Parables

The wise refuse to share their oil, which cuts against everything else Jesus taught. What the oil actually stands for, and why it could never be lent.

Luke's version is not the Talents with different numbers. A delegation opposes the king, and the first hearers knew exactly which delegation that was.

The tenants murder the heir hoping to gain the estate, which sounds insane until you know what they were counting on. Why the owner sends his son alone.

The owner keeps going back to the market himself, in the heat, when he could send a manager. That detail is the parable, and it changes the complaint.

The master comes home and waits on his own slaves at the table. Luke marks it with a formula he almost never uses, because the reversal is that startling.

The judge is not a picture of God, he is the opposite of one, and the argument runs by contrast. A woman with no standing is the model being held up here.

Both houses take the same storm, which rules out the reading most people carry. What digging down to rock actually involved and what the foundation is.

The lawyer asks who his neighbour is and never gets an answer, because the question itself was wrong. What the priest was actually weighing on that road.

The parable used to build a map of the afterlife is not answering that question. What it is answering, and why the rich man never stops giving orders.

Bailey reads the three excuses as a public insult; most commentators hear lame excuses. Why the guest list, not the excuses, answers a seven-hundred-year argument.