Exegetical Essay: How A Parable Create Meaning

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I believe that it would first be helpful to explain in some detail how a parable creates meaning. It would be a mistake to assume that any of the parables carry implicit meaning that can easily be understood regardless of the context. This fact from the onset is a exegetical challenge for us because the context that Jesus gave these parables is no longer accessible to us. What we have is one form of the parables as they appear to us in the text, which is far from the complete picture (the parables were probably first spread by oral tradition, which is lost to us). Some argue that the parables are metaphors or similes that communicate some form of meaning that is not present on the surface level. Others have taken this approach to the extreme and …show more content…
Donahue writes, “Jesus thus spoke a language of the familiar and concrete which touched people in their everyday lives but which pointed beyond itself and summoned people to see everyday life as the carrier of self-transcendence.” This is to say that the parables, on some level, made sense to the people that heard them. The people would be told a parable about a shepherd and they would immediately know a thing or two about living in an agrarian society because they lived in one. This presents a challenge for modern interpreters because these contexts are not always easily understandable to us. For example, it might be more difficult for someone that has lived in Brooklyn their entire life and never even seen a sheep to understand a parable about a shepherd than it would for a first century farmer. Therefore there is a need to understand the cultural context of the parable in order for us to attempt to retell the parable in a more familiar context. Another problem that we often encounter is that we often try to simplify the parables and reduce them to simple morality

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