The kingdom of God is like this

In Resident Aliens, Stanley Hauerwas and I warned that seminary biblical courses sometimes disempower budding preachers: See? You’ll never have the linguistic, analytical, or historical skills to preach a biblical sermon. In contrast, Thomas Long has written a voluminous, sweeping, occasionally even thrilling book that will empower preachers to preach on and with the parables of Jesus. Along the way, he schools a few biblical scholars.

Over four decades, at a half dozen seminaries, Long taught his legendary course on preaching the parables. This was a momentous period for parables research. Dan Otto Via, John Dominic Crossan, Klyne Snodgrass, R. Alan Culpepper, John Stott, and many other scholars shoved parables front and center, mining them as the distinctive element of Jesus’ teaching and preaching. Long has read all of their books, it seems. Preachers will love his astute distillation of these scholars’ findings, as well as his occasional mocking of their vaunted discoveries.

Long taught that parables could be sly, explosive, disruptive, and mind-grabbing. But he had to admit that most of his students’ sermons on the parables were just . . . well, sermons. Then he received a revelation. When Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is like this,” it’s not just a rhetorical device. With those words, a theological event is taking place. Long puts it this way: “The purpose of parables is not merely to talk about the kingdom of God but instead to take us to those places all around us where the inbreaking of God’s kingdom can be perceived and experienced.”