Short Stories by Jesus, by Amy-Jill Levine

While I was reading Amy-Jill Levine’s Short Stories by Jesus, I kept wishing she had published it ten or 20 years earlier because she could have spared me quite a few naive mistakes I’ve made in preaching and teaching the parables. We who talk about Jesus for a living have an understandable but la­mentable habit of thumbing through a book or commentary, discovering some angle on the text we think will be productive, and then considering it settled forever. Levine has shown me ways I have relied on interpretations that were superficial or just plain wrong and that often the writers I read are themselves thoughtlessly repeating someone else’s thin or faulty reading.

As a Jewish scholar and a clever raconteur, Levine is endowed with peculiar gifts to help us achieve her purpose: recovering “the art of hearing a parable,” where context helps us “to determine what is normal and what is absurd.” She deftly marshals history, the social sciences, rabbinic thought, Philo, and people from other cultures, including Merino sheep farmers in Australia (who point out that sheep resist valiantly if you attempt to carry them on your shoulders) and Yemenite women (who are certain their husbands would welcome home a wayward son).

Levine’s best, most intriguing work is on the trio of parables on the lost in Luke 15. She helps us see what should be obvious: not only is the prodigal’s father wealthy, the owner of one hundred sheep is relatively affluent, as is the woman with the coin. Precious few of Jesus’ listeners owned as many as a hundred sheep, and the woman owns her home, has access to her own funds, and can throw a big party for her friends. Levine’s deep insight? If you only have five sheep, you’ll notice one missing, but if you have a hundred? “Perhaps it is those who ‘have’ who are more likely to fail to notice what is missing.”