It's my honor to welcome Erin McGraw as a guest essayist this week. I've known Erin for ten years, first as a superb teacher of writing, and now as a dear friend. In many ways, she has already been present in this column; much of what I've come to understand about God and Christianity is a result of her wisdom, kindness, and good humor. Erin is the author of six books of fiction, most recently Better Food for a Better World: A Novel. — Debie
Some years ago I attended a church that replaced traditional homilies with discussion among congregants. We didn't know one another well, and these conversations were a way for us to converse a little.
On a day that the Gospel featured the parable of the Good Shepherd, that well-known comparison of Jesus to a shepherd who would leave his entire flock in order to save a single straying sheep, a woman stood up to share. "I grew up in South America, among sheep herders. How we laughed at this story! A shepherd would be crazy to abandon his flock! Sheep are very stupid; a whole flock could go off a cliff. Only a crazy man would leave them all in order to chase one.
"The priest laughed, too. 'You're right! Our God is a crazy God, who will continually chase us down, one after another. God is always chasing us!'"
I was enchanted. In just a few words this woman had taken the story of the Good Shepherd, threadbare from countless leaden sermons — Jesus the careful, anything-but-crazy shepherd and we the heedless sheep — and made it alive again.
A few years passed before I had the chance to share her interpretation, but eventually I was in a discussion group and the Good Shepherd rolled around. "A crazy God!" I said confidently. "Crazy with love for us!"
The group had barely broken up when a woman who had been listening bore down on me, seething. I'd never spoken with her before, but could tell from her accent that she was from Central or South America. "Do you realize how foolish that makes people from my country seem?" she said. "You make it sound like we don't know what a parable is. Your interpretation was very insensitive."
I apologized, of course, but she was having none of it. "Now people think we only know about sheep," she said before she stormed away, leaving me feeling clumsy and stupid. "But it wasn't my interpretation!" I wanted to call after her. "It wasn't my story!" Though I wanted it to be.
If I understand what happened correctly, she was stung when she heard what she thought was mockery. Instead of hearing the joy I had meant to convey in this new meaning of the old story, she heard contempt. If I could find that woman again today, I would beg her pardon from the bottom of my heart for offending her. But I cannot apologize for what stories do, which is open the world.
This problem of interpretation lies right at the heart of storytelling. Stories — good ones, anyway — don't have a single, invariable meaning, and that is exactly their strength and their weakness. Stories require us to interpret them, and it's in interpretation that we introduce some slippage into the system.
Jesus communicated most richly in parables — stories that are protracted metaphors. Readers and listeners are invited to find meaning in them, to explore them. The very fact that they are metaphors — comparisons, in which one thing suggests something else — allows them a rich resonance that no mere statement of fact could have. "The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed" is, to my ear, a more enticing statement than, "God's kingdom begins small but grows large."
The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky believed that metaphors exist to "make strange" the world. In his view, metaphors don't exist in order to nail a single, agreed-upon meaning into place, but rather to shake up our perceptions until the world seems bright and fresh again. Shklovsky would have been all over the crazy-God story because it takes our idea of God as a dutiful parent and turns that idea inside out. Suddenly we are presented with a God crazy enough to go racing up and down the pastureland for love of us. That's a fun image.
But the woman who confronted me didn't find it fun. She was insulted. The danger of interpretation is its instability. If my interpretation doesn't line up with yours, who gets to be right? I remember my nephew Steven, age 4, walking along the beach and keeping a careful eye on the surf lapping in over his feet. "Where's the edge?" he wanted to know.
That image is another metaphor, another comparison. Looking for certainty in the Scriptures, I think, is like my young nephew wanting to know the exact edge of the ocean. And that very image is for me buoyant and life giving; perhaps because of my training in literature, I'm most comfortable when there are many possible interpretations available. Options, I think, are life giving.
This isn't to say I don't understand the yearning for a single firm, clear definition of goodness, of heaven, of our proper relationship to God. But as far as I can tell, Jesus wasn't all that big on single, firm, clear definitions. What is the Kingdom like? It's like a sower, distributing seed over many kinds of field. And it's also like good seed that is mixed with weeds. And it's also like a mustard seed. Not "or" — "and." Matthew's Gospel does not suggest that we must choose between metaphors. Instead, the metaphors pile up. The Kingdom is each of these fields, and the King each of these sowers. The Kingdom is not something tiny and human-sized that we can grasp in a single image; it is everything! At once! And so far we're only talking about the seed stories.
I think that Jesus's gentle, metaphor-based instruction encourages us to remember God's largeness. God is surely great enough to be both the careful shepherd and the crazy one. A choice doesn't have to be made.
Instantly, the world seems larger. Our hands, which just a moment ago had been empty, are now overflowing. Maybe — this is my hope — the Kingdom is a millimeter closer at hand.
Image credits: (1) Wordpress.com.
