Eugene Boring on Understanding Parables

I’ve just finished teaching a week long course on the Gospel of Mark for Malyon College in Brisbane. I’m pretty up on my Marcan literature, but I found David Garland’s A Theology of Mark’s Gospel (BTNT) and M. Eugene Boring’s Mark (NTL) to be excellent reads to catch up on stuff. Any way, Gene Boring has a great little descriptor on parables which is worth reading:

Parables are polysemic; that is, they generate new meaning in new situations. While a parable cannot “mean” simply anything (it is not a Rorschach blot), it has no one meaning that can be ferreted out b objective methods. It takes on meaning as it gently forces the hearer/reader to participate in the construction of meaning. The process can subvert the life-world of the hearer, opening up a new vision of reality. Parables thus often function by beginning in the familiar world of the hearer, but then they present a different  vision of the world that challenges the everyday expectations of the hearer. In the preaching of Jesus, parables were not pleasant stories to decorate a moralistic point, but were disturbing stories that threatned the hearer’s secure mythological world. This mythological world is the world of assumptions by which we habitually live, the unnoticed framework of our thinking within which we interpret other data. Parables surreptitiously attack this framework of our thought-world itself. “‘You have buklt a lovely home,’ myth assures us; ‘but,’ whispers the parable, you are right above an earthquake fault'” (Cross, Dark Interval, 57).

That is so true. Parables are not earthly stories with heavenly meanings; they are weapons of polemical discourse, designed to challenge your worldview, offend your sensibilities, affront your prejudices, make you realize that you are maybe the villain rather than the hero of the story.