In Parables as Subversive Speech William Herzog takes us back to the time and place in which Jesus lived for a fresh reading of nine of Jesus’ parables. (See numbers 3-11 in the list below.) We find Jesus in the midst of the economic, political, and religious forces that oppressed Palestine’s poor people. In parables Jesus draws word pictures of the ways that oppression works and encourages creative thinking in response. Jesus’ parables, in this view, are not so much... Read more

“… and they all lived happily, for a while, after.” That’s how Jesus could have ended the Parable of the Dishonest Steward. A rich man gets a bad report – just a rumor, perhaps – about one of his estate managers and fires him. The employee makes a last-ditch effort to save himself from a life on the streets. He offers his soon-to-be-former clients some substantial debt relief. The master sees how happy his debtors now are and takes a... Read more

Jesus told a parable in which a widow crosses the boundaries of social acceptability and obtains justice from an unjust judge. That is the story, but that is not where the usual interpretation of the Parable of the Unjust Judge ends up. This is the tenth in a series of posts on the parables of Jesus, following William Herzog’s interpretive model of Jesus as “pedagogue of the oppressed.” Herzog interprets the Parable of the Unjust Judge, or Persistent Widow, in... Read more

I always pitied the third servant in the Parable of the Talents, the one who got one talent from the master and buried it. Sure, he could have been more enterprising, like the other two servants. They got five and two talents and made five and two talents more. But he wasn’t a bad sort, just timid, not one who takes risks. He kept the money safe, didn’t lose a penny of it, and gave it all back when the... Read more

The crowd on Palm Sunday hailed Jesus as the new King David. Jesus twice (at least) laid to rest the idea that the Messiah would bring back the days of that famous king. Once it was in a provocative question: “David himself calls him [the Messiah] Lord; so how is he his son?” (Mark 12:37) Once it was by means of a parable, the subject of this post. Jesus disowns the popular conception of and hope for the Messiah. That,... Read more

In the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, Jesus, the pedagogue of the oppressed, features a pedagogy of the oppressor. And this pedagogy fails: the rich man doesn’t learn. This post in a series on William Herzog’s Parables as Subversive Speech turns to his Chapter 7, “The Unbridgeable Chasm.” Previous posts in the series: William Herzog Reads Jesus’ Parables, Brings them Down to Earth Paulo Freire, the “Pedagogue of the Oppressed”: Is This a Good Fit for Jesus? Laborers... Read more