Jesus' teaching

Here are some thoughts that I copied down years ago - I believe it comes from a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor.

"Jesus is one of the hardest people in history to get a straight answer out of. Someone comes along and asks him something as important as how to have eternal life - and he asks you a question right back. You ask him who your neighbor is and you get a long story in which the good guys turn out to be bad and the bad guy turns out to be the good guy. If you give him a choice between a clear answer and a story, he'll tell the story everytime. But unlike most preachers he won't tell you ahead of time what it is going to mean and remind you afterwards what it meant! He's just going to tell it - stopping waaaay before you are ready and then he is going to sit back and watch what you do with it. If there is more than one person listening then all the better - half the group can try to persuade the other half what it means while he sits there with an amused look on his face. Jesus' stories draw people out - because he won't finish or explain most of them, his listeners have to do that - and 9 times out of 10 they learn more that way. Jesus was the master at involving people and when they were involved in his stories the main thing they understood at the end was that they didn't understand as much as they thought they did. The good guys weren't all that good. The bad guys weren't all that bad. Those on the top were really on the bottom and those on the bottom were headed straight to the top. "Yes," didn't always mean yes and, "No," didn't always mean no. Anyway you look at it, Jesus exercised a significant ministry of confusion - which is no more valued now than it was then. Most of us go to our religious leaders for clarity not confusion. And yet confusion is so often the gateway to transformation. When old formulas fail. When familiar landmarks vanish. When time-honored handholds on the truth suddenly give way under the weight of fresh revelation - time and time again that is how God clears space for something new to happen - but not without a period of acute disorientation first - which is what so many of Jesus' stories seem designed to produce."

Comments

[ed]

Awesome stuff!!! I'm going to refer others to this and if you don't mind copy some of it into a post.

Really good stuff...