Dark Sayings

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”  Matthew 13:10  NASB

Parables– “The Bible is familiar, life is strange.”[1]  Maybe we have it backwards.  Maybe the “dark sayings” are really how we live, and those verses in the Bible that seem so odd and impenetrable at first, are really crystal clear assessments of our own obscurity.  Maybe the Bible’s language that so often leaves us confused about the meaning is really nothing more than a mirror on our own internal chaos.  Maybe if we weren’t so duplicitous, so riddled with yetzer ha’ra self-protection, so absorbed with “right” answers and control, we would realize that those dark sayings are dark because we don’t have the light needed to see them.

“Why do you speak in parables?” might be more about the listener than about the speaker.  Perhaps we don’t hear because we are the ones with the deficient apparatus.

One of the most interesting features about the biblical narrative is the necessity for the reader to create the text along with the author.  What I mean is that biblical language is inherently flexible and messy.  Crucial passages tend to be ambiguous.  Story lines weave in and out of expected themes.  Characters display a certain amount of religious bi-polar behavior.  The meanings (and innuendos) of important terms are left up to the reader to supply.  More often than not, the end of a story or a letter forces the reader to go back to the beginning and re-read the passage all over again because something about the end changes everything about the beginning.  We can even say that this seems to be true for God’s entire plan and purpose.  At any rate, it is simply impossible to remove the role of the reader.  Like Heisenberg’s principle, the mere presence of the subject (the observer) changes the behavior of the object.

This is why Zornberg notes that the Bible is familiar but life itself is not.  The Bible is culinary divine reduction.  God boils it all down to a few conversations, a line or two of poetry, a narrative with an agenda, and apparently irrational behaviors.  Then He invites us to notice how our lives reflect that same salmagundi, a gallimaufry of actions, emotions, wishes, defeats, control, and confusion.  All of which is to say, if you read the Bible as a technical expert, as a recipe collector rather than as a chef in the kitchen, you will sterilize it.  You will lose its intimate involvement in your life, its confrontation and consolation, its dark mirror manifestation of your inner life.  Reading the Bible should be a white-water ride through your own emotional cascades.  It was never meant to be a textbook for theological academicians or a jumping-off place for eloquent sermons.

Topical Index: parables, reader, dark sayings, Matthew 13:10

[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. xiii.