Several weeks ago my pastor showed me a book he's had in his collection for quite some time. It was a small book; a backpocket kind of book.
The Innovator: And other modern Parables. By G. William Jones. It was published in the 60's. It is a fantastic collection of parables. I have yet to read one that doesn't make my brain spin round for awhile. Jones has this to say about teaching through stories.
"As professional observers and students of life and the world, teachers and preachers tend to think of their role as one of predigestion. Much as the mother Eskimo chews up her food, then transfers it to the toothless mouth of her baby, school and church communicators observe actual occurrences and experiences, extract from them their 'kernal of truth,' then turn to give their hearers only the bare kernel, shed of its 'confusing' trappings. The prejudice seems to be that a straightforward 'A+B=C' approach is the clearest and therefore most understandable and meaningful form of
communication from one mind to another. . . .If I want my listener not only to hear, but also to understand, then I must give him room to work on what I am saying and his own share of the communicative task to do. If I make what I sense to be the 'truth' of what I am saying as explicit as possible, then I have taken away his work from him and done it myself. I have forced him back into the passive stance. However, if I am willing to let the 'truth' in what I am saying remain implicit, then his share of the work - the interpretation, or making the implicit explicit - is left for him. My speaking becomes an
invitation for his involvement. He may not do his explicating the way I would have done it. He may not come up with the same kernel of truth of which I was thinking when I told the parable. I take the risk that 'hearing, he will not understand.' But I also encounter the possibility that in rummaging about for himself in the parable, he may come up with a truth that is
truer than my truth. At any rate, whatever he gets from the experience will be his truth which he garnered himself, and not my truth to which he could only give either mental assent or rejection. (and neither of these latter possibilities is very dynamic)"
I've only been able to find the book for sale at
Biblio.com
(And to think, this was published way before anyone said the words 'emergent church')
And with that, here's one of his parables, The Diamond
A tattered prospector entered the Great Glass City one day. Riding his mule down streets between dazzling glass buildings, he shouted "I've found it - the stone of great price!"
A few curious passers-by stopped and crowded around him.
"Look!" he shouted ecstatically, holding a large uncut diamond before their gaze. "It's a diamond!"
"Looks just like glass to me," said one lay expert, "and downright inferior glass, at that. All melted looking. Must have been fused by the Blast. Curious."
With this assesment the crowd began to disperse.
"No! No! Look again!" cried the prospector. "It's valuable, exceedingly valuable!"
"If you want to see something exceedingly valuable, take a gander at THIS!" said a millionaire in the crowd, extending a knuckle circled by a large, ruby-colored, cut glass ring.
After the "ooohs" and "aaahs" of the crowd died down, the prospector protested, "No! My diamond is far more valuable than your glass, no matter how beautiful your glass, nor how ugly my stone. Here let me show you," he said, taking the millionaire's ring firmly in his grasp. With his diamond the prospector scratched a very small "X" on the surface of the ruby-colored glass.
"There! see?" he said, stepping back from his work. "Do you see now how the diamond is greater than the glass? Diamond scratches glass, but glass can't scratch diamond!"
"Ye gods, you stupid idiot!" screamed the millionaire, looking closely at his ring. "You've ruined a ten-thousand-dollar work of the glassmaker's art!"
The prospector was thrown in prison for three years.
At the end of the third year, when he was released from prison, the prospector marched straightway to enact a plan he had been formulating all these years in his dungeon. Boldly he approached the Wonderous Shring of Multicolored Glass at the center of the Great Glass City. (The residents had a habit of gathering there on their day off to watch the amazing display of colored lights on the colored glass, and then going home with a good feeling.) The prospector stepped resolutely up to the mammoth center panel of the glass shrine and with his diamond inscribed an eight-foot circle in its surface. Then he tapped the circle lightly with his forefinger. The sound of shattering glass brought a mob on the run. Pleased at the response, the prospector held the diamond aloft and was about to begin speaking when they all cried out, as if with one voice, "Just LOOK what you've done to our shrine!"
With this they began pelting him with glass cobblestones, old bottles, and shards from the shattered shrine until he was quite covered by them, and quite dead. Only the diamond, still clutched in the prospectors dead fist, projected above the pile of vitreous debris.
In the days that followed the incident, some heathens, heretics, atheists, doubters, and malcontents in that great city began to form a society devoted to the carrying on of the prospector's message about diamond being more valuable than glass. They also devoted themselves to the living-out of the implications of such a revolutionary thesis. And so they too were persecuted, and many were killed. (It may be of passing interest to some readers to not that, rather than being called 'diamond lovers,' they were called 'glass haters')
But posterity has been more kind to the prospector and his memory. Around that original pile of glass, still topped with the bone-held diamond, is today a large and most impressive shring of the finest multicolored glass that money can buy. The residents of the Great Glass City have a habit of gathering there on their day off to watch the spectacular displays of colored lights on the colored glass, and then going home with a good feeling.
