CHAPTER 1
Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Lost Son
Session Goals
This session's reading, discussion, reflection, and prayer will equip participants to:
• deepen relationships with fellow participants;
• reevaluate ideas about the nature and purpose of parables;
• consider potential obstacles in interpreting Jesus's parables;
• practice reading and interpreting Jesus's parables as stories before — but not instead of — interpreting them as Scripture;
• explore the three parables in Luke 15;
• practice "counting" who is missing from their personal relationships and their communities of faith;
• plan and commit to at least one way of seeking whom and what they count as "lost."
Suggested Leader Preparation
Jesus my teacher, grant me curiosity and faithful imagination, patience with myself and openness toward this group's participants, a passion to learn more about Scripture and to grow closer to you, and strength to act on the truths you reveal to us in our study. Amen.
• Carefully and prayerfully read Luke 15 in one sitting, several times, before the session. Note words and phrases that attract your attention and meditate on them. Write down questions about your reading and try to find answers. If desired, consult a trusted Bible commentary.
• Carefully read Short Stories by Jesus, Introduction and chapter 1. Note any material about which you need or want to do further research before the session.
• Carefully read Session 1 of the Participant Guide. Write down any questions or observations the material prompts.
• Secure and prepare a comfortable meeting space for your group, easily accessible to all participants regardless of physical ability.
• Materials needed: Bibles (especially in reputable translations not usually used by your group); one or more standard English dictionaries; recent issues of a local newspaper; recent printed church bulletins and newsletters (if available). Optional: name tags, hymnals, light refreshments.
• Have a markerboard or pad of large paper on hand for writing down participants' responses, questions, and insights.
• Choose which discussion questions and activities you will use, keeping in mind your group's interests, previous Bible study experience, and comfort level with academic study (as opposed to purely devotional reading) of Scripture.
• Optional: Display three groups of pennies (or other small objects — small candies, for example) side by side on a table where all will be able to see: one group of 100, a second of 10, and a pair.
As Your Group Gathers
Welcome the participants. Ask each to fill out and wear a name tag (optional). Ask participants to introduce themselves and to talk briefly about why they are interested in this study of Amy-Jill Levine's Short Stories by Jesus. Be ready to talk about why you are interested in facilitating the group, as well!
Optional: Invite participants to look at the three piles of pennies you prepared. Ask them to close their eyes for a moment. Remove one penny from each pile. Ask participants to open their eyes and tell you how the piles are now different.
Tell participants that in today's session they will read and reflect on three of Jesus's parables that involve counting and noticing what, and who, is missing.
Open with this prayer or pray in your own words:
God of all wisdom, you are at work in our world and in our hearts to bring forth a new world and to give us new hearts, in which your will is done on earth as it is in heaven. By your Spirit, teach us in this time together, that we may learn and do all that is needed to receive your rule of grace, for we ask in the name of our Teacher and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Discuss the Nature and Purpose of Parables
Ask participants: "What is a parable?" Write responses on a large sheet of paper or markerboard.
Invite one or more participants to look up and read aloud the definitions of parable in a standard English dictionary (or from a trusted dictionary website). Ask: "What about these definitions of parable seems familiar or unfamiliar to you, and why?"
Read aloud the following list of information, inviting participants to respond to each with any questions or concerns. Make note of any such responses so they are not lost as you continue the study.
• Parables compare two unlike things by putting them side by side in an unexpected way.
• Parables can vary in length from a few sentences to a longer story.
• Parables carry at least two levels of meaning: the literal and the metaphorical.
• Parables may be but are not always allegorical — that is, the elements in a parable do not necessarily represent one and only one other thing or truth.
• Parables do not have a single meaning.
• Jesus did not invent the parable.
• Parables can be interpreted in many ways, but modern readers should always assume a parable's original audience would have been able to find meaning in it; therefore, modern readers must consider the historical and social setting in which a parable originated (in the case of Jesus's parables, first-century Galilee and Judea).
Read aloud this quotation from Short Stories by Jesus:
Jesus was requiring that [his disciples] do more than listen; he was asking them to think as well. ... What makes the parables mysterious, or difficult, is that they challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge. Our reaction to them should be one of resistance rather than acceptance. ...
If we hear a parable and think, "I really like that" or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough. ...
When we seek universal morals from a genre that is designed to surprise, challenge, shake up, or indict and look for a single meaning in a form that opens to multiple interpretations, we are necessarily limiting the parables and, so, ourselves.
Ask:
• How do you react to Levine's claim that parables should provoke our resistance rather than our acceptance?
• Why might a teacher like Jesus choose to teach using parables?
• Why, according to Mark 4:10-13, did Jesus teach in parables? How do you react to this reason?
When [Jesus] was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that
'they may indeed look, but not perceive,
and may indeed listen, but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.'"
And he said to them, "Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?"
Mark 4:10-13
Identify Potential Obstacles to Interpreting Jesus's Parables
Invite one or two participants to tell a brief story or anecdote about something that happened to someone else and about which they have no firsthand knowledge. Point out that, in a similar way, we have no direct access to Jesus's parables. We only have Matthew's, Mark's, and Luke's presentations of the parables (John's Gospel includes no stories Jesus told). Jesus left no written documents.
Ask about this and other potential obstacles in interpreting Jesus's parables:
• When trying to understand Jesus's parables, why do we need to remember that, as Levine says, "the evangelists are our first known interpreters of the parables"?
• How can the differences between first-century life and culture in Jesus's Galilee and Judea and our twenty-first-century life and culture sometimes make it harder to understand Jesus's parables?
• What can people who've heard and read Jesus's parables many times, perhaps even over a lifetime, do to remain open to new insights into and understandings of these stories?
Compare and Contrast Two Parables
Have participants turn in their Bibles to Luke 15. Form two groups of participants. Ask one group to read verses 3-6 only. Ask the other to read verses 8-9 only. Encourage participants to try and read these verses, as much as possible, as though for the first time, and to consider — for the moment — only their assigned verses. You may wish to have on hand Bibles of a reputable translation your group does not usually use, or you may ask them to use Levine's "fairly literal" translations in Short Stories by Jesus — "if the literalness makes the parable seem unfamiliar," Levine writes, "good." Her literal translations can help in listening anew to the parables, and thinking about each of the words Jesus chose to use.
Ask each group to discuss these questions (which you have written on a large sheet of paper or markerboard) about their assigned readings:
• Who is the protagonist (the character in a story who struggles to overcome a problem)?
• What is the problem?
• How and how far is the protagonist's problem resolved?
• What specific words, images, and details of plot and character do you notice?
• What questions do you have about this story?
Note: Treating biblical texts, let alone stories told by Jesus, as the fictional stories they are before interpreting those stories as Scripture may feel uncomfortable, even upsetting, to some participants. You can suggest to them that while Christians believe Jesus was (and is) much more than a devout, intelligent, and creative first-century rabbi, he was not less, and he expected his hearers to engage with the parables as stories. Suggest that, in the interaction between hearer and story, the Word of God begins to be heard.
After allowing sufficient time for discussion, invite each group to report its findings to the whole group. Encourage participants to point out similarities and differences between the two parables.
Ask:
• What is lost in each story, and why?
• What do the protagonists' reactions to these losses, and to the findings, suggest about them?
• Forgetting for the moment the interpretations offered in Luke 15, what would you say these stories were "about"? Why?
Read aloud Luke 15:7 and 15:10. Ask:
• Levine writes that Luke interprets these two parables from Jesus as being about repentance and forgiveness. She also notes that sheep and coins do not repent, and the sheep owner and the woman who find their lost objects do not forgive them. To the contrary, the problem is that they lost the objects. Based on your studies of the stories themselves, how much sense does this interpretation about repenting and forgiving make to you? Why or why not?
Optional Creative Extension: Rewrite the Parables
Invite participants to write a diary entry or letter from either the sheep owner or the woman's point of view. How would these characters talk about what happened in their own words? Invite volunteers to share their responses.
Ask:
• How does this creative exercise help readers "enter into" the world of Jesus's stories? What obstacles to entering that world remain?
• How do such creative retellings reveal as much (if not more) about the storyteller as the stories themselves?
• Do creative responses like these help or hinder our understanding of the parables as Scripture, and why?
Read and Discuss the Parable of the Lost Son
Recruit four volunteers to read aloud Luke 15:11-32. They will read as the narrator (Jesus), the younger son, the father, and the older son.
After the reading, ask:
• On a scale of 1-5 (where "1" = "never even heard of it" and "5" = "I could recite it in my sleep"), how familiar were you with this parable before the reading?
• What interpretations, lessons and morals, or applications have you drawn from this parable in the past, or have you heard preachers and Bible teachers draw? What do you think of these interpretations?
• With which character in this parable do you most identify, and why? With which character do you least identify, and why?
• Levine points out that Jewish sources do not support the commonly repeated idea that the younger son sinned in asking for his share of the inheritance, or that he "treated his father as if he were as good as dead." What do you think about the son's request? What do you think about the father's choice to "divide his life" (Levine's literal translation of verse 12) between them?
• Levine also points out that the parable does not support the idea that the younger son sinned in working with pigs in Gentile territory. He did not eat the pigs (Leviticus 11:7-8). "The prodigal is in an impossible situation," she writes, "but the issue is not Jewish xenophobia or purity. The problem is starvation." When have you found yourself in an "impossible situation," doing whatever you must to get through?
• Is the younger son truly sorry for having left home and wasted his half of the inheritance, or is he planning a practical way out of his predicament (verses 17-19)? Why do you think as you do?
• Levine writes, "Jewish fathers of the first century were not, at least according to the sources we have (which should be the sources that inform our history), distant or wrathful." What do you make of the father's reaction to the younger son's return (verses 20-24; compare 15:6, 9)?
• How much sympathy do you have for the elder son's reaction to the younger son's return (verses 25-30)? Why?
• Levine suggests the father in this parable is like the sheep owner and the woman in the previous two parables because he lost something — or, more accurately, someone. How did the father "lose" his oldest son? What do you think of his efforts to "find" the oldest son again (verses 31-32)?
• We can infer from Luke's placement of this parable immediately after the parables of the Lost Sheep and Lost Coin that Luke wanted to read it, too, as mostly a story about repentance and heavenly joy. What other meanings do you see in the parable when you examine it independently? To what extent do these multiple meanings contradict or complement each other?
Call to Action
Read aloud this quotation from Short Stories by Jesus:
We need to take count not only of our blessings, but also of those in our families, and in our communities. And once we count, we need to act. Finding the lost, whether they are sheep, coins, or people, takes work. It also requires our efforts, and from those efforts there is the potential for wholeness and joy.
Distribute recent issues of a local newspaper to participants. Invite them to spend a few minutes looking through its pages for groups and people who receive little or no attention. Who is missing? (For example: How many stories are about people who are homeless? people who are poor or sick? children? people of ethnic minorities in your area?)
Brainstorm a list of these groups and people on a large sheet of paper or markerboard.
Then ask participants to look at recent bulletins (orders of service) and/or newsletters, as available, from your congregation with the same question in mind: Who is missing? Based on this document, to whom does it appear we minister? (For example: Are members who are homebound listed? members who are not in the majority age or ethnic group? nonmembers from the community who have some other connection to your church? children?) Brainstorm a list of these groups and people on a large sheet of paper or markerboard.
Tip: If these printed resources aren't available, browse the local newspaper's and your congregation's websites. Who is pictured and discussed? Who is not?
Ask:
• What more could our congregation be doing to connect with and serve those both within and without our own community of faith who appear "missing" or "lost"?
• How can we make the ways in which we do reach out to the "missing" and "lost" more visible within and without our own congregation?
Closing Prayer
You know us all, Lord Jesus, and you know those whom we do not. Forgive us when we lose those who are precious to you, by what we do or by what we fail to do. Send us in your Spirit's power to them, that we may rejoice together as children of your Father in heaven, and ours. Amen.
CHAPTER 2
The Good Samaritan
Session Goals
This session's reading, discussion, reflection, and prayer will equip participants to:
• identify ways in which church and culture use the phrase "good Samaritan";
• explore the parable in Luke 10:25-37 and the context in which Luke recorded it;
• appreciate the historic relationship between Jews and Samaritans;
• imagine modern analogues of Jesus's parable;
• evaluate their own willingness to get involved in helping people who need their help.
Suggested Leader Preparation
Jesus my teacher, as you challenged your followers' preconceptions about whom they should see as their neighbors, so challenge this group and challenge me as together we strive to hear and obey your call to love others. Amen.
• Carefully and prayerfully read Luke 10:25-37 in one sitting, several times, before the session. Note words and phrases that attract your attention and meditate on them. Write down questions about your reading and try to find answers. If desired, consult a trusted Bible commentary.
