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By Amy-Jill Levine (HarperOne, 2014)
By Amy-Jill Levine (HarperOne, 2014)Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish scholar whose particular interest is Christian scripture. That’s reason enough to read her for those who hope to engage the New Testament perceptively. Since nearly every important character in the New Testament is Jewish, including Jesus and his mother, appreciating the intrinsic Jewish elements in these texts is enhanced by having a friendly insider offering you the backstory.
Levine has at least four goals in writing about the parables of Jesus. One is to return our focus to each parable’s original target: essentially, the listener. “That man is you” isn’t just an accusation the prophet Nathan once made to guilty King David. In every parable, we should feel the cold fingers of a warning: The bull’s-eye of these stories is drawn on us! To deflect that aim to another person or group is to ricochet.
The second objective is to restore a first-century Judean context to these stories. Most of us aren’t farmers, we don’t live under an oppressive regime, and we mostly misread Jewish tax collectors, Pharisees, and widows, to name a few groups who’ve been caricatured out of view. Levine provides a culturally corrective lens.
A third goal is to provide access to the surprise and challenge intended by these stories. If we sit in the pews ho-humming the obviousness of a moral lesson (“Yes, God the Father welcomes the prodigal sinner home”), then it’s time to consider that we’ve turned a multilayered koan into mere allegory.
Perhaps Levine’s fourth reason for writing this book is actually the first: to unmask anti-Semitism rampant in parable interpretation. How many homilies reveal the purpose of a parable as rejecting the obsolete rigidity of Judaism in favor of a better, kinder, truer Christianity? You may not agree with all of Levine’s conclusions. But you’ll never hear a parable again quite so complacently.
This review appeared in the March 2015 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 80, No. 3, page 43).