Reddit reviews Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus

I've been reading a book lately, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus and I highly recommend it. The parables are picked over a lot, but we don't always think about why Jesus used them. At first glance, we might say that he's using these earthy analogies to make heavenly things easier to understand, but the text says the exact opposite: that he's purposely obfuscating, that ONLY those who have ears to hear will understand, that people will see and not perceive. The parables are not just delivering information to their listeners- they are revealing the hearts of the listener.

Not to go all Stanley Fish on you here, but it's as though Jesus is a reader-response critic who is just as concerned with what the parable says about the person who hears it as he is with the subject matter itself.

Other ideas I found interesting: in the parable of the sower, we're told that the seed is the "word of God", and Capon argues that the synoptics can't be unaware of John's ideas about Jesus being the Word of God. So it's Jesus that gets sown in the hearts of all men, and the parable is not just a morality play on whether "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it" or not.