Franz Kafka understood the open-endedness and the “fatefulness” of parables when he wrote, “If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables.”23 In other words, a “hearer” of the Good Samaritan parable truly becomes the Good Samaritan. That’s the ultimate in participation. This interactive component, by the way, is one of the things that irritated people most about Jesus’ parables: they didn’t want their minds teased into active thought.
