Short Stories by Jesus Quotes

“Reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“Jesus understood that God does not play by our rules. His God is a generous God, who not only allows the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust, but also gives us the ability to live into what should be rather than what is. The parables help us with their lessons about generosity: sharing joy, providing for others, recognizing the potential of small investments. His God wants us to be better than we are, because we have the potential to be. We are made but a little lower than the divine (Ps. 8.6; see Heb. 2.7); we should start acting in a more heavenly matter. Those who pray, “Your kingdom come,” might want to take some responsibility in the process, and so work in partnership with God. We too are to seek the lost and make every effort to find them. Indeed, we are not only to seek; we are to take notice of who might be lost, even when immediately present. The rich man ignores Lazarus at his gate, and the father of the prodigal ignored the elder son in the field. For the former, it is too late; for the latter, whether it is too late or not we do not know. But we learn from their stories. Don’t wait. Look now. Look hard. Count.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“Religion has been defined as designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. We do well to think of the parables of Jesus as doing the afflicting. Therefore, if we hear a parable and think, 'I really like that' or, worse, fail to take any challenge, we are not listening well enough.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“compassion can be felt in the gut; mercy needs to be enacted with the body.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“Residual marcionism, the view that God had a personality transplant somewhere between the pages of Malachi and Matthew, is still alive and well in churches today; it is also still a heresy.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“It’s much safer, in many congregations, to assure the faithful how our souls are saved through divine grace rather than to suggest that our societies are saved through personal and corporate aid to the poor.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“The Gospels generally present sinners as wealthy people who have not attended to the poor. That is a dandy definition of the term. Thus,”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“There’s an old saying in biblical studies (I first heard it from Ben Witherington III) that a text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“to Jesus’s Jewish audience as well as to Luke’s readers, the idea of a “good Samaritan” would make no more sense than the idea of a “good rapist” or a “good murderer.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“It’s possible these men were afraid. . . . And so the first question that the priest [and] the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ . . . But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“[M]embers of society with something of value to contribute neither seek nor want political office; only the bramble, which has nothing to offer, accepts the job, and he does so with a threat that he will destroy those who oppose him.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“To get an initial hint of the distance between the mind-set of parable's original audience and our own twenty-first-century perspectives, we might begin by reflecting briefly on the term 'good Samaritan.' Today, we use the term as if it were not peculiar. Yet as far as I am aware, there are not 'Good Catholic' or 'Good Baptist' hospitals; there are not social service organizations called 'Good Episcopalian' or 'Good Mexican' or 'Good Arab.' To label the Samaritan, any Samaritan, a 'good Samaritan' should be, in today's climate, seen as offensive. It is tantamount to saying, 'He's a good Muslim' (as opposed to all those others who, in this configuration, would be terrorists) or 'She's a good immigrant' (as opposed to all those others who, in this same configuration, are here to take our jobs or scam our welfare system), or, as Heinrich Himmler put it to a gathering of SS officers, every German 'has his decent Jew' - that is, knows one good Jew - and as far as Himmler was concerned, even one was too many, because that might create sympathy. The problem with the labeling is not simply a lack of sensitivity toward the Samaritan people - yes, there are still Samaritans. It is also a lack of awareness of how odd the expression 'good Samaritan' would have seemed to Jesus's Jewish contemporaries.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“When personal resentment overrides familial and cultural values, we all lose.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“When church becomes a club, parables become pedestrian.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“This book is an act of listening anew, of imagining what the parables would have sounded like to people who have no idea that Jesus will be proclaimed Son of God by millions, no idea even that he will be crucified by Rome. What would they hear a Jewish storyteller telling them? And why, two thousand years later, are these questions not only relevant, but perhaps more pressing than ever?”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“anti-Jewish material is repeated, because no one questions it.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“Jesus has to explain that dropping bombs is not the proper response to a lack of hospitality.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“The audience, surprised at this lack of compassion, would have presumed both that the third person would be an Israelite and that he would help.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“(one always goes “up” to Jerusalem; one could be on the moon and still go “up” to Jerusalem”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“A third reason for auditory atrophy is the expectation of congregations, who have come to believe that the sermon is monologue, not motivation, that it is designed for entertainment. The service becomes less an opportunity for reconciliation, restoration, and renewal and more a Sunday morning version of what Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and now Jimmy Fallon provide on weekday nights: a monologue to make us laugh, music to amuse or bemuse us (having paid singers in the choir doesn’t hurt, nor does an organ that cost more than most”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi

“To grasp the implications of the comparison—the term “parable” comes from the Greek para, “along side, together with,” as in “parallel” or “paradox,” and balo, “to cast,” “to throw”—we need to understand the nuances of each side of the equation. We immediately realize that, with such comparisons, no single meaning can ever be determined, just as no single metaphor or simile can be restricted.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi