Seeing With the Heart…
“A sower went out to sow some seed…”
“A man fell into the hands of robbers…”
“Suppose a woman has ten silver coins and looses one…”
“There were ten virgins with ten lamps…”
What’s up with all these stories?
Think about it. You are the Son of God. Your job is to communicate truth that will lead to the eternal rescue of lost humans. Would you do it like this?
A treasure hidden in a field? A lump of dough? Ten virgins and something about oil?
Why doesn’t he come right out and say it – and get to the point? Jesus is not entertaining children; he is speaking to adults about the deepest things in life. But he seems to be telling us some rather puzzling stories. Does that make sense?
Unfortunately, we think we are the enlightened ones. We are children of the internet and cell phones and The Weather Channel. We aren’t fooled by saying what is true and what is not. For certain thinigs… proposition is useful and helpful. Sacremento is the capital of California; water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit; you shoes are in the front room, under the sofa.
But proposition fails when it comes to the weightier things in life. The fact is that the Civil War was fought between the years 1861 and 1865. And while it is also a fact that hundreds of thousands of men died in that war, those facts hardly describe what happend at Bull Run or Antietam, at Cold Harbor or Gettysburg. You don’t even begin to grasp the reality of the Civil War until you hear the stories, see the pictures from the time, visit the battlefields, watch a film like Glory.
How much more so when it comes to the deep truths of the Christian faith. God loves you; you matter to him. That is a fact, stated as a proposition. I imagine most of you have heard it any number of times.
Why, then, aren’t we the happiest people on earth? It hasn’t reached our hearts. Facts stay lodged in the mind, for the most part. They don’t speak at the level we need to hear. Proposition speaks to the mind, but when you tell a story, you speak to the heart. We’ve been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. It is our way of communicating the timeless truths, passing them down.
And that’s why when Jesus comes to town, he speaks in a way that will get past all our intellectual defenses and disarm our hearts. He tells a certain kind of story. And the best stories of all, the ones that bring us Eternal Truths, they always take the form of parable, or sometimes we say, fairy tales. Better still to call them myths.
(Waking the Dead by John Eldredge, p. 23-24 )
