I was many years into Casablanca superfandom when I finally encountered Umberto Eco’s half dissenting, half praising assessment in his essay “The Cult of the Imperfect.” I was, at first, annoyed and defensive about this movie, which so thoroughly deserved its canonical status in American film for its dialogue (“you can tell me now, I’m reasonably sober” is a line that still makes me chuckle), its political heart, and its production of a vocabulary of references that live on in every American medium and genre since. Then, as I read on, I had to acknowledge that Eco was right: it’s a Brueghelian assembly of stock figures, tropes, and outright clichés, and the only reason it struck me as a revelation when I first saw it is that it introduced me to storytelling elements that had long been standard, even in film.1 The movie doesn’t succeed in spite of this pastiche quality, but because of it:
“Can I tell you a story?” Ilsa asks. Then she adds: “I don’t know the finish yet.” Rick says: “Well, go on, tell it. Maybe one will come to you as you go along.”
Rick’s line is a kind of epitome of Casablanca. According to Ingrid Bergman, the film was made up piecemeal as filming progressed. Until the last minute, not even Michael Curtiz knew if Ilsa would leave with Rick or Victor, and Ingrid Bergman’s enigmatic smiles were because she still did not know—as they were filming—which of the two men she was really supposed to be in love with.
It works because the story could go either way and still fit the storytelling conventions it borrows. Or Ilsa could actually shoot Rick, though perhaps not fatally, or Renault could snitch, or Victor could be captured, all within the frame of expectations set by a story featuring these particular characters.
Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and holding a get-together.
That’s a line that has stayed with me ever since I first read it. The genius isn’t the individual creation—the character of, say, Rick Blaine—but the iteration and combination of his stock figure and mannerisms with all the others. This is the genius of tall tales and folklore. It’s the genius of jokes: one guy walking into every gin-joint in every town in all the world, over and over forever.
Play It Again, Luke
It’s also, at least in part, the genius of parables. There is no distinction to the characters in a Biblical parable. There is no interior profundity hinted by the words themselves. The self-talk is not introspection but scheming. A rich man schemes to pull down his barns and build new, bigger barns to supply himself for good (twist: he is fated to die). A man helps a wounded traveler on a dangerous road (he’s from a different ethnic group). If someone gets a name, it’s a stock-character name: Lazarus, the Leper Man, has sores on his body. Like Lou Gehrig’s Disease. There is often the appearance of a potted moral to go with the potted characters. And the preacher can, if she chooses, expound on that moral, perhaps complicating it, perhaps applying it in an unexpected way, perhaps transposing it to our own day and our own folkloric characters.
At least that’s how I usually approached these stories the first time or two through the cycle. Last week I totted up my sermon stats, and of the 420 sermons I’ve preached in these thirteen years, most of the very few I can remember in any detail are about Jesus’s parables. Twelve years ago, when I preached about the parable of the lost sheep and coin, I quoted Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (“the good of the one outweighs the good of the many”). While that’s actually all I remember from that sermon, I’m sure it served a trite reading of the parable because it connects so directly and obviously. And I’m also sure it “worked” because a year or so later, someone came back to that church and told me they remembered that I had preached about Star Trek III.
That’s one, rudimentary strength of the parable as a genre within the Scriptures. But a few years in, I was really shaken up in my approach. First, a pastor leading a Bible study at a synod assembly told the parable of the vineyard workers from the perspective of day labor and the humiliating disappointment of that last-hired group, about to give up and go home with nothing to show their family for a day of waiting for work. It was like hearing the story in stereo, or watching it in color for the first time. What if the parable wasn’t, in the first instance, about the hearers and the epiphany they were supposed to experience, but about real people with their own subjectivity?
Then I read Amy-Jill Levine’s Short Stories by Jesus, which goes further by debriding some of the more famous parables of their conventional interpretative assumptions—including, perhaps most importantly, the theological and historical-critical polemics against first-century Judaism that have crept or crashed into Christian readings. While I can’t endorse all of the theological and literary premises Levine relies on to do her interpretive work, I was usually persuaded by her claim that the parables she writes about are intrinsically open-ended and not reducible to a simple moral revealed by analogy. Something as basic as challenging the traditional labels for the stories (why the parable of “the prodigal son” and not “the father with two sons”?) can help the preacher find a fresh and revealing approach. There may be no character standing in for God or Jesus, no plain meaning to be distilled from a folksy narrative format. So not only does the sparse characterization and laconic style of parables allow you to, as it were, pick them up and rotate them in three-dimensional space, their lack of one-to-one correspondence to a world outside of the parable requires you to.
If you come to church and hear the parable of the “laborers in the vineyard,” you may instinctively identify with the owner. Or you may identify with the workers hired early, or maybe with those taken later. Or you may even find your way in to the story through the manager, who surely had some thoughts about having to execute his boss’s rather bizarre policy. Perhaps you’re the sort of orchard owner who will cut down an unproductive tree promptly and without regret, or the kind of gardener who pleads for one more year to make it work, or a tree that needs that last chance. Opening these possibilities for the hearer is, in my view, table stakes for preaching on the parables.
Once I composed a first-person retelling of the Prodigal Son story from the prodigal’s point of view. I’d never warmed to first person narration in preaching but there’s a first time for everything. However, this required actually acknowledging the narrative form: the prodigal is aware of himself specifically as a character in a story. The next time through, I played with the narration. Instead of a self-aware character’s account of the events, it was a parable multiverse in which the story branched in different directions at different points because of decisions made by the characters, yielding six unhappy endings and one, final, happy one.
This year, when it was time to deal with the “parable of the dishonest manager,” which could also be rendered as the parable of the “unjust manager” or “manager of unrighteousness,” or as a “parable of the inattentive rich man” or a “parable of the grateful debtors,” I dug deeper than I usually do into commentaries.2 No one had a great answer for what this vexing little story means, not that I had any right to expect it, but in the process I was reminded that it is one of three parables in Luke introduced with the stock character of the "rich man." The first, which we had in July, is the story of a rich man who pulls down his barns to build bigger ones to accommodate a bumper crop and ensure a future of ease and plenty (commonly shorthanded as “the parable of the rich fool”). And the last is the famous, devastating “parable of the rich man and Lazarus,” or “Lazarus and the rich man,” or, since at some point the lack of a name for the protagonist was felt as a problem, “Lazarus and Dives.”
Here was a figure from the ancient folk repertory appearing three times over: as a self-satisfied fool, as a slovenly master outsmarted by a clever subordinate, and finally as an oblivious magnate self-condemned to torment. In the form of the lectionary (the latter two stories back to back, six weeks after the first), it’s as though the clichés are talking to one another. Holding a get together. Or, as I tried to do it last week, a support group for victims and survivors of Jesus’s parables held at “St. Luke’s Medical Center”:
[DIVES]: I see this now. I should have done everything differently. But, like, what’s the point of all this self-knowledge? I made my choices, I lived my life, now I’m in Hades and I can’t save myself. I can’t even save my own brothers. I guess I’ll see them here. Or maybe I won’t. You don’t really see a lot of people here. My dad must be here somewhere too but I haven’t run into him. Anyway, what are we even doing here?
LEADER: I think it’s time to introduce Jacob to our group affirmation. Who wants to lead us today?
[RICH FOOL]: I’ll go. “I am a character in a story”
ALL: I am a character in a story.
[RICH FOOL]: My story is told by Jesus.
ALL: My story is told by Jesus.
[RICH FOOL]: Jesus tells my story to change people’s lives
ALL: Jesus tells my story to change people’s lives
[DIVES]: So that’s it, I’m a cautionary tale? I’m here to help… [gestures to listeners] whoever repent? Nobody gets out of here, right?
LEADER: That’s not true. The man with two sons got out of here. Remember?
[INATTENTIVE OWNER]: That guy! His one son was a loser who wasted the inheritance.3
Formal Experiments and Cheap Tricks
Was this a good idea? I don’t know, but people did listen. It got responses from people who have never mentioned a sermon either way before. Partly it was just the novelty of a staged reading with four “characters” played by different people. It’s very possible, even probable, that we will fall in love with our own conceit from time to time. I could have spun this story out for pages and pages, built a whole world in the St. Luke’s Medical Center populated by the figures of parables and tales, detached from their settings and looking for the meaning of it all. But I’ve never regretted trying a formal or narrative experiment in preaching. Too much of it would be exhausting for the hearers and, surely, for us as well.4 And it’s important to remember that apart from the truly, prodigiously gifted practitioners among us, we’re never going to succeed at entertainment as such, with our without an edifying point. Cheap laughs and little stunts are good in their place, but there’s no upside in making them anything but our Pips to the Gospel’s thematic Gladys Knight.
And the parables are the perfect literature for these experiments. Their openness and irresolution does not lend most of them to the kind of proclamatory pyrotechnics invited by Jesus’s teachings and sayings, or to the granular contextual detail and theological speculations invited by miracle stories. I’ve become less and less interested in the particular literary games we in the U.S. mainline have been taught to play with that material, turning the literal into metaphor and history (however broadly understood) into myth and allegory. But the parables are right there, not only permitting but demanding that we edit and stage-manage the elements, make an allegory, and embrace the flexible profundity of tales that have been told time out of mind.
It’s noteworthy that Jesus trusts his audiences with these stories. There are, certainly, passages that suggest a hostile obscurity in the parable form, as if there is a single definitive point that is deliberately hidden by the narrative. And the form can act as a ruse or a trap for the conscience of the hearer, as Nathan’s story of the lamb was for David. Sometimes, surely, it is the preacher’s task to make these stories do just that.5 But I don’t think that’s the norm for Jesus’s parables either on the page or in worship. There’s a generosity, a gratuity, in the genre itself, a confidence that an interpretation doesn’t have to be “correct” in an exclusive way for it to be good. Like the meals at which some of these stories are recorded as being told, the event itself is in some sense the purpose. You come together with each other and a blank-faced traveler you meet again for the first time, bearing a story whose finish will have to come to you as you all go along.
This is perhaps why actual parodies of Casablanca are hard, if not impossible, to pull off, but a self-conscious genre pastiche like The Big Lebowski can capture the same line-quoting cult enthusiasm.
I can recommend, unsurprisingly, the commentary on Luke’s Gospel co-authored by Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III.
Obviously this is ripped off from the BadAnon scene in Wreck-It Ralph, which I have also used verbatim in a sermon.
I have heard a story, too good or scary to fact-check, that an Orthodox priest in London preaches entirely in the form of Lake Wobegon-esque interlocked short stories. I would not recommend attempting this.
I considered, but ultimately rejected, some way to make it clear that the typical American middle-class diet would probably qualify as “feasting” by the standards of Dives and Lazarus, neither of whom could ever have imagined a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato and french fries.