Parables With Power

Jesus spoke in parables. We all know that. And parables were used in the Old Testament; however, parables could be broken into two distinct approaches and that is the point I want to make today. There was of course the distintiveness of His use of the parables which came with an authority that no one else employed. After all, He was totally sold out to God and behaviorially, the only begotten Son of God.

The Haggadah approach was to tell a story which contained a moral point. More specifically, the Haggadah contains the order of the Passover Seder. Haggadah means “telling,”; a fulfillment of the scriptural commandment to each Jew to “tell your son” (about the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt, as described in the book of Exodus in the Torah).

The oldest complete readable manuscript of the Haggadah found today is in a prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon in the tenth century. It is not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that these sayings were formally collected into one book.

The second approach was called the halakhah which were straight-forward ethical injunctions. Halakhah were the collective corpus of Jewish religious law, including biblical law (the 613 mitzvot) and later talmudic and rabbinic law as well as customs and traditions.

Jesus employed the haggadah with such force and multiple meanings that people were amazed at His teachings and went way to ponder their meanings. Matthew 13:34 seems a bit stretched saying that Jesus didn’t speak to the people except by using parables. And here’s what we need to remember. Jesus spoke to the crowds, the masses, the outcasts, and the down-n-outs of society.

Even that which he spoke privately to His disciples, He implored them to share with everyone else (Matt. 10:27)- from the housetops if necessary. How are you doing with that?

His teachings are transformational! :-)

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