he who has ears (part 2)

Even in the form of a human, God is an artist. Jesus constantly taught using stories that contained as the characters, people they knew and understood, situations, culture and lifestyles with which they were familiar. Jesus’ metaphors used levels of his listeners’ understanding to cause them to search for similarities in the concepts he was trying to convey. We know that this was his main method of communication because nearly all of his recorded teaching appears this way, and on the very night that he died, his disciples expressed surprise that he was speaking straight up with no figures of speech.
Jesus seems to have created an atmosphere for learning in which all the pieces would fit together at once, and each piece would suddenly make sense of all the others. It seems highly likely that the disciples wouldn’t have been surprised by his straight talk had he talked straight before. I suspect that the vast majority, if not all of Jesus’ teaching was done artistically, through metaphors and myth and figures of speech.
While Jesus’ stories and metaphors and teachings require all the others to make sense, we tend to tear his teaching apart, explain away the art, present it a detail at a time, scientifically, with big modern words like soteriology and propitiation. Thus the gospel is reduced to fire insurance and the fine print reads like the indecipherable ten pages that come with your State Farm bill every month. Relationship is reduced to religion, love is reduced to life-style, eternity starts when you die, and the kingdom is no longer at hand, but probably will be presently.
These were the very same things that Jesus was trying to restore while he was here. Lost relationship, and real living in this life. Amazing that we can reduce his teaching to the exact thing he was trying to overcome.