Photograph by Tim Wildsmith via Unsplash

Thomas G. Long is a masterful preacher and longtime teacher of preachers. His text The Witness of Preaching is a rare homiletics classroom text that the author has updated diligently over the years to reflect changes in preaching theory and emerging challenges for preachers new to ministry. Long is now retired, yet his vocation as preacher and teacher continues through his writings and support to various scholarly endeavors. His most recent work is Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2024). 

When teaching the parables during a post-retirement visiting professor semester at Yale Divinity, Long found himself rethinking his suppositions about the parables and how to instruct preachers to proclaim them rightly. After several days of rumination, Long realized he had taught preaching parables along the “literary critical road,” staying on that trajectory for decades focused on examining “how the gears, levers, and pulleys of a particular parable worked to generate its impact on hearers” (p. xiii). Long spends the introductory section of this book exploring influential parables scholars and the generations of biblical and homiletical scholars who followed this pathway, very familiar to many preachers today, even if they are unaware of the various contributions made to parables scholarship showing up as bedrock methods for introductory New Testament and homiletics courses.

Instead, Long began retracing his steps to where the other “road” of interpreting parables might take the preacher. He writes, “The true power of the parables lies down the other road, not primarily in their literary form, but in the kingdom of God to which they refer” (ibid.) He began searching for ways to read the parables where the literary critical method can provide insight, yet it is in service to the greater task of proclaiming the Reign of God in a way that does not reduce the parable to a matter of mastering sociocultural and literary critical methods in order to know conclusively what a given parable is all about.

Along the way, Long singles out the scholarship of the American Baptist scholar and theological educator Dr. William R. Herzog II, now of blessed memory. I did not agree with Long’s perspective on the body of Herzog’s parables scholarship. Here, Long cites Herzog as taking the background of agrarian peasant studies and liberationist readings of the Scriptures, both products of scholarship from the latter quarter of the 20th century to present day and using these lenses to draw his observations about the parables. Knowing Herzog a bit through life in a small denomination and certainly in the grateful stories shared by many of his students from the four ABCUSA-affiliated seminaries he taught at in his long career, I did not find Long’s firmness in critiquing Herzog the scholar, as I think Herzog and Long would have found much common ground. Herzog was indeed a person deeply concerned with the teachings of Jesus in service to the vision of the Reign of God being made known in Jesus’ ministry. He worked with pedagogical models and suppositions formed in the 20th century, and Long seems to want a “straw man” in his book to prove his own points more than Herzog’s work deserves.

I do appreciate Long’s understanding that we can bog down in research or speculation. I agreed heartily with his account of his firsthand encounters with the early days of what became later known as the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars seeking historicity well above any other concern. In Long’s career, he watched several key movements unfold in real time, attending symposiums and engaging in the critical fields of New Testament and parables scholarship. The literary critical method could leave the student a bit exhausted by working through all the possible angles of reading the parable alone or somewhat in context of where it appears in a given Gospel’s narrative, or even puzzling why one Gospel writer tells the parable in a given way that differs from how it is told elsewhere.

Long’s book follows onward with support for the preacher preparing to preach a parable before moving into chapters that introduce each of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) with their general backgrounds for reading their parables within each Gospel’s overall framework and then the parables found in each Gospel, one by one. 

Many readers may be inclined to look up the given Scripture text in pursuit of material for the Sunday morning sermon. Indeed, in my earliest days in ministry, I tended to use some parables books on my own shelf that way: “read for the quote.” I repented of my sins, and I read more for the larger framework of the author’s arguments about how parables work, let alone in the momentary engagement of a given parable. Long’s book offers a great deal of wisdom for the preacher and student alike. His preliminary chapters on Mark, Matthew, and Luke are very helpful, reminding us that the parable is not to be lifted out of the greater narrative. Long also chides those who might wish to dwell on too many “inside baseball” scholarly questions that might be fulfilling for the mental stimulation but do not wrestle more completely with the task at hand—letting the Reign of God shake things up in the hearing of the Sunday morning listener.

Parables should not be treated as lab specimens, yet they should be appreciated as a contrary witness against the grain of the religious and sociopolitical norms that Jesus and his followers found untenable under the dual powers of Empire and Temple alike. Parables do not stay mired down in the muck of such things, even as they should never quite ignore them for lofty spiritual ideals. The parables of Jesus are embedded in the life of the hearers, even as they are at the ready to lift up the Reign of God as the work of God, not humanity, in breaking into the mundane and sin-fractured world we know all too well.