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Podcast: An Attribute of Jesus That You’ve Probably Never Noticed (Peter Williams)

December 11, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

An Extraordinary Example of the Genius of Jesus

In this episode, Peter Williams uses the famous story of the prodigal son to unpack how Jesus was a genius in the way that he taught during his earthly ministry.

The Surprising Genius of Jesus

The Surprising Genius of Jesus

Peter J. Williams

In The Surprising Genius of Jesus, Peter J. Williams examines the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15 to show the genius, creativity, and wisdom of Jesus’s teachings.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:20 - The Most Interesting Human Who’s Ever Existed

Matt Tully
Peter, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Peter Williams
It’s great to be with you.

Matt Tully
It’s great to talk again. Today we’re going to look at the parable of the prodigal son, as we often refer to it, although you have a different name for it that we’ll get into in a minute. We’ll explore in particular how Jesus used his teaching. He was so intelligent and clever, and you even call him a genius in how he taught to the people who were listening to him. And we’re going to use this parable as a jumping off point for that. But before we jump into that story, why is it worth taking the time to notice Jesus’s cleverness—his genius, as you call it?

Peter Williams
I think we should notice everything about Jesus. Jesus is the most interesting human who’s ever existed.

Matt Tully
You say that, but do you mean that as you’ve experienced that and you really feel that, or is that like something that we should feel?

Peter Williams
I’ll go for both. I do think that he is the most interesting person I’ve ever encountered, but also you can derive it from the fact that he’s God. But just the breadth of teaching that we have, it is extraordinary. And so I want people to get a fresh enthusiasm for that because I think that sometimes we can domesticate Jesus. You can begin learning about him so early and so simply that you don’t think that there’s really a masterclass that Jesus can give you. There are deeper levels, and I think Jesus does have those levels, even as he maintains his simplicity always.

Matt Tully
There can be a certain familiarity with Jesus, and even when we talk about being passionate or excited about Jesus, so often it’s in the realm of love for him and affections for him, which are obviously great. But what I appreciate about what you’re doing here is you’re trying to maybe excite our intellectual appreciation for Jesus and for how he thinks and how he teaches, which I think is something that we don’t often talk about.

Peter Williams
Yeah. And so I think that he’s the cleverest person ever to have walked this planet. And so we should appreciate him for that, as well as many other things.

03:31 - The Parable of the Two Sons

Matt Tully
So let’s jump in to what you would say is maybe the best segment of teaching that Jesus does that underscores or illustrates his cleverness. You point to the parable of the prodigal son. Why don’t you like that name for the parable?

Peter Williams
It’s not a bad name, but it doesn’t cover everything. So, 62% is about the younger brother who goes away, and 38% is about the older brother at home. And both of those are meant to be there. So I prefer to call it the parable of the two sons. The other aspect of the parable of the prodigal son is it emphasizes the prodigal son’s sin. And that’s legitimate, but it’s actually something the older brother wants to do. The older brother is convinced that the younger brother has been wasting his money with prostitutes, even though the younger brother, clearly, has not been sending back postcards from the brothel describing his activities. So he’s projecting there. And the younger son is prodigal and unlucky. What he does is he spends all his money in having made bad choices, but he is also unlucky that the one place he chose to emigrate to is the country that gets hit by the great famine.

Matt Tully
Right. We forget about the famine sometimes.

Peter Williams
Right. We often forget. So he’s prodigal and unlucky. So I think there’s two sons, and we should try and take a global view. But at the end of the day, the parable of the prodigal son is not a bad name. It captures a lot of what’s in there.

Matt Tully
Without getting into the details, which we’ll do in just a minute, why do you say that this parable of Jesus is perhaps the preeminent place to see most clearly his genius?

Peter Williams
I think there are a couple of reasons. It’s his longest parable. It’s close to three minutes long.

Matt Tully
Which doesn’t seem very long, actually.

Peter Williams
Which doesn’t seem very long, but some of them are just phenomenally short. But also because it’s very clear in Luke that he’s got this double audience, where he’s got tax collectors and sinners on the one hand and scribes and Pharisees on the other. What I think we can see is a very clear example of him teaching at two levels. So he teaches by telling a story that will work if you have no biblical background and if you’re a sinner who’s not at all interested in Scripture. It should speak to you. And if you’re a scribe who actually spends his life copying out the Scriptures, it should speak to you. So I think that’s a very clever thing to do. And so Jesus doesn’t fill every one of his stories with as much Old Testament as I think we find in this case. And so I just want to bring that out to people.

Matt Tully
So help us understand a little bit more of the context when Jesus actually tells this parable. What’s going on around him? What’s just happened before in the narrative, and what’s coming ahead? How does this fit into that?

Peter Williams
There are three stories in a row. Well, five stories in a row because you’ve got the parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, these two lost sons, and then we have the parable of the unrighteous steward, and then we have the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. And both of the ones in chapter 16 begin, “There was a rich man.” One had an unrighteous steward; the other one is feasting sumptuously every day. And there are lots of connecting phrases between these stories. So obviously, the three stories of lost—sheep, coin, and sons—have connections. The lost sheep gets lost by going away from home, the lost coin gets lost at home, and then Jesus tells a story about a son who gets lost going away from home and then one lost at home—namely, the older brother. So I think you can see those first two bits as the warm up act, if you like, for the main story.

Matt Tully
Just as an aside here, I’s sure there are people listening—and I even feel this right now—that hear you making all these connections in this Gospel to things that happened before, and they think, I can never do this. I never see those connections when I read these stories. How do you do that? What’s the secret to seeing these connections?

Peter Williams
I think a key thing is to read slowly. In the parable of the two sons, you see that the younger son longed to be filled with what the pigs ate, but no one gave him anything. And then you are in the next chapter and you read that Lazarus, the poor man, longed to be filled with what fell from the rich man’s table, and along came the dogs and licked his sores. You can see this sequence of “long to be filled,” and that’s quite a striking phrase. It’s both nearby and one’s got followed by pigs and one’s followed by dogs, and that might remind you of Jesus’s saying in Matthew about not giving what’s holy to the dogs or your pearls before swine. But again, it’s slowing down to read this, to count phrases, to look at what the prominent things are. We all know these stories at a superficial level after we first heard them once. Now you’ve got to slow down and try and take more notice of them.

Matt Tully
Which works against our natural tendency when it comes to our Bible reading. We sometimes have a reading plan we’re trying to get through, and the tendency is just that I want to check it off. I want to get it done. It’s harder to be willing to slow down.

Peter Williams
I think Bible reading schemes and programs are very good. One thing we probably should do is vary the speed at which we read a particular passage. So let’s say you try and read three chapters of the Bible every day because you want to get through the Bible in a year. That’s really good. You get familiar with the whole Bible. But as you’re reading the book of Proverbs, you’re on overload because each one of those Proverbs is like a lesson in itself.

Matt Tully
Yeah. We’ve all felt that: Wow! Now we’re onto something totally different.

Peter Williams
And so you can benefit a lot from the Proverbs from reading one a day. Now, the advantage with reading several chapters is you start noticing there are recurring proverbs and there are variations on the theme proverbs. So there are advantages of both methods, and therefore you should probably use both methods. So I think it’s good to speed up and slow down, to vary, and if you always read in exactly the same way, you’re likely to see precisely the same things.

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. So what were some of the other things that you were going to mention about the parable of the lost sons?

Peter Williams
The last bit of the proceeding chapter, chapter 14, is “let the one who has ears to hear, hear.” That’s immediately followed by hearing that tax collectors and sinners are drawing near to hear Jesus. And then the scribes and Pharisees are grumbling, which of course is what Israel does in the desert. And here is this command that God gives, that all Israel should hear. And so, it really does set you up with a lovely contrast there.

Matt Tully
Which is kind of then mirrored in the actual parable itself.

Peter Williams
Yeah, sure. I think that there are two aspects to this. One is that Luke clearly has a lot of artistry as he does his story in the book of Luke. And so it’s possible to say, Oh, the artistry in Jesus’s story actually comes from Luke. I want to make the argument that, actually, Luke is a great artist, and Jesus is a great artist. And you need Jesus’s story to have been told to the people Luke reports it of, because that’s what makes sense of the things that Jesus says in his story. Because Jesus is making a number of references that would be particularly aimed at scribes, and so Luke says he was talking to scribes. So those two things make sense. So you can actually make an argument apologetically that we’ve got to have a really faithful transmission of Jesus’s story—the actual words of the story—as well as transmission of the context.

Matt Tully
So let’s dig into the parable itself. I want to jump right into Luke 15:12. This is the verse where the younger son approaches his father and asks for his inheritance. And you slow us down a little bit in that and help us to understand. We all know that the younger son gets the inheritance and runs off and wastes it, but something happens with the older son there that’s maybe a little bit more hidden.

Peter Williams
What you see, firstly, is the younger son says, “Father, give me my share of the inheritance.” Every time the younger son talks to his father he calls him father. It happens three times. One of them is, of course, a speech in his head. He’s practicing with his father. At the end of the story, the older brother does not call his father father. He says, “Look, all these years . . .”

Matt Tully
The only time that he speaks to his father.

Peter Williams
He doesn’t call him father. So there’s a contrast there, in one sense, that the younger son is emotionally closer to his father, even if he ends up being physically further away for a lot of the time.

Matt Tully
It’s almost like prefiguring what’s going to happen.

Peter Williams
But the other side is he asks for his share of the inheritance, and then it says the father divided his inheritance between them. Now, how should the older brother feel at this point? He should feel really grateful to his younger brother. His younger brother has done the dirty work of asking his father for the money. He has just had a huge advance already. He should be eternally indebted to his younger brother.

Matt Tully
Because the older brother would have received the lion’s share of the inheritance.

Peter Williams
Yeah. Obviously, it’s a story and you don’t know where it’s set, but if it’s set in Israel, in Israel an older brother would get double. So he does really well. And wherever you imagine it, it’s that you could imagine that the older brother gets to keep the farm, and the younger brother gets his share of the movable things.

Matt Tully
The liquid assets.

Peter Williams
The liquid assets. That’s also a common way that farms are dealt with across cultures. But that sort of specifics we don’t know exactly, but the older brother does really well. He should be eternally grateful. You see the father’s generosity. You see a behavior that’s a bit like Abraham, because Abraham’s the only other father who gives away his inheritance while he’s still alive. Of course, he doesn’t divide it equally between his sons because the older son, Ishmael, despises the feast for the younger brother, and that’s when he actually loses his inheritance, which I think there are some echoes of that in Jesus’s story. But it’s really important to grasp the fact that the older brother has this whole thing because then, when at the end, the older brother complains, “You never gave me a young goat so that I could eat with my friends. All these years I’ve been slaving for you,” you realize this is completely wrong. He’s not been slaving for his father. He’s been building up his own business the whole time. Although he’s a son, he’s got the mindset that thinks of himself as a slave.

Matt Tully
That is fascinating because that theme is going to come up later with the younger son who, when he decides to go back, he says, “Maybe I can go back and work as a slave.” But then how is that ironic difference drawn out further?

Peter Williams
He almost wants to be a hired servant. He wants to pay his way back and so on. And the father accepted him as a son straight away. He gives him a ring. He gives him a robe. So anyone who looks at that younger son sees him accepted unconditionally back. The father doesn’t say a word to the younger son in the story, by the way. It’s really interesting. He only talks to the older son. He doesn’t seem to need to say anything to the younger son because his actions have said it. His run, his embrace, his kiss, his giving the robe and the ring says everything, and killing the fattened calf. This son is fully reinstated instantly, which of course is a lesson to us because we can always say with people who repent, Well, you really need to do your probation time now and prove it sincere and so on. And the father doesn’t do that.

Matt Tully
Why don’t we know very much about what the younger son does with his inheritance? You make a point of this in the book.

Peter Williams
When I was told this story in Sunday school, it was one of those things that one tended to do quite a bit with. You imagined him going to all these parties and spending his money. And then as the bag gets gradually empty, his friends drift away. And it’s not wrong to imagine that, but it’s interesting that when Jesus tells the story, he says he wasted his money living—and you could say prodigally, riotously. You could use just one word to sort of encapsulate it all. And there you’ve got the thought that Jesus, in his storytelling, doesn’t do the big expansion on the sin. Sin is very boring. You’re not better off after a story of sin. But actually, that’s the bit of the prodigal son story that modern storytellers want to dwell on. You might have a whole fiction book that effectively is expanding on that aspect, and that’s the bit that Jesus moves on from very quickly.

Matt Tully
And why do you think it is that he includes—again, assuming that Jesus is being very intentional, very economical in the words he’s even using in this—why include this bit about this famine? Why include the unlucky portion to the story when it seems to maybe relativize the younger brother’s sin and culpability for that?

Peter Williams
Well, what it does of course is it shows the descent of the younger brother. Things get worse and he runs out of money, but it’s not just that. They’re compounded with something even worse where there’s a famine, and he’s starving, and then he has to join as citizen of the country, which sort of rubs in that he’s not a citizen. It gives you this wonderful element where it should take away from our judgment of him because the older brother wants to say it’s entirely his fault, but there’s this element that actually relativizes that. Obviously, he is sinful and he does the wrong thing, but that’s not all there is to the story. It shows how he needs to be at his wits end before he finally repents. He has to be brought low enough. So all of those are parts of it, and it also gives us a reference back to the Joseph story. In Joseph, it’s called a great famine. There aren’t that many great famines in the Bible. I think a great famine is probably a multi-year famine rather than a famine that tends to be just for one year where you lose a harvest and that gives you a famine. A great famine is something bigger. And there’s a great famine in the days of Joseph. And then what you see in Jesus’s story is that the son, when he comes back, is given a ring and a robe, just like Joseph was given when he came before Pharaoh and was established as ruler of the land. And of course, then the story Jesus tells has the father saying, My son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and he is found. Well, there’s only one other person in the Bible who had a son who he thought was dead and then is alive again, and that’s Jacob receiving back Joseph. So I think there’s a richness of allusion to the story of Genesis that’s going on there.

Matt Tully
What should we make of the job that the younger son has to take?

Peter Williams
That sort of leads on from the whole famine aspect. If you’re a Pharisee listening to Jesus’s story, you’re really onside for the first bit because this story is going very well, because this younger son is getting what he deserves.

Matt Tully
They’re nodding their heads.

Peter Williams
He is wasting his father’s money. Ha! Then he gets hit by a famine, and then he’s feeding pigs. And that’s good because you want to rub his face in it. And so they’re onside almost cheering.

Matt Tully
Pigs were unclean for Jews.

Peter Williams
Pigs were unclean. Herding, generally, is a lowly thing. It’s the sort of thing when David had seven older brothers, they were very happy to leave the herding of the sheep to the youngest. Because at the end of the day, it’s quite boring being out at night and having to look after the sheep. It’s not high on skill.

Matt Tully
Is there something to that, even in the infancy narratives where we have the shepherds coming? What’s going on there?

Peter Williams
Yeah, I think so. They’re not generally super rich. Even in the Middle East today, if you find people who are shepherding animals, they’re not people with a lot of other choices about their job. So that’s a brilliant aspect of the story. Plus, this is not just herding animals; this is the lowest animal. And you expect it to say that he wanted to eat the pig’s food but it didn’t taste nice, or he ate the outer bit. But he didn’t even get given what the pigs rejected. He said he wanted to eat the husks, if you like, of the pig’s food—the bits that pigs wouldn’t even eat, and no one gave him that. So I think that with a great economy of words, Jesus gives you a very dramatic picture.

Matt Tully
And again, presumably, Jesus knows at this moment at this point in the story that all the Pharisees are listening right there and all the scribes are nodding along, approving of where this story is going. And similarly, the Gentiles who are listening, the tax collectors, they’re feeling what?

Peter Williams
I mean it’s difficult to know how many Gentiles there are because the tax collectors may be Jews who are collaborating with Romans, or I think probably more likely in this setting are probably Jews who are in flagrant breach of the things that they should be doing, according to whether it’s the law of the Old Testament or perhaps the law that the Pharisees has added to the Old Testament. But either way, they’re in flagrant breach of that. They’re, I think, spoken to really by the son’s return. Here’s someone who’s used money the wrong way. He’s wasted his father’s money, and has got nothing good to show for it, but he comes back and is welcomed. And that just speaks hugely to those who feel the guilt of their sin and everything they’ve done wrong and they’ve messed up. And the fact that there’s the father there, looking and watching out to welcome them back. That’s it.

Matt Tully
I’m sure many of us who have heard this story retold or preached in churches will know that oftentimes there’s a lot made of the way the father receives the son back—the fact that he runs to him, the fact that he embraces him. What would you say about that? Is all of that genuine, that this is something that would have seemed pretty out of the ordinary?

Peter Williams
It is out of the ordinary. The father runs, embraces, and kisses. That is a very unusual thing because you expect the father to be angry. The younger brother has wasted all his money. He ought to make him do some penance and reparations, some biding his time. And he fully accepts him publicly and celebrates that. And of course it’s based off the Old Testament because the phrase “ran, embraced, and kissed” only occurs one other time in the Old Testament, and that’s when Jacob, having cheated his older brother Esau out of everything and gone off into a far country and then comes back, he’s heard that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 armed men.

Matt Tully
He’s afraid he’s going to try to kill him.

Peter Williams
He’s very scared. I mean, 400 armed men, that’s not going to work out well. And then, surprisingly, Esau runs, embraces, and kisses. And so what Jesus, by using that reference, is showing is that even that bad guy in the Old Testament who was cheated out of a lot was willing to forgive. And so that’s a challenge to anyone who’s in the older brother’s situation. The older brother could easily feel that if the younger brother has gone away and spent everything that was his and now he’s coming back, he’s somehow going to live off what the older brother’s money is.

Matt Tully
He’s now a parasite.

Peter Williams
Yeah, and now be a parasite. Now, of course, that’s incorrect because we know that the younger brother has said that he’s willing to work for his father. So he’s not going to be a parasite. He’s actually going to add to the business. But the older brother is thinking in very mean terms and thinking he’s going to lose out to having him back. And so we see that mean heartedness in contrast even with Esau in the Old Testament in how the father in Jesus’s story runs, embraces, and kisses the son. Now, there’s a further element to that. Scribes, in their training, were taught to put dots over some words in the Old Testament. Not many, just fifteen lots of words, and only five of them in Genesis. And one of them was that word “kiss” in Genesis 33:4.

Matt Tully
What were the dots for?

Peter Williams
Because of a textual debate about which words should be in. I think we can show they were there by the time of Jesus. So any of the scribes who are trained particularly to know that verse, and they know Genesis pretty well because they copy it out multiple times, but they particularly know that verse. So the dramatic highlight of Jesus’s story—the thing that you would make the dramatic highlight of any film with the greatest music going on, which would be the father running, embracing, and kissing the son—that also is the bit that hits on the highlight of the scribes’ training. And so it should be a challenge to them.

Matt Tully
It’s confronting them, saying, Would you do this?.

Peter Williams
Yeah.

24:08 - The Uncomfortable Generosity of God

Matt Tully
You also highlight the fact that the father obviously shows a lot of generosity and grace towards his younger son, but there’s an uncomfortableness to his generosity that you highlight. Unpack that a little bit.

Peter Williams
We could be asking ourselves, Whose money is he being generous with? Is he being generous with the older brother’s money? How come the older brother is out in the field while everyone’s celebrating? Did no one think of sending a message to the older brother to say what’s going on?

Matt Tully
It’s pretty easy to get in the shoes of the older brother and feel a little bit sorry for him.

Peter Williams
Absolutely. When the father says, Bring out the best robe, well, who’s the best robe belong to? There’s only two possibilities: it’s either the father or the older brother. And killing the fattened calf, the one that’s ready for the meal. So I think there is a lot where you can be uncomfortable with the father’s generosity, and I think that’s good.

Matt Tully
You actually say that you think that’s deliberate, that Jesus is trying—

Peter Williams
God is uncomfortably generous. The fact that he welcomes sinners who’ve actually sinned against real people. I was just reflecting today on prison ministry and how there are people who have really, really harmed other people’s lives in big ways and been locked away for a very long time, and then they come to Jesus. And their victims are still at large—

Matt Tully
And they’re still suffering.

Peter Williams
And they’re still suffering. And these people have been fully accepted by God and are fully forgiven. That is a very uncomfortable thing to think about, the fact that God has forgiven someone is very awkward for us. People today do not like the thought that God could forgive Vladimir Putin if he repented. That goes against so much of what we want to think. God’s forgiveness is very, very uncomfortable. It comes, of course, conditional on repentance, but fundamentally underwritten by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. That’s the key thing. And if we see our own sin and how much we’ve been forgiven, that should help us appreciate more how God forgives others. I think often we’re uncomfortable with him forgiving that really big sinner over there because we don’t think of our sin as very great.

26:31 - The Message of the Parable

Matt Tully
For these two different audiences that Jesus has in mind as he’s telling this story, if you had to summarize what the message is for each of those audiences that they should be drawing from this parable, what would those be?

Peter Williams
For those who are weighed down with their sin, to know that there is a God who would welcome them back, throw his arms around them, accept them as his child—fully and unconditionally. That’s so important. They need to turn from their sin, but when they turn and come to him, he will receive them instantly.

Matt Tully
As children, not just as slaves or servants.

Peter Williams
Absolutely. Then I think there are those who are a bit like the older brother. They want to work their way and think about their own merits and how deserving and righteous they are. And they’re actually nurturing resentment towards God their father. They feel they’re not getting enough from him. And I think that that’s a challenge because I think a lot of people fit into that type. A lot of us do think we can earn our way to God, and it’s a real reminder that you absolutely can’t. And of course, the story ends without a full ending. That is, you’re told that the father goes out to the older brother. He reasons with him. The father has the last word, but it doesn’t tell you how the older brother responds.

Matt Tully
Why is that?

Peter Williams
Firstly, what would happen if the older brother did repent? We know that because of the story of the lost coin. In the story of the lost coin, when the woman finds the coin lost at home, she rejoices. So if this son lost at home were found, there would be joy. We know that. But it’s a great way of leaving the story open ended so that if you’re in that situation, it’s asking the question, How are you going to respond? The invitation is there.

28:14 - The Parables of Jesus and the Old Testament

Matt Tully
And it’s kind of up to you now because we don’t know how you’re going to respond yet. It’s fascinating. So you’ve highlighted how this story echoes so many different stories in the book of Genesis and elsewhere. But then you say that actually a lot of Jesus’s parables are like this in that they have these echoes and they have these typologies coming out. What are a couple of other examples, briefly, that would be like that?

Peter Williams
With Jesus’s story of the two sons, you get this clear reference, I think, to Genesis 18:6, where the father runs. And he seems to be an old man at the time, and the only other old man in the Bible to run is Abraham when he’s welcoming the guests. He runs, and the first word from his mouth is the word “quick.” That’s the first word that the father says in Jesus’s story, and then he goes and gets the fatted calf. But in the story of Abraham, it’s “quick,” and then he says, “three seahs of flour,” he says that to Sarah. Jesus’s shortest parable is about how the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who gets some yeast and leaven and puts it into three seahs of flour. And seah is a particular measurement. It only occurs a few times in the Old Testament. These two passages are the only time you get the words “three” and “seah.” And more specifically, it’s flour rather than anything else. And so I think there’s a reference there. We can show Jesus thinking about that verse. Now, that gives you a number—the number three—and how it connects with the Old Testament. But there are other times that numbers come from the Old Testament. For instance, in the parable of the soils which yields thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. I think the hundredfold is a reference to Genesis 26 where Isaac has a hundredfold increase. When you have the parable of the talents where the man owes 10,000 talents, that number doesn’t just come from nowhere. That’s exactly the number that Haman said he would owe to the king Xerxes, or Ahasuerus, in the book of Esther. So you get those sorts of things in Jesus’s story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man is feasting with purple and linen, and feasting every day. Well purple and linen only occur in one passage in the Old Testament. It’s in Esther 1:6. It’s also a feast. It’s Xerxes’ feast. He’s a king, and he invites all the men of Susa. So he doesn’t have beggars left outside. And he’s a sort of baddie king. And then it will tell you that this man is feasting every day. Well, there’s only one other group who feast every day, and I think that’s Job’s children—Job’s sons. They have a sibling only feast, and they invite their sisters round. But then you read outside, with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, there’s this man who’s covered with sores. Well, who’s the only other person covered with sores in the Old Testament? That’s Job. And of course he’s rich, and he can say he’s always welcomed the poor at his table.

31:21 - Guidelines for Interpreting Parables

Matt Tully
So when you do this, when you look at a parable of Jesus, you’re looking at all these details that are easy for us just to run past and say, Okay yeah, there were three guys. Who cares? But you’re saying, But why? And you’re finding these connections. What are the guardrails for doing that?

Peter Williams
I think one of the things about it is how do you tell when something is not random. Part of it is frequency. If we just met a person one and they behaved a particular way, we might not be sure that we’re correctly analyzing why they did something. But if we meet them ten times and they do it more often, we get more confidence that this is part of their personality. Now, it’s the same with a feature of a text. The more frequent it is, the more confidence you get that this is real. So I think the fact that you find this in a lot of Jesus’s stories in multiple Gospels—these references to the Old Testament—that assures you that they’re there. When you find that there are multiple ones which refer to some of the same texts, that gives you some reassurance.

Matt Tully
If you see multiple connections to a certain old Testament story.

Peter Williams
Yeah. And then you actually see that there may be multiple ways in which the texts are used the same way. So all of these things can add together. But yeah, there need to be safeguards. And at the end of the day, what we shouldn’t be doing with these things is making equations—this is that. So I think we can show lots of allusions. But sometimes when you look at modern films, you can get scenes which echo each other, but we don’t want to say the two scenes are each other, or that one is a picture of the other. It’s rather in the nature of art that you have some of these sorts of softer allusions. So we should expect that in any fine storyteller like Jesus, there will be some elements where you might not be fully certain what is intended here. There’s a certain open-endedness to his stories.

Matt Tully
I’m struck by the way that you actually have done this. So often you see a connection there, and you’re going back and you’re having to read and understand more of the broader story that that connection is in. And that helps you to interpret or add a new layer to the meaning of the New Testament parable.

Peter Williams
Yes. But at the end of the day, these stories are very powerful because not every lose end is tied up. You don’t know how the older brother responds. You’re not always sure, in an Old Testament story even, what’s really going on. As in, you’re told, and I think in the Joseph story, you’ve got a situation when Joseph’s brothers report back to Jacob the things that the leader in Egypt has said, they give a different account one time from another time. Now, how are you supposed to look at that? Are they lying or not? And again, you’re not meant to go away with an absolutely firm conclusion on that. So the text can leave you with these questions. It doesn’t have to answer every single one of them.

Matt Tully
I’m also just struck by how undergirding all of this—and all of the attention that we should pay to, in particular Jesus parables, but even the whole New Testament is like this to some extent—is this conviction that Jesus is a really good teacher, and that he has a lot he’s doing with this, and literally every word matters.

Peter Williams
Yes. A good example is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man’s not named; Lazarus is named. So one’s more important to God at one level. But then it tells you the poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side or bosom. And the rich man died and was buried. What it has not told you is that the poor man was buried. So it raises a question in your mind, Was the poor man buried? We know the rich man was buried, and that was a big public event probably.

Matt Tully
A lot of people attending it.

Peter Williams
With a lot of people attending. But to conclude that the poor man wasn’t buried is overstating. It actually just leaves that question in your mind: I wonder if he was buried. And so that’s the brilliance of the story because it leaves that question genuinely open. And I think that’s a a masterful element of storytelling, that you don’t feel that you need to tie up everything.

Matt Tully
And it causes you to ask questions and contemplate things in a way that even lingers with us sometimes.

Peter Williams
And you’re told, for instance, the poor man was laid at the gate of the rich man. So that just in that phrase it’s telling you he probably is not fully mobile. Someone’s had to carry him there. But again, it doesn’t tell you that. It gets you there by an indirect route with an absolute economy of words.

Matt Tully
It’s obviously a well-known truism of good storytelling is you show, you don’t tell. And so often Jesus is doing that masterfully in these parables.

Peter Williams
Yeah. And the poor man dies first. Poor men usually do. What does he die of? Is he dying of hunger? Or his sores? It doesn’t tell you. So it’s just brilliant.

Matt Tully
Peter, thank you so much for helping us to dig into this beautiful story and help us to appreciate not just the story, but Jesus himself.

Peter Williams
Thank you.

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