Friday 9 March 2012

What Jesus Parables REALLY DO!

 (The secret hitherto undisclosed purpose of what Jesus was really up to)

by Chris Welch  Facebook Note on Monday, 27 February 2012 at 12:00 ·
Joan and I were talking over the Franz Kafka tale I put music and soundeffects to on my CD, called Before The Law.

The reason we say , or some say...!!??, "kafkaesque" is because his stories have entered people's imagination as weird...kind of story versions of Max Escher's drawings of roughly the same period.
So there was Freud, Jung...opening up ways of thinking.(I think Freud is now largely discredited) There was the German painter movement of Expressionism. There was an even weirder movement in music, which was like moving in the other direction...trying to make left-brain music, when it is fundamentally rightbrain...and that was Schonberg doing 12 tone music.

Why is all that relevant now? Well most art movements precede reality by about 50 to 100 years. However you view all its total relevance this far on, the one thing that wasgoing on were early attempts at flagging up that there was a "hidden world" driving the external world. It was early attempts at determining what it was.

Can you imagine a group of intellectual grammar school boys in German lessons being confronted with a Franz Kafka story called Before (in front of, not before in time) The Law.

Brought up to be very quick in leftbrain skills, absolutely none of us had any equipment whatsoever to deal with Kafka's story. So there was a huge questionmark over our heads when the teacher asked us what it was about. And actually Martin Milnes the teacher was quite pleased with this. Because that's how Kafka is.

Anybody who is interested I could share the track and what I wrote to Joan.

But after writing to Joan, and further seeing Nancy's writing last night I was really impacted by this thought yesterday.

Jesus DELIBERATELY told parables.
He could have come out straight with some kind of leftbrain explanation of Ezekiel 8 or something. Ezekiel 8 covers very similar territory to Expressionism...describing the strange inside world of us as a Temple...but a Temple with walls scrawled with gods,idols,fears,things that dominate, things that we "pull towards us by our believing"

But Jesus didnt.
A bit like a Kafka tale, His parables are immediately recognisable as life examples, but they are kind of surreal. They are life as we experience it, but there's a hidden edge to them which is subversive like good art.

It's subversive because it starts attacking the mentality we run from as fallen beings and is described in a lot of detail in Romans chapter 1.

But it is subversive not only in "content"...it is subversive in what the parables actually "do" to the mind. Like a good Buddhist conundrum, like" imagine one hand clapping, or imagine the inside of a ping pong ball".....at surface value they mean very little.
Very unrewarding to left brain machinery.
About as helpful as Graham Kemp's great phrase:
Unless things change they remain the same
http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2012/01/unless-things-change-they-remain-same.html

But what parables do, is force those willing to hear INWARDS.It forces them into contemplation, meditation. The area of us where we wait on God.

There's a strange verse which says :
Faith comes by hearing
hearing by the Word of God.

Leftbrain people convert this verse back into leftbrain speak which is Faith comes by hearing Billy Graham
or Faith comes by hearing another preacher

Leftbrain people twist this two step process to a one step process.

But it is 2 step.
You have to hear the Word in one of its four main forms
1. Read the Bible, but hear the Holy Spirit speaking those words to you personally
2.Hear God stuff, Bible or Holy Spirit stuff through another person writing or talking
3. Hear God speaking somehow into your heart through daily events Psalm 19
4. Through a specific supernatural gift of prophecy written or spoken in a meeting. These often have an amazing Word of Knowledge aspect...ie contain stuff the speaker could not possibly know.

But the PURPOSE of the First Step is to create in you the "machinery" to handle God's Word. So the first bit of God's Word coming to us is like when you download a programme. The first bit downloads the actual installation programme machinery on your insides. This is called "spiritual hearing".
Then once the spiritual hearing programme is installed, it zones in on God's actual faith for things.
The purpose of the Spirit is to reveal to us ALL that has already been given. It's all given, but we havent a dickens clue about what it is,and how it's now available. So the Spirit searched the deep things of God on our behalf, and plonks them in our newly formed "hearing mechanism".

So faith comes by hearing...but hearing itself comes by the Word in the first place.

And the function of parable speech is to get a "leftbrain" locked individual out of his little box, into the area inside him or her where they can start to do something with the Word of God as it comes.

The Proverbs 3 way of speaking about this is
Trust in the Lord with all of your heart
AND DON'T RELY on that leftbrain box of yours, don't rely on that insight,
but Instead
learn a new way of living where you are acknowledging God in absolutely everything
studies,fun,relationships,work,housework, taxes,going out, coming in.....blah blah....

until you are fixed in this new spirit-based way of living. Instead of living as a just me alone individual in the universe.
080808 On,Now,To the Third Level: Unless things change they remain the same
‎080808onnowto.blogspot.com
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