Spiritual Hiccups - The Word for Franchisees

Over the years I have come to realize that Christians approach the Bible from a number of different vantage points.  This cause lots of issues and problems, especially for Protestant Christians, with our greater emphasis on the witness of Scripture.  And today's reading may be one small case in point.

When Jesus tells "The Parable of the Wicked Tenants," how are we to appropriate his words?  For some the Bible is primarily a history, and so this is simply an account of Jesus condemning the Jewish authorities, a passage that provides "proof" that the new covenant through Jesus supersedes the old covenant with Israel.

Others, myself included, see the Bible writers as less concerned with history and more concerned with guiding Christians in their lives of faith.  Luke's gospel makes clear that the author expects his readers already to know the story of Jesus.  He wants to help them understand its significance for their lives.  And if Luke is not trying to relate "what happened," what does he expect his readers to garner from these verses?

Gentile Christians might have heard these verses very differently than you or I do.  At a time when most Christians understood themselves to be Jewish, the parable speaks good news to Gentile outsiders regarding their inclusion into the covenant. 

But what of us today?  If anything, modern Christians' attitudes are quite the opposite of those first Gentile Christians.  We aren't the latecomers to the party who others regard with suspicion.  We've been running the show for centuries.  Rare is the Christian nowadays who thinks of herself as a Jew.  We have taken our place as the tenants.  We've taken over the franchise.  And so, does the parable speak a different word to us as tenants, as franchisees? 

One of the fundamental claims of Christianity is that God's Word became flesh in the Incarnation.  Such a claim has interesting implications.  The Incarnation speaks of a Word that is not some static truth, but that is engaged with us, that seeks to meet us and to somehow change us in the encounter.  But reducing the Bible to facts with one simple meaning seems to deny God this freedom to move dynamically in our lives, to speak to us what is important for us to hear now, to say things quite different from what needed to be spoken to First Century, Gentile Christians in the Mediterranean world.

When we go to the Bible, what do we hope to find there?  Are we looking for "proofs," or are we hoping to encounter the Living God who seeks to transform us into something new? 

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