One of the effects of the irruption of Global South thought into Global North theology in the last half century is a re-reading of the bible from within the experience of poverty.
Not least among the new insights occasioned by this re-reading is that concerning the parables. Scholars like Walter Wink and William Herzog and popular cultural educators like Ched Myers have made us aware that such folk stories, read in social context rather than spiritualized and universalized, have the character of political cartoons. Rather than allegories offering us characterizations of God or Jesus, they are better understood as politically-coded riddles, inviting their hearers to judge for themselves the situations they find themselves in.
In 1st century Palestine among an oppressed people, they often served a function of consciousness-raising, provoking peasant listeners to dare risk thinking and voicing their own interpretation of events and discover their own wisdom. Only indirectly and obliquely do the parables speak about God, and then only by way of unmasking domination and uncovering the cry of anguish it silences. The results of such a contextual reading can be startling. Feminist bible critic Sharon Ringe, for instance, notes how easy it is to get taken in by our romanticizing of the gospel writers.
But what happens to the story if we try to imagine our way into the text from the point of view of the servants? More to the point, in what follows I want to offer a thought experiment in connection with the entire 15 th chapter of Luke, letting the three scenarios recorded there signify in relationship to their social context and in relationship to each other.
The setting is provided for us by Luke: Jesus is partying with the hookers and loan sharks, the pimps and rent-to-own clerks of his day, who come to listen to him because that is what he does to themβlistens! And it is imperative that we be clear here: the plotting on the life of Jesus begins already in chapter four in Luke.
