Gerhard LOHFINK. The Forty Parables of Jesus. Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press Academic, 2021, pp. 256, $29.95 ISBN: 978-0-8146-8510-5. Reviewed by Rachelle LINNER, Spiritual Director, Medford, MA 02155

Gerhard Lohfink is a Scripture scholar and a pastor, and both qualities inform his books.  Readers owe gratitude to Dr. Linda Maloney, his translator, and the Liturgical Press, for publishing these rich resources for study and personal prayer.  This latest volume is no exception.  While particularly useful for homilists it will also be helpful for those who pray Lectio Divina.

The book opens with a chapter explaining the genre of parables — how they function, how they have been received and interpreted, and how they are treated as allegories.  This prepares the reader for Lohfink’s careful analysis of forty parables (39 from the canonical Gospels and one from the Gospel of Thomas.)  He provides extensive commentary on the context of the parable, how they would be heard by Jesus’ first listeners, and teases apart the meaning of images. Most importantly, he shows how the parables have been interpreted (and misinterpreted) over time, by Scripture scholars and theologians.

One of the more interesting is his discussion of the parable of the abundant harvest (Mark 4:3-9.)  Many commentators had dismissed the grain that yielded thirty, sixty and a hundred- fold as exaggerated.  Yet, after giving a lecture in a rural congregation a farmer told him that such a harvest was completely normal because of tillering, in which some seeds split into several stalks. Lohfink’s delight in discovering this is a lovely example of his openness and ability to lift us out of the “deep ruts” of the “exegetical carriage.”

Lohfink interprets the parables through what they teach about the reign of God — this is happening now, among those listening to the parables, and therefore among us. “In biblical theology the reign of God always requires a concrete people, a society that God has created especially for this: to make visible God’s merciful rule.”  (60)  Jesus models what this new community will be like. He “had given everything for the sake of the reign of God.  He gave up the security and comfort of a family and a spouse.  He did without a house or property or any other form of security.  Still more serious: he avoided putting himself at the center of everything and thus exercising religious power—the kind of power that is surely the most sublime and dangerous kind of power there is.  Jesus lives not for himself, his own person, but surrendering utterly and solely to God’s cause, or more precisely, to the reign of God that is now coming.” (53)

Lohfink never lets us forget that the parables were told by a Jewish teacher to a Jewish audience, stories that draw on the deep traditions of Hebrew Scripture.  In the three parables of God’s mercy that Jesus told to refute his critics — the lost sheep, lost coin and the lost son — he reiterates Jewish confidence in God’s mercy.  What Jesus’ opponents “saw as scandal was not that God can forgive even serious sin.  People in Israel had always believed that. What embitters the Pharisees and scribes here is that salvation is being promised to people who have not changed their ways at all.” (86) 

  Lohfink forcefully rebuts the anti-Jewish interpretation of the parables, significantly in his discussion of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.  It is a story about one particular Pharisee, not a broad generalization about all Pharisees, told to warn of the danger of self-righteousness. “Jesus is talking about all of us.  Which of us has not thought secretly ‘I’m so glad I’m not like that other person!’  Or maybe much worse and more dangerously ‘We, the good people; others, the reprobates!’  That is just how every nationalist agitation has begun, and so it is beginning again.  The trap of false interpretation would snap firmly shut if the Pharisee in the parable were seen as not just a caricature of all Pharisees but of all Jews.  Then we would not only have missed the meaning of this parable altogether; we would be slapping Jesus in the face.” (118) 

  He rejects a supersessionist reading of the parable of the violent farmworkers (Mark 12:1-12) who killed the son of the owner of the vineyard.  This text has been used to sustain the “horrifying history of Christian anti-Judaism, supported and nourished by a false theology, namely, one that saw it simply as a matter of course that Israel had been rejected by God and the church had taken the place of God’s once-chosen people.  That was a theology of the salvation-historical rejection, replacement, and disowning of Israel.” (193)

  This is an important book by a distinguished Scripture scholar who is able to make his learning accessible to a broad audience.  It is inspiring gift for a community in need of hearing the Good News of the reign of God.