Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God

by Thomas G. Long

Publisher:

Westminster John Knox

, 2024

Overview

In Proclaiming the Parables, noted preacher and scholar Thomas G. Long moves away from past treatment of the parables primarily as literary devices and moves toward an emphasis on their theological impact as pointers to the kingdom of God.

While the parables are indeed significant poetic literary creations that have enchanted readers over the centuries, their main power, he claims, lies in their disclosure of the kingdom of God, which is not merely an idea, nor even just a complex symbol with generative and centrifugal force, but an event: the inbreaking of the life of God into human history and experience.

Long sees parables not merely as creative figures of speech but as GPS devices taking hearers to those places where the event of God is happening all around us. This book provides two chapters for each synoptic Gospel. The first focuses on the Gospel as a whole and the parables’ place in it, and the second provides preachers and teachers with detailed exegetical and homiletical commentary for each major parable in that Gospel. Two introductory chapters additionally situate this book in the history and theology of the parables’ interpretation and address questions that preachers have about preaching the parables. Preachers who consult this volume will be informed about each major parable, guided through the controversies regarding interpretation, and stimulated to preach on the parable in fresh, faithful, and creative ways.

Key Features

• Emphasizes the theological impact as pointers to the kingdom of God
• Provides two chapters for each synoptic Gospel
• Features detailed exegetical and homiletical commentary for each major parable

Contents

• Jesus’ Parables on the Playground of the Scholars
• Decisions Preachers Make
• Mark’s Parables: Background
• Mark: The Parables
• Matthew’s Parables: Background
• Matthew: The Parables
• Luke’s Parables: Background
• Luke: The Parables

Praise for Proclaiming the Parables

Every generation of preachers has a regularly visited bookshelf with volumes written by the finest minds of their times, promising to strike sparks they can coax into flame by the time Sunday morning comes around again.Tom Long’s books have delivered on that promise for at least two generations now. With this new volume, he secures his legacy for generations to come—not only by offering his readers new ways of thinking about the purpose of the parables but also by nourishing us with his own powerful way of pointing to God’s kingdom in our midst.

—Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Always a Guest

This book is a literary revelation that intellectual reorientation is possible when one encounters a God with whom nothing is impossible. Tom Long, a major influential theological scholar who taught on the parables for over forty years, demonstrates that scholarship, ministry, and life are nonlinear but can be disrupted through the inbreaking of the kingdom of God from the parables. Long humbly admits his change in perspective on the parables after many years. He awakens to the fact that a parable is not solely a literary device but also a theological reality, a kingdom-of-God event that preachers should proclaim is ‘at hand’ yet not ‘in’ our hands. Parables are more than stories, metaphors, or ideas but are the power of the living God on earth as it is in heaven. Get this book into your hands to be reminded once again that the kingdom of God is at hand!

—Luke Powery, Dean of Duke University Chapel

Be very afraid! While masquerading as a book about preaching and teaching the parables, in this splendid volume, the parables begin to do their work of unsettling, rearranging, and finally inviting. They preach themselves. Tom Long’s extended conversation with Jesus’ teaching has born fruit, thirty- and sixty- and a hundredfold. I, for one, am grateful.

—Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Helen H. P. Manson Professor Emerita of New Testament Literature and Exegesis, Princeton Theological Seminary

Product Details

• Title: Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God
• Author: Thomas G. Long
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox
• Print Publication Date: 2024
• Pages: 456
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Resource ID: LLS:PRCLMNGPRBLSKGD
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-08-21T16:41:27Z

About Thomas G. Long

Thomas G. Long is Bandy Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He has taught preaching for over forty years, and his introductory textbook, The Witness of Preaching, has been translated into a number of languages and is widely used in theological schools around the world. Long has served as the president of the Academy of Homiletics and as senior homiletics editor of the New Interpreter's Bible. He has been editor of Theology Today and serves as an editor-at-large at The Christian Century. Long has been honored with the distinction of delivering the Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching at Yale Divinity School and was also named by Time magazine as one of the most effective preachers in the English language. A Presbyterian minister, Long has served churches in Georgia and New Jersey.