PARABLES OF CHRIST 2
Ali wasn't quite sure what was meant by pastors as parables of Christ, so I'll try my best to give an overview of David Hansen's ideas:
Hansen draws from Eberhard Jungel who suggests that Jesus is a parable of God. A parable, says Hansen and Jungel, is an extended metaphor. It's meant to create a comparison between a known thing and an unknown thing for the sake of illuminating the unknown thing and bringing something new, unforseen and surprising to the hearer. The incarnate Jesus is a parable of God (illuminates God to us). "In the totality of his life, he bore the image of God perfectly." Having established this idea of parable, Hansen goes on to say "Jesus is the Parable of God and delivers God to us in the process. Isn't it possible that pastors, to the extent that they follow Jesus, are parables of Jesus Christ and so deliver him to those they encounter?... Sometimes God comes to people when I preach, or pray, or even when I'm just visiting with them. Being a parable of Jesus shows me how it is possibly true when he says: "He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me" (Mt 10:40). Hansen goe son to say "As a parable of Jesus Christ I deliver something to the parishioner that I am not, and in the process I deliver the parishioner into the hands of God.
I come to their home as I am. I am a known quantity to them. Because of my position as pastor, the family I visit knows from the start that something about God is happening. I listen to them tell their story, trying to keep my own Godforsaken agenda ego-agenda out of the way. ("Why don't you come to church more often? I want a bigger church, and you're part of my plan.") After a while I pray for the family.
You wouldn't think that listening to people would be such a big deal. But listening to us is what God does. The fact that I listen to a family the way Jesus does makes a comparison happen inside them. A subconscious process tells them: Jesus listens to me; this is what Jesus is like. They sense they have been with Jesus all along.
Am I so desperate for identity that I've resorted to calling myself Jesus? No. I'm just a hook with some feathers and threads on it (Hansen earlier used fly fishing as a metaphor for ministry). I observe that when I encounter people along the way, they don't experience me so much as they experience God. How do I account for this? I am a parable of Jesus... [If] Jesus is communicated through us because of the likeness we share with him in our everyday life, if the essence of delivering Christ is living like him in our whole life, matching our narrative with his life's narrative, then our everyday life counts.
Every Christian's life is meant to be a parable of Jesus... An adequate definition of pastoral ministry emphasizes following Jesus as the act of ministry."