Why don’t you suggest that they simply illustrate the true parables of Christ?

Peggy,

If you are still in contact with that Jewish fellow, you might recommend, “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist” by Dr. Brant Pitre. He is Catholic but a high church Anglican or an Orthodox can easily appreciate it. The book is absolutely eye-opening.

The Eucharist is thoroughly Biblical. It also draws heavily on the culture of the Second Temple Period, which is alien to many contemporary Jews.

For instance, did you know that, during the STP, the high priests would, on certain holidays, take out the Showbread, the Bread of Presence, and hold it up before the crowds of pilgrims, proclaiming, “This is the love of your God.” I kid you not.

As for sinners earnestly seeking God, I find that apathy is more the order of the day: as John Betjeman (a poet much-loved in England) wrote:

Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that arduous love affair
In clouds of doubt and argument; and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want to know His love -
And why this is I wish to God I knew.

In all of the “Lost” parables there is an obvious mapping between something lost (us) and something looking (God) – although I am sure we can see additional allegories too.

The problem Christians of any stripe face is to persuade anyone they are in need of anything and, apart from the Spirit, none can see that.

Thou didst call us from nonbeing into being, and when we had fallen away, Thou didst raise us up again, and didst not cease to do all things until Thou hadst brought us up to heaven, and hadst bestowed upon us Thy kingdom which is to come.

People have false images in their head because, forgetting the actual shape of the Biblical story, they have their own culturally driven (or culture-Church-driven) imagination. The illustrations work for them, because it is how they think. It is why I spend as much time as I do writing about images and metaphors (as well as questioning myself privately about my own images and metaphors). Such things govern how we read and shape the gospel, for good or ill.

Of course, on the topic of “knowing God,” there is always the danger that one comes to know a “projection” of God and not the true God. This requires that we be in lively contact with the Tradition, with those living the faith whose lives bear witness to their true faithfulness, etc. But an inward knowing is certainly promised to us in Christ, in the Tradition, and in the services of the Church and the lives of the saints. I expect it, and pursue it with the knowledge of that promise.

I had a few years within the charismatic movement as a young man (17-20+). Coming out of that movement, I was deeply aware of spiritual delusion and deeply concerned not to be deluded again. It drew me deeper and deeper towards the Tradition, eventually to Orthodoxy itself. But the possibility of true knowledge of God was something I never renounced (nor have I needed to). I first read Lossky in my early 20′s and was excited by what I read, though most of it was well beyond my understanding. That same hunger continues to this day, with the added motivation that having some taste of that Reality, I only want more. It is eternal life.

I’m also struggling with the content of the children’s curriculum on “How to become a Christian” from my daughter’s 5th grade ss class at the same church. The first section on “salvation” (which session, blessedly, my daughter missed) follows the typical “Four spiritual laws” outline. Two illustrations and statements (on the first two pages) are already very problematic for me. The first on how sin separates us from God (because we are “dirtied” by our sin and God can’t have anything to do with sin and thus, by extension, with the people dirtied by it!) also has the following illustration. There are two cliffs separated by a great gulf in the middle. On one side are people with their eyes trained over the gulf of separation looking toward the other cliff with anxious expressions on their faces. On the other cliff stands a big sign with the words “God Perfect” on it and an arrow pointing in the opposite direction of the people.

Are we as sinful people really anxiously seeking God as the people on the cliff appear to be? Is God somewhere out of the picture and moving away from us to make sure He keeps well clear of our sin?

The second illustration is a story of “The Muddy Girl” who goes out plays in the mud and is stopped at the door by her father who forbids her to enter the house until he has first hosed off the mud.

Is our sin really like mud in this sense? And is God like a fastidious parent more concerned about the cleanliness of his house than what the “mud” is doing to his daughter?

With regard to both of these illustrations, all I could think of was how when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they went away and hid from God, while He came looking for them, and lovingly made them coverings from the skins of animals to clothe their shame and nakedness (a picture of the provisional nature–and the limitations–of the Old Covenant sacrificial system if ever there was one). The same with the Parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and the Lost Son (Prodigal Son)! Top that off with the reality of the Gospel accounts of God entering our sin-sick world in the Person of His Son and being laid as a newborn, for want of a more appropriate place, in the feeding box of a dirty stable for animals, surrounded by mud, clay, straw, and the stink of animal urine and manure! That was only the beginning of the humiliations He endured for our sake. And Jesus makes it very clear that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father also! How can modern Christians think that these modern illustrations are compatible with what the Gospel really teaches? It is beyond me!

I made it seem like I was first arguing with a Messianic Jew by using the words Jewish believer. I should have said religious Jew or stridently Orthodox Jew. I don’t want people going, huh??? when it comes to that part of my story