258: Jesus the storyteller with Dr. Amy-Jill Levine

Jesus rarely gave answers.

Instead, he told stories.

A farmer scattering seed. A woman searching for a lost coin. A father running toward his wayward son.

They were ordinary scenes—familiar, even predictable. And yet, once you stepped inside them, nothing stayed simple for long.

Because Jesus’ stories weren’t meant to settle people. They were meant to move them.

They didn’t draw clean lines between right and wrong. They blurred boundaries. They disrupted assumptions. They asked listeners to decide where they stood.

Who are you in this story? Who did you expect to be the hero? And what happens if you’re wrong?

The parables invited participation. They awakened imagination. They comforted the afflicted—and yes, they afflicted the comfortable.

And somewhere in that tension, joy took root.

Not joy as ease. But joy as awakening. Joy as recognition. Joy as the sudden realization that God’s kingdom looks different than we thought—and is closer than we imagined.

Jesus knew something about stories.

He knew they bypass defenses. He knew they open hearts. He knew they don’t just teach us what to think—but invite us to become someone new.

Today, we’re joined by someone who has spent her life helping readers encounter Jesus’ parables with fresh eyes.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine is a renowned biblical scholar and the author of “Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi.” With warmth, clarity, and deep respect for the text, she helps us see how these ancient stories still call us—today—to empathy, imagination and action.

This is a conversation about why Jesus taught in parables. And what happens when we let those stories do what they were always meant to do.

Show highlights include:

• Why Jesus chose stories as his primary teaching method.
• How parables function within Jewish tradition as interpretive, living texts.
• Why stories always have more than one meaning—and why that matters.
• How parables invite participation rather than passive listening.
• Why neat moral lessons miss the point.
• What it means for a parable to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
• How wrestling with a story strengthens spiritual growth.
• Why reading in community deepens interpretation.
• What the “Pearl of Great Price” reveals about what truly matters.
• How storytelling continues Jesus’ tradition—not only by inspiring, but by challenging.

Listen and subscribe to The Do Gooders Podcast now. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Christin Thieme: Dr. Levine, why do you think Jesus chose stories rather than sermons or explanations to really teach about God’s kingdom?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah, well, partly because he’s part of the Jewish tradition and the Jewish tradition functions on stories. So to use Christian terminology, if we look at the Old Testament, the Old Testament, some of my students think it’s just a bunch of laws. It’s not. It’s a bunch of stories. And the stories in fact help us interpret the laws. If we look at post-biblical Jewish tradition, rabbinic tradition, again, my students think it’s all a bunch of laws and it’s not it’s laws, but it’s also got stories.

Stories are part of human nature. They’re the reason Aesop’s Fables continue and we still read them. They’re the reason religions carry because a religion is a story and it’s a story that somehow is not just intellectually challenging, but also reaches the heart.

I think Jesus does that very well, particularly with his parables.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, I think that element of reaching the heart is really an important part of the equation for sure. When you are teaching, do you rely on stories?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Always. So whether if I’m teaching the New Testament, for example, I’m teaching about stories about Jesus, I’ve got stories about Paul, that would be the book of Acts. I’ve got the stories the Church preserved for us, because all the material we have is curated. We have not just Paul Raw Paul, but we have the letters the Church decided to preserve in the form they decided to preserve them. And I’m also teaching stories by Jesus, and those would be parables or single one-liners that have a plot to them.

And I’m asking my students to think for themselves. So one of the benefits of stories is that they have meaning over time, and the meanings may well outstrip what the original author intended. So it’s like we can read short stories today, this is why English classes still actually work. And we might be able to know what did this particular storyteller, what did Mark Twain intend at such and such a time? Or what did the writers of Genesis intend in such and such a time? But we also interpret the stories from our own subjective position, our own social location. So the stories always have more than one meaning.

I frequently have chats—I write a lot on the gospel of Matthew, and I frequently have chats with Matthew, which is a story. And I will say to Matthew, did you intend me to get this particular reading? And Matthew’s typical responses, I can see where you get it because I’m asking of this text questions from my own social context, which are not part of Matthew’s social context.

 So the stories always have new meaning for the Bible. If the stories only had one meaning pastors would be out of business, priests would be out of business, no reason to go listen to a sermon. Everybody knows exactly what it means and that’s the end of it. And if we said that the text only has one meaning at least from a Christian perspective, we’re putting the Holy Spirit out of business. It’s got nothing more to teach. So those stories have to have ongoing meaning.

Christin Thieme: I know you’ve said that parables invite listeners to step inside the story. Is that the participation element that you’re talking about? What does that participation look like?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Yeah, it it’s sort of that. So one can do biblical studies in a variety of different ways. I’m a professional, so what am I going to do if I’m doing the New Testament, I’m going to look at the Greek and I’m going to wonder how do I translate this? If I’m doing Genesis, I’m going to be looking at the Hebrew, but anybody can just pick up a text and say, what does this text mean to me? And as soon as we engage that question, then we’ve got something.

What keeps us from going off the deep end or being completely so cystic, it means this to me. So therefore that’s what it means is both the Jewish and the Christian tradition insist on reading in community Jesus is very clear. It’s like where two or three are gathered, get yourself a study buddy, join a congregation, and then bring your reading to others who are equally invested in the text.

And that way we can sharpen readings, we can correct readings, we can add to them, or we might think, yeah, I still kind of like mine, but I like yours even better. And then we can see how the text itself as we interpret the stories, actually winds up creating community.

So I think that with the parables, Jesus told parables, most of the explanations for parables aren’t given. And when they are given, I actually think they’re given by the gospel writers rather than Jesus, because sometimes they’re inconsistent with the story. That doesn’t make them wrong, it just makes them an interpretation. But I think Jesus told parables and Andrew looked at Peter and said, what do you make of this one? Let’s go talk to one of the Marys.

So the parables themselves become opportunities for community building because they’re opportunities for conversation. And the fact is, generally you can’t get them wrong. Once you say, here’s what it means to me, well then that’s your truth. But then that truth has to be checked over against other people’s truths.

Christin Thieme: Why do you think it’s important that parables don’t resolve neatly?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Otherwise? They’re not a challenge, they’re just platitudes. They’re moralistic and they’re kind of boring, which is why the parables are so much more interesting than Aesop’s Fables. I mean, we can read the tortoise and the hare and conclude slow and steady wins the race. That’s great. Well, yeah, all kind of knew that anyway.

But what the parables do is they force us to come up to our own conclusions, and it’s simply a better form of pedagogy. Instead of saying, this is what you’re supposed to do, this is what you’re not supposed to do to allow the reader or the person hearing the story to draw a personal conclusion that’s going to be much more meaningful to the individual and it creates better engagement.

Christin Thieme: And we’ve heard many times that Jesus’s parables comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Right. I think that’s exactly right. I have no idea who came up with that statement by the way. It was attributed to a lot of different people, but I think it’s spot on. So parables in general tell us what we already know, but we’ve got it so deep down buried that we don’t want to acknowledge it. So they’re like a really, really precise form of heart surgery that they open us up and they bring to the force stuff that we know and we actually go, oh. So they can be very disturbing. And that’s the afflicting the comfortable.

At the same time, they’re kind of funny, at least most of them are. So our hearts may be sinking and at the same time we’re kind of laughing and that’s brilliant because the parables are designed to indict us and to challenge us, but they’re not designed to make us feel guilty. That doesn’t help very much. Now I feel guilty, I can’t get anything done.

But they’re an open challenge about how we’re supposed to treat other people, about our attitudes toward God, about our attitudes toward economics and the self about trying to figure out what’s really, really important. And they do so through really funny manners, and some of them are only one line, and they can still do that.

So if we take something like the parable called the Pearl of Great Price, which is a two line parable. You can also call it the pearl of the very peculiar merchant who’s looking for pearls or he’s looking for fine jewels. And he follows these one pearl of enormous value and he sells everything that he has and buys it. And we think, well wait a minute, let’s slow down and think about this for a minute.

The kingdom of heaven is like an underpaid daycare worker or an underpaid pastor. I get that it was people working for the kingdom. But merchants in the Bible usually get very, very bad press. I mean, the book of Revelation talks about merchants as the one who are trying to buy and sell. Nobody’s buying their cargo and their cargo was gold and silver and enslaved people. So as soon as I have a parable that begins, the kingdom of God is like a merchant, I’m thinking that’s wrong.

And now I have to start thinking, well, maybe. And if he were a merchant but he was selling medical equipment or farming equipment, that’s really good. He’s a guy who sells jewelry. So merchants in antiquity are basically people who go from town to town selling you stuff you don’t need at a price you can’t afford, and by the time you figure out you don’t need it or it breaks the merchants in the next town, and this is a guy selling jewelry. People don’t need pearls.

So I accessorized for today, they’re really not necessary. Why do I need this? I’m finding one pearl of enormous value. He sells everything he has and buys it, which means he’s no longer a merchant. He’s a guy with a pearl. What’s he going to do with it so he can wear it? So these are big, fresh water pearls. You can’t wear them because they’re not going to cover very much. You can try to eat them, but it’s either going to choke you or it’s going to recycle. You can sit on them, but that’s going to get uncomfortable. You could call your neighbors and come look at my pearl. That gets old very, very quickly.

It’s a very weird scenario when we think about it, see what he’s going to do with it. The commentators say things like, well, he’ll sell it on the retail market and he’ll make a great profit. But I don’t think—the parable doesn’t say that. And that also turns the kingdom of heaven into a commodity, and I don’t think that’s really helpful either.

So if we step back and say, how is this guy or this whole story, the kingdom of God is like a merchant who did all this other stuff, what does this tell me about the kingdom? What does it tell me about being able to find the one thing that you think has so much value that it’s worth selling? Everything out. Gamblers would call this going all in. How do you know it when you see it? Because most people don’t. So he’s just looking for fine jewels. He finds this one pearl. That’s it.

How do you know when you’ve got what you really need?

In the Roman world, which is part of Jesus’ world as well, Stoic talked about stuff being like unnecessary stuff. So how do you get rid of all the unnecessary stuff and figure out what’s really important? We can see this in Paul’s letter to the Philippians where it’s like, okay, I’m in prison. I’m probably going to get my head chopped off, but I’ve got Christ and that’s the only thing that matters. And the rest, it doesn’t matter.

Then we can say to ourselves with this parable, what’s the one thing that really matters? Because if we can figure that out, we don’t have to sweat the small stuff. When is enough enough? When do I stop being inquisitive and buying more and more things? When is enough enough? The parable challenges us with this very peculiar naked merchant. By the way, if he sold everything he had, that includes the wife and the kids and the house and clothes and all that. He’s a naked merchant with a pearl. Very odd image.

How do I know what my pearl of great price is? And if I do, how are my actions commensurate with what I know to be that pearl of great price? I think that’s brilliant.

And different people will come up with different answers. The pearl is the Church, the pearl is my family, the pearl is my relationship with Christ, the pearl is my spirituality, the pearl is coming into my own and recognizing that I am a whole person and I am somehow worthy rather than unworthy. So different people will come up with different answers. And when I ask students about what is your pearl of great price, which is they’re usually not asked that question, if I don’t know what the most important thing in the world is to them, how can I say I love them because I don’t know them?

So how do I get to know my students, my family, my friends, without knowing what is of central importance to them, and that’s all on one parable and that’s only part of what we can get from it.

Christin Thieme: Do you think that element of the wrestling, the discomfort really, do you think that’s essential for our spiritual growth?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine:  I think so, but not a discomfort in an icky way, but discomfort in a, I really need to challenged challenging way. For people who do crossword puzzles or do Wordle in The New York Times or something, there’s a little bit of discomfort there. I’m not sure exactly how to get there, but there’s also a challenge and that type of challenge can be really invigorating and we come up with something new that is such a rush. I mean, at least for me it is.

It also seems to me that if we’re not doing a little bit of, if not wrestling, at least reconsidering, then we’re stunting our spiritual growth. People who hear particular stories. This problem with parables is churches tell parables to kids because kids can get it and they can have very, very simple explanations like the Parable of the Good Samaritan means you help somebody by the side of the road even if you don’t particularly like that person or the prodigal son means God loves you even if you screw up big time.

But that’s very simplistic. So if we get arrested with this development and we think that parables are children’s stories, we’re going to miss it. So what I tell my students is if you have some sense of what this parable means or better what this parable does, how it acts on you from when you were a kid, that’s probably fine. You can hang on to that. But if you read a text when you’re six and you read the same text when you’re 60 and you get exactly the same message, you’re reading like a child. And as Paul said, it’s time to put away some of those childish readings and start reading like an adult and adults will wrestle the text. It’s really good wrestling.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, definitely. What happens when you recognize yourself in a story that you didn’t necessarily expect?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Well, you might feel comforted or you might feel indicted. There are some parables that I think work along those lines to get you to recognize things differently. Some of the longer parables can do that really well for people who read what’s usually called the prodigal son, which I prefer to call the parable of the man with two sons. That’s how it starts. There was a guy with two sons. If you’re a kid, you might see yourself in the older brother, the younger brother. Once you become a parent, suddenly you’re dad or you might be the next door neighbor because there might be a family next door who’s got a problem. So we step into the parables differently and here we step in may well depend upon where we are in our own lives.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, that’s an important point. Where do you see joy in Jesus’s parables?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Oh, all the way through. As soon as the parable grabs you, like a good short story grabs you, or at least it should. And I like literature. I was an English major way back when Noah was on the arc, but it’s that grab that, gee, I wonder what’s going on here. I wonder what other people have said about this thing. And I’m in historian, I’m going to go back and say, what did the church fathers think? The first interpreters of parables, what did the reformers think? What does my next door neighbor think? 

I actually do that with my neighbors. They find it moderately amusing, standing at the grocery store and saying, have you read the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price? I live in Nashville. You can actually do that.

And when a student comes up with a reading that I hadn’t considered, which happens, and I’ve been doing this for over half a century, I was like, but what about this? That’s right. That is so exciting to me. That’s joyful. It’s like wow. And the sense of just when I thought I’ve cracked it and I think, okay, I think I really know what this parable was intending to do and I really know how it’s working on me. And somebody comes up and says, but AJ, what about…Wow. That just puts a smile on my, I’m just delighted by that.

Some people who do music, I like music and for me, I like classical music. But every once in a while when I hear a different performance of the same piece that I’ve heard over and over again and somehow the strings are doing something just a little bit different, I can be, wow, I’ve never heard that that way before. Or people who like songs which get recycled all the time and then you hear a cover of a song that you’ve really liked. I like the original, but I really like this one too, and I find that joyful.

Christin Thieme: What is your favorite parable?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Can’t do that. It’s just like asking a parent, who’s your favorite kid. Or an author, what’s your favorite book? I can’t do that.

Christin Thieme: Do you have a favorite one to teach?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: There are several that I like teaching. So by the way, when people ask Jesus questions, he usually answers the question he wants to answer rather than the—so what’s the greatest commandment? He comes up with two. So there are some that I really like. I like to teach the pearl of great price. I like to talk to people about what their pearl of great price is. What would you give it all up for? What’s the most important thing in your life? And then watch people look at other people and go, really, I didn’t think that. Or why is that?

I like to teach the parable of the dishonest steward in Luke chapter 16. It comes right after where it looks like everybody’s behaving badly and everybody wins. And I think the steward is actually cooking the books. So what do we do for this in terms of morality? Is it okay if everybody cheats but everybody wins? If you cheat a rich person, is that okay? But if you cheat a poor person, that’s awful. And at what point, what’s the economic cutoff? If you have over $500,000, it’s okay, but if you’re unlimited income, it’s not? I think this raises wonderful questions all the way through.

And it also raises questions on us. Do we think this guy is cheating or not? Does Luke interpret the parable correctly? Because Luke, I think, is kind of flailing at the end there. I like teaching the three parables in Luke chapter 15. So it’s not just the prodigal son, it’s the lost coin or the frantic sheep owner. There’s no shepherd in that parable or the lost coin or the frantic woman in the home and the frantic dad who’s trying to deal with both sons. I’m asking people about do you feel counted? When have you never felt counted? When have you felt alone? When have you felt ignored? When have you been the one doing the ignoring? And that’s where the indictment comes.

And when you realize somebody is lost, what do you do to go find that person? What do you do to celebrate? This is fantastic. God. I like a lot of parables. I like parables about women. We don’t have that many of them. Like the lady who hides yeast and dough when the Greek is actually hides, which is the wrong verb, and she gets enough food to feed half a village. Well, that’s a little weird. Or the tenacious widow who threatens to give a judge a black eye and all the translators who say, oh, she’s bothering me. The Greek, it means to give somebody an undercut. It’s a boxing term and he say, here’s this widow about to kind of punch this guy. And how do we imagine this widow? I mean, is she 6’ 2” and can bench press 360 pounds, or she kind of old and frail and whatnot? How does she match up with some of the other widows in the biblical tradition? I think she’s fascinating.

Christin Thieme: So many things to look at and explore and talk about. I love it. We’ve been talking a lot about telling stories today and how we almost have a responsibility to do that, to continue on sharing hope and compassion and so on with people around us. How do you think we’re continuing Jesus’ storytelling tradition when we do share real stories of goodness happening around us?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Sharing stories of goodness is lovely, but I think that would be selling Jesus short. He’s not only telling stories about goodness, he’s telling stories that challenge and that indict and that try to make us better than we are. The Sermon on the Mount ends with Jesus saying, be perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. And my students bristle with that because that’s a pretty high call.

But what I do is I tell them stories. So here’s where stories can be helpful. When I was a kid, I would come home from school. I was a very good little girl and I got good grades in school, so I’d come home with an A and my mother would heap praise on me: I’m so proud of you, this is wonderful. And then she’d look at my paper and say, what could you have done that would’ve been even better? Why didn’t you get an A plus? So I already felt completely affirmed, but I realized that that’s not, we just don’t stop there. We can always do one better. And I had these wonderful conversations with my mom about, oh, you could have added this. You could have added that. I know you didn’t have enough time, but let’s just think about how much more we could do.

And I think that’s part of the Jesus challenge. So we think we’re doing fine. And he’s like, yeah, you’re doing fine. This is terrific. I’m delighted. What else could you do in a way that doesn’t make us feel guilty, but makes us feel spurred on? How do we build the Jewish expressions to go from strength to strength? So how do we move from this good spot to an even better spot? 

People in Christian tradition will talk about growing in their faith. That’s part of it. So it’s not just telling stories about acts of compassion. Those are really important, but those can also make us feel guilty, like I didn’t act as well as so-and-so did. Stories of challenge where people overcome obstacles. Those may be even more helpful. And stories about normal people rather than saints, those tend to be helpful as well, because I’m not a saint that’s shooting too high for me, but stories about the next door neighbor or the guy down in the street or some friend of mine or somebody in my family. Those are better stories. I can step into those more easily.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, exactly. If somebody listening reads a parable feels unsettled by it, some of what we’ve been talking about that challenge feeling, what would you want them to do with that feeling?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: Well start by celebrating because you’re reading correctly.

So if we read a parable and go, isn’t that nice or isn’t that sweet? We’re ignoring what the parables can do to us. So as soon as you’ve got, I wonder what this means, or I wonder how I’m supposed to react to that, or I wonder what, that’s a great start. So hallelujah, you’re already ahead of and think about it.

Think about what it is that, what’s that little irritant when scratching irritants don’t draw blood, but that initial scratch can actually feel pretty good. Go look up what other people have said. Go look at commentaries. If you can, learn Greek and Hebrew because the Bible’s written originally in Greek and Hebrew and to read it in translation is already a bit of a problem. I know some people have some beloved translations that they really like, but get back to the original because it’s so much more interesting. Then you can figure out, well this word’s used here and it’s also used here and we can play with that.

Talk to your neighbors, join a Bible study. Just that one little bit of irritant. I’m disturbed by that. Well let me go find a Bible study so other people can help me with that. And if they’re just sitting there going, isn’t this nice? Isn’t this sweet? Find you another Bible study. That’s right. Find one that rejoices in the wrestling.

Christin Thieme: Dr. Levine, thank you. This has been so fun. As a last question for you, what is bringing you joy right now?

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: There are a couple of things that are making me particularly happy. I did a book for Abingdon called “Entering the Passion of Jesus,” and it’s coming up on its 10th anniversary. So they asked me to do a 10th anniversary edition.

Christin Thieme: Oh, neat.

Dr. Amy-Jill Levine: So what I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks is going back over the original and, every once in a while, I read something and I go, that’s a really good comment. I surprise myself. Like other cases I’m thinking this is good, but it could be better. When you go back, it’s like going back over what I thought was a really good text and 10 years later I’m thinking this could be more clear or I think I need to nuance this differently. So this joy of this is really good. I’m not disappointed by it, but I think it can be even better. And now I have the opportunity to do that.

So that’s been just enormous amounts of fun. So I’m on the road a lot and when I give a talk to have people come up to me and say, I’ve been reading this text my entire life.

And I’ve never thought about it like that because I’m in historian and what I try to do is locate Jesus mostly. I mostly work on Jesus material, gospel material, but also Paul within a first century Jewish environment to say, can I imagine? And it’s an active historical imagination. If I’m some Galilean Jew sitting by the hillside and Jesus tells me the story, what am I thinking of? What are the resonances that I’m hearing?

So even to take a step back behind the gospel writers and say, what might that original message have been? Because a number of times the New Testament has been interpreted in an anti-Jewish manner. How do we get rid of some of that church accretion, this unfortunate accretion over the centuries and get back to a Jewish storyteller talking to Jews.

And I find that joyful because I can help eliminate antisemitic interpretation. I can show Jews who might not worship Jesus as Lord and Savior to say, but he’s one of us and he’s a Jewish storyteller. And even if you don’t worship him as Lord, he’s got some important things to say. And that opens up into religious relationship. And I think that’s a good thing too.

Additional resources:

• Read “Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi” (HarperOne, 2015) by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine. 
• If you are enjoying this show and want to support it, leave a rating and review wherever you listen to help new listeners hit play for the first time with more confidence.  
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Listen and subscribe to The Do Gooders Podcast now.