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Great Biblical Stories: A

Narrative Journey with

Howard Gray

Presented by Rev. Howard Gray, S.J. Ph.D.

Great Biblical Stories: A Narrative Journey with Howard Gray S T U D Y G U I D E

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Table of Contents

Program Summary ............................................................................................................... 4

About Your Presenter ........................................................................................................... 5

Topic 1: Stories from God: The Book of Jonah............................................................. 6

Topic 2: Stories from God: The Book of Ruth as a Love Story .................................. 10

Topic 3: Stories from God: Elisha and Being a Magician for Peace ........................... 14

Topic 4: Stories from God: Jacob and God’s Pedagogy .............................................. 16

Topic 5: Stories about Call: Jesus and His Calls ......................................................... 18

Topic 6: Stories about God: Jesus and the Compassion of God .................................. 21

Topic 7: Stories about God: Jesus and Women ........................................................... 24

Topic 8: Stories about God: Jesus and Hospitality ...................................................... 27

Topic 9: Stories about God: Jesus and Prayer ............................................................. 30

Topic 10: Stories about God: Creating the Church........................................................ 33

Topic 11: Stories about God: God as Narrator .............................................................. 36

Topic 12: Stories about God: Becoming God’s Partner ................................................ 39

Suggested Readings ........................................................................................................... 42



Program Summary

Take an unforgettable journey through the Bible’s great stories with modern

spiritual master, Rev. Howard Gray, S.J., as your guide.

For as long as humans have been around, we have found comfort in stories,

and narrative informs our lives in many ways. In Great Biblical Stories: A

Narrative Journey with Howard Gray, you will discover newfound theological

and spiritual meaning in the Bible’s great stories. By looking at the stories God

has used in the Old and New Testaments, you will develop an informed

approach to the literature of faith that can help you to know Him more

personally.

Under the guidance of Rev. Howard Gray, S.J., Ph.D., you will discover

how the stories in the Bible illustrate the priorities of the Kingdom and the ways

we can enter into its values and grace. A masterful speaker on spirituality, Fr.

Gray explores how Jesus’ storytelling technique connects to the stories in each

of our own lives.

In this 12-lecture program, you will first look at the four Old Testament

stories of Jonah, Ruth and Naomi, Elijah, and Jacob. In these narratives, you will

not only discover the humanity of these biblical figures, but also the various

ways of God and the person of God. Such powerful stories reveal the richness of

God’s mercy and forgiveness, His powerful hopes for the human family, and the

ways He works towards peace and reconciliation between peoples. You will

come to see God as both a dynamic actor in the human narrative and a witty and

loving teller of tales.

Next, you will look at Jesus as a central figure of the Gospel narratives and

as a storyteller in His ministry. You will explore five aspects of the Jesus story:

His call, compassion, relationship to women, hospitality, and prayer. You will

then look at the story of how the Spirit inspired the Church to become a Church

for all peoples. Finally, you will consider God as a storyteller, exploring the

ways you can become His partner in this theology of story.

If you are like most Catholics, you love biblical stories. Now is your chance

to explore these timeless stories anew and grow closer to God in the process.



About Your Presenter

Howard Gray, S.J., is presently the Assistant to the President for Special

Projects at Georgetown University.

Prior to this position, he has served in a number of leadership positions

within the Jesuit community, including Provincial Superior, Formation Director,

Tertian Director and Rector of university and formation houses. He has lectured

nationally and internationally on Ignatian spirituality. He has written extensively

on Ignatian spirituality, ministry, and the apostolic mission of Jesuit high school

and universities. He is a well-known director of Ignatian retreats in the USA,

East Africa, and East Asia. He earned a bachelor's degree in English and

classics, a licentiate in philosophy and a licentiate in sacred theology from

Loyola University of Chicago, and a doctorate in English from the University of

Wisconsin.Fr. Gray has received five honorary degrees, the Georgetown Bi-

Centennial Medal, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Award, and the Xavier

University’s Leadership Medallion. He served as the Vice President of the

Major Superiors of Men from 1985–1988 and on the Papal Visitation of

Seminaries in the U.S. from 1981–1987.



Topic 1: Stories from God: The Book of Jonah

I. The Role of Story in the Life of the Spirit

A) Hearing the scriptural story as a story

B) The meaning is the context—poem by Billie Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk within the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch

I want them to water-ski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

Is tie the poem to a chair with a rope

And torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.



Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple That Astonished Paris. Copyright ©

1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on

behalf of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.

C) The meaning of the revelation is in the details of the telling—the Good Samaritan—“he bandaged

his wounds” (Lk. 10:34 NRSV).

D) The essence of spirituality

1) The narrative is the revelation.

2) In the revelation, we find both who God is and what God asks of us.

II. The Book of Jonah—four chapters about a Hebrew prophet who doesn’t want to be a

prophet and tries to escape the call to deliver God’s message to the city of Nineveh

III. Chapter One – Summary

A) God appears in this story as a relentlessly committed God. Jonah’s vocation and mission to be

prophet to Nineveh, the capitol of Assyria, is announced. As a Hebrew, Jonah views the people of

Nineveh as enemy because they represent all that his culture deems culturally and religious

offensive. God calls Jonah not to punish the enemy but to save the enemy.

B) Jonah flees from his prophetic mission by boarding a ship to Tarshish, emphasized in the story as

“away from the presence of the Lord” [1:3]. God calls up a terrible storm and Jonah is thrown

overboard by a fearful yet scrupulous crew. God prepares a “great fish” to swallow Jonah and save

him from the sea.

IV. Chapter Two – Summary

A) In the belly of the fish, Jonah prays for deliverance. God talks to the fish and it releases him on the

shore.

B) Jonah is summoned by the Lord to go to the city of Nineveh and preach repentance. He reluctantly

does.

V. Chapter Three – Summary

A) The people of the city from the king to the common people to the animals listen, mortifying

themselves by wearing sack cloth and fasting. They pray for mercy and repent.

B) God heard their prayer.

VI. Chapter Four – Themes, Mindsets, and Summary

A) Dialogue between Jonah and God reveals two mindsets

1) Jonah sees the Ninevites as heathens, immoral, worshipping false gods and unworthy of God’s

attention and mercy.

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2) God – Jonah says, “I knew you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding

in steadfast love and ready to relent from punishing” [4:2].

B) Final Conversation

1) Jonah is so upset by God’s mercy he prays for death. God says, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Jonah waits outside the city to see if God will punish Nineveh.

2) God creates a shade bush, which please Jonah by protecting him from the heat of the day. God

destroys the shade bush with a worm and sends heat to make Jonah uncomfortable. Jonah prays

for death again.

3) God admonishes Jonah (“You are concerned about a bush. Should I not be concerned about

Nineveh?”), effectively meaning, “Shall I not save?”

VII. Themes and Repetitions

A) God’s concern for Nineveh

B) Jonah’s determined opposition to his call to deliver God’s message to people he considers unworthy

of God’s attention and mercy

C) Jonah’s passion to see the enemy as unworthy of forgiveness or mercy

D) Jonah creates God in his own image but time after time encounters the reality of who God is.

VIII. Graced Tension

A) Themes:

1) The vocation and personality of Jonah

2) The personality and priorities of God

3) The way God inspired the author to weave the fabric of the narrative together

B) Tension between who the Lord is and the Lord Jonah would like to invent

C) Jonah is taught the universality of God’s design—God’s loving care has no boundaries while Jonah

is concerned with boundaries.

D) Geography represents Jonah’s effort to avoid the call of God—he travels by sea “away from the

presence of the Lord.”

E) God never abandons Jonah, even though he is not admirable and a reluctant prophet.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What is the significance of reading meaning within the context of a narrative as opposed to detaching

meaning from the context? What do you understand by the context of a passage or a narrative?

2. What do you understand by the idea that revelation not only tells us something to believe (our belief) or to

follow (our ethical conduct) but also the personality or the character of the revealer (someone to be

related to)?

3. In the light of the above, what are the details about the narrative of Jonah the prophet that you think are

important in understanding:

(a) The personality of Jonah

(b) The personality of God?

(c) The process whereby Jonah is confronted with his idea of being a prophet and God’s idea of being a

prophet?

4. One help in interpreting a story is to look for the repetitions within the narrative. What are the significant

repetitions in the Jonah narrative for you?

5. Suppose someone critiques the Book of Jonah as being fantastic, unbelievable, and even naïve. How

would you respond to these criticisms?


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Topic 2: Stories from God:

The Book of Ruth as a Love Story

I. Introduction to the Book of Ruth – Similarities and Differences

A) The Book of Ruth is held in an agricultural setting, not a world stage.

B) The people’s relationship to God is heavily underscored, but God is not an active character.

C) The Book of Ruth has three characters: Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz.

II. Chapter One – Summary and Key Points

A) A great famine forces a Hebrew family to emigrate from Bethlehem to Moab. Elimelch died leaving

Naomi with her two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, who married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah. Both

sons die.

B) Widows and orphans were part of the anawim, meaning “the poor seeking God for deliverance.”

C) Naomi decides to return to her own country. She asks her daughter-in-laws to return to their own

families to seek new husbands with her blessing.

D) Orpah tearfully departs, but Ruth refuses to leave Naomi. Ruth professes her love for Naomi. Naomi

and Ruth return to Bethlehem during harvest time.

III. Chapter Two – Summary and Key Points

A) The introduction of Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s late husband and of Ruth’s father-in-law

B) Ruth gleans the grain that that falls to the ground after the reapers pass.

C) She happens upon a field that belongs to Boaz. Boaz and Ruth meet for the first time.

D) Ruth tells Naomi what happened. Naomi praises God and instructs Ruth to stay with the women

who work Boaz’s field when she gleans.

IV. Chapter Three – Summary and Key Points

A) Naomi is plotting to bring the budding attraction between Ruth and Boaz to full flower.

B) Naomi tells Ruth in how to bring the relationship to a new level of commitment.

C) Ruth does as she is instructed, and in a midnight encounter Boaz accepts Ruth’s plea for protection

and by implication marriage.

D) Boaz informs them that there is a closer kinsman who has prior right to ask for her hand in marriage

and ownership of a field Naomi’s late husband owned.



V. Chapter Four

A) The closer kinsman refuses the offer.

B) Boaz completes the final negotiations in a ritualistic town trial. The townspeople then utter a

benediction on Boaz and Ruth.

C) The story ends with the family, Naomi, Ruth, and Boaz, celebrating the birth of their son and

grandson, Obed.

D) Naomi has been restored to life in the grandson placed at her bosom, becoming his nurse.

E) Naomi’s family’s property, her status in her society, and her heritage is secured in Ruth and Boaz

and the birth of Obed.

F) Obed becomes the father of Jesse, who is the father David, the great shepherd-king of Israel and

forbearer to Joseph who took Jesus as his beloved son.

VI. Themes and Layers of Meaning

A) Human love is blessed by God, but here on earth God asks other human beings to make love happen.

B) The commanding spiritual reality that underpins the book of Ruth centers on the presence of God

within the experience of pain and loss, suffering and death.

C) Judges – Salvation and Redemption – the story is set in the time of the judges, leaders who appeared

as saviors or redeemers.

D) Famine

1) Famine symbolizes hunger on many levels.

2) Through suffering, the characters came to hunger for the deliverance that only God could bring.

3) They are loyal to their values and their trust that God would hear and respond to the cry of the

anawim.

E) Suffering

1) Suffering is never presented as a good thing, but out of suffering the mutual loyalty and love

even in the face of adversity is celebrated and honored.

2) God is present in the way human beings of the Book of Ruth interact and contribute to their

redemption.

F) Hesed

1) Central to the Book of Ruth is the Jewish reverence for the virtue of hesed, a loyal and loving

kindness that people could express to one another, but especially to the poor and marginalized in

their society.



2) God is seen as the God of hesed, of faithful kindness and of love.

3) Jesus will fold this hesed into his parables and ministry, a merciful acceptance that flowed from a

wise understanding of the human heart.

VII. Conclusion

A) The Book of Ruth tells the story of people who believe and trust the goodness of God because they

find that in one another.

B) Like the Book of Jonah the Book of Ruth shows how God works in the relationship people have with

one another.

C) Like the human Jesus we learn the heart of God by learning the heart of people like Ruth, like

Naomi, like Boaz.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. There are three main characters in the Book of Ruth. Why do you think that the narrative is called only

The Book of Ruth? What difference does a title make anyway? Is there any significance between the title

and the theology of the story? Explain to yourself the difference.

2. From The Book of Ruth, how would you describe the role of women in the society or the social

environment of the story? Does this background tell you anything about the attitude of Jesus later on in

the Gospels? What?

3. The claim is made about the various “levels” in the Book of Ruth. What do you understand by the

“levels” of a story? How do the levels of a story, like the Book of Ruth, also reveal anything that has

religious or spiritual value?

4. What do you understand by the term hesed, and why is this term and its meaning important in the Book of

Ruth?



Topic 3: Stories from God:

Elisha and Being a Magician for Peace

I. Introduction

A) We are going to center not on another biblical short story but on one incident about the prophet

Elisa, found in II Kings 6:8-23.

B) But first a word about what we are examining:

1) We are looking at narratives and stories as the conveyers of spiritual and theological insight.

2) The methodology is not linear but rather circular, creating an imaginative world that can be

approached from many different angles.

3) From the angle of plot, characterization, and setting

C) Your role as the listener or reader

II. Our present narrative focuses on the prophet, Elisha and is taken from II Kings 6:8-23,

A) Background of the prophet

B) This particular incident centers on political intrigue, military power, and the power of God through

Elisha

1) The plot to capture Elisha

2) The servant and the theme of “seeing” in this episode

3) The strong are made weak and the weak strong

III. The irony of this episode, a series of graceful antitheses

A) Might and true power

B) Enmity and hospitality

C) Captured for peace not vengeance

IV. Theme of “a more excellent way”

A) Elisha

B) Jesus

C) And for us



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. One way to understand a new narrative, here the story from II Kings 6:8-23 about Elisha the prophet, is to

see it in the context of other stories you have read. For example, how does Elisha differ from the earlier

prophet we saw, Jonah? How do their different personalities influence both what the stories unfold and

the kind of theology or religious insights that each reveals?

2. “Seeing” and “blindness” play important roles in this narrative. Name the different kinds of blindness

represented in the narrative from II Kings 6:8-23. Do you recall any Jesus stories in which blindness also

plays a significant role? How does the reality of blindness link Jesus to Elisha?

3. There are two worlds in this narrative, that of the kings and the military and that of Elisha. How do these

two worlds contrast and compare? Is there any religious significance in that contrast? What is it?

4. The story is about Elisha and his powers. How does the narrative reveal anything about Elisha’s God? Is

this different from the God in Jonah or in The Book of Ruth?

5. We have seen the importance of hospitality in every story thus far. How does the virtue of hospitality

appear in each and how does it differ in each?



Topic 4: Stories from God: Jacob and God’s Pedagogy

I. Introduction

A) This narrative focuses on Jacob, a fascinating figure, known as both a trickster and a mystic.

B) Our source is Genesis chapters 25-50, but we are highlighting incidents that dramatize how God

goes about teaching Jacob to be a good person.

C) How Jacob’s story fits into our context

II. Jacob, the Thief

A) Born in ambiguity: a twin, different from Esau, and both chosen by God yet now always a godly

person

B) Jacob and stealing the blessing from Isaac, his father

III. Jacob, the Fugitive

A) Alone, frightened, in exile

B) The dream of the ladder to heaven

IV. Jacob, the Seek of Reconciliation

A) With Esau

B) The midnight wrestling match with God

V. Conclusion

A) How God works with ambiguity



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How is Jacob both “a trickster” and a “mystic”? Is there any relationship between trickery and mysticism?

What does this possible relationship between trickery and mysticism suggest about the spiritual life?

About God? Does God “play tricks”? Look at Jeremiah 20:7 for help if you are stuck on this response. In

your own life, have you ever encountered God as a trickster?

2. Jacob and Esau were twins and competitors. Compare them as personalities in the story. Do you think that

God loved Jacob more than Esau? Why or why not?

3. What is the significance of the great vision of the ladder in this Jacob narrative? What is the significance

of Jacob’s oath, “The Lord shall be my God?”

4. Jacob is never a saint, but he is God’s chosen. What does this tell you about God?



Topic 5: Stories about Call: Jesus and His Calls

I. Introduction

A) Two themes:

1) The importance of the narrative in revealing how God works within the human

2) The repetition of the call

B) How narrative presents action:

1) Storyline (plot)

2) Its human interactions (characters)

3) Its cultural and geographic background (setting)

C) The New Testament is about stories of call.

II. The Call of Jesus as an Adolescent in Luke 2:41-52

A) The second chapter of Luke’s Gospel centers on the birth and development of Jesus.

B) The plot in the temple experience is straightforward.

C) But the characters are rich in their diversity.

D) The setting is both familial and intimate (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph) and communal (a Jewish fast),

and suggests emotional trauma for Mary and Joseph.

E) Luke does not detail this richness but implies it.

F) As listeners or readers, we enter into the story contemplatively and imaginatively.

G) The enigmatic response of Jesus to his mother’s heartfelt question

III. The Call of Jesus to be an itinerant rabbi in Luke 3:23-38

A) Two events border the Lucan description of Jesus’ call: “Jesus was about thirty years old when he

began his work.”

B) The narrative of his baptism (Luke 3:21-23): Jesus’ call to preach the Kingdom of God began with,

“You are my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22).

C) The presentation of his struggle with Satan about the nature of his call (Luke 4:1-13)

IV. The Call to Jerusalem in Luke 9:28-51.

A) Jesus’ call moves him towards Jerusalem where he will give his final witness to his deepest message.



1) The love of God

2) The enduring forgiveness that characterizes that divine love

B) The Jerusalem journey climaxes in the scene of the Transfiguration.

C) That divine story that Jesus lives out is witnessed by the voice in the mountain: “This is my Son, my

Chosen; listen to him!”

V. Conclusion

A) The story of Jesus’ choices move through three periods of his life:

1) Adolescence

2) Mature vocational choice that sets him on his work of preaching and teaching

3) His ratification of this mission by his resolute determination to go to Jerusalem to undergo the

final test

B) The reader or hearer of the story of Jesus recognizes the narrative pattern of God’s developmental

call from adolescence to maturity to final fulfillment.

C) Without the narrative, there is no revelation of God’s design in human life where the narrative

structure becomes grace.

D) Story of the sister dying of Parkinson’s disease: head, hands, and, finally, heart



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. What do you understand by the notion of call in Scripture? In Church life today? What is the difference

between a “call” and a “profession” or “a career”?

2. The narrative episode that we have examined ends the so-called Infancy Narrative in Luke’s Gospel; that

is, the stories surrounding Jesus’ birth. Does this instance of Jesus experiencing a call also represent the

end of a significant part of his human development? Why is this important for our own spiritual or

religious lives as Christians?

3. The episode works in a number of contexts: familial, cultural, religious, and psychological. Can you

identify these levels of story-environment?

4. How does the figure of Jesus unify all these elements of the story—familial, cultural, religious, and

psychological? Does this say anything about the artistry of the narrative in Luke?



Topic 6: Stories about God: Jesus and the Compassion of God

I. Introduction

A) Jesus lived God’s story and told stories about the experience.

B) While Jonah was a reluctant prophet, Jesus began his ministry by embracing wholeheartedly the

mission of the prophet, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” and adding that this call was fulfilled

“today.”

C) Jonah’s narrative centers not only on his reluctance to be a prophet, but also the reasons for his

reluctance.

1) Jonah knew that God was a compassionate God who would forgive.

2) Therefore, Jonah would look bad if Nineveh was not destroyed.

3) Therefore Jonah sulked, angry with the compassion of God.

D) Jesus’ story moves in the same plotline, i.e., a prophet called to bear God’s message, but Jesus acts

in a way very different from Jonah.

1) Jesus embraces compassion in his deeds and in his parables.

2) The deeds of compassion and the teaching about compassion are the focus of this reflection.

II. In Luke 7:1-17, we see Jesus acting out of the compassion of God.

A) The episode is a story about how Jesus acted out of compassion.

1) The narrative is understated, beginning simply with Jesus moving towards Nain, a town about 25

miles from Capernaum.

2) Where he meets a funeral procession at the gate of the town

3) No burials were allowed within the walls of a Jewish city or town.

4) Thus, the procession was passing through the town gate.

5) Luke presents the story with great linguistic economy but profound emotional overtones

(a) The man being carried out was the only son of a widow, who was thus the only support of a

woman now left totally—psychologically and financially—alone.

6) The narrative moves from the scene that Jesus perceives to the deeper involvement of his own

emotional—spiritual—response.

(a) “When the Lord saw her” represents a different level of perception.



(b) “He had compassion for her”—a term that signifies deep emotional identification with the

plight of another

7) Finally, Jesus extends himself in his humanity: “Do not weep.”

8) Finally, Jesus extends his divine power: “Young man, I say to you, rise.”

B) We see Jesus as a prophet remote from the narrowness and self-concern of Jonah.

C) Jesus has TOTAL PROPHETIC engagement both in his human sympathy for the widow and in his

divine desire to reunite mother and son.

D) Through the story we witness the way Jesus presents what it is to be human and to be God.

III. Jesus taught the same kind of compassion in Luke 10:25-37, the parable of the Good

Samaritan.

A) In this story, Jesus shows who the neighbor is by telling story of a man left battered and half-dead on

a roadway.

1) Ignored—merely glanced at and significantly passed by—by a priest and a Levite

2) But truly seen and engaged by a Samaritan, the outsider, the religious renegade in Jewish eyes,

one who was considered unfaithful to religion and to the Law

3) But it is the Samaritan who experiences what Jesus experienced at the gates of Nain—

compassion, that emotional identification with the suffering person

4) And it is this compassion that prompts the Samaritan to make the victim his neighbor through a

collection of practical, caring deeds, which represent the truly religious care people ought to have

for one another

IV. Conclusion

A) There is a narrative harmony, a unity of themes, between the deeds of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus

about compassion. This compassion is a fulfillment of the prophetic mission to show the presence of

God and the priorities of God to the world.

B) Sacred stories—as we find in the gospels—show us concretely, imaginatively, affectively why Jesus

was a true prophet and, indeed, the fulfillment of all a prophet ought to be

C) Sacred stories—as we find in these two gospel episodes of Nain and the Good Samaritan—show us

what it is to trust the person of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus.

D) This realization is what Ignatius Loyola called “gospel contemplation,” a way to pray through

reliving the stories of divine compassion.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. The topic introduces Jesus as one who lived God’s story and one who told God-stories. What is the

difference between the two?

2. We’ve seen widows before and underscored their place or vulnerability in Jewish society. How does that

cultural reality enter into the story of the widow of Nain? Why is this important to the story? Is there any

religious or theological setting being prepared in this cultural event? Or put it this way: does the widow

symbolize a certain human condition?

3. Why is it important to see a correspondence between the deeds of Jesus and the stories of Jesus? Why

would such a correspondence be important for Jesus’ role as a prophet?

4. How would you use the narrative of Nain and the parable of the Good Samaritan in your own prayer? Or

how would you use these to help people pray the gospels?



Topic 7: Stories about God: Jesus and Women

I. Introduction

A) Women play a prominent role in the Gospel of Luke, but we are going to concentrate here on what I

call the role of women as “heroes” in that Gospel.

B) Prominent: Mary, Elizabeth, and Anna are presented in the early chapter of Luke’s Gospel in such a

way that they link the birth of Jesus to the OT antecedent stories.

C) Such narrative links also suggest something about the religious and spiritual ancestry of Jesus.

1) The feminine experience of God nurtured the human consciousness.

2) Cultural foundations of Jesus’ mission

D) Attention to the way Jesus acted and taught show us that Jesus saw women in the light of the

extension of the Kingdom.

II. Four themes in the story Luke in 7:36-50: the personality of Simon, the woman, the

other table guests, and Jesus himself.

A) Each of these four sets of characters brings his or her own personal history to this scene.

B) Each of these four sets of characters both brings a unity, seated around the common table, and a

diversity to that table:

1) Simon is self-righteous and aristocratic.

2) The woman is the outsider but courageously seeks only to honor the man who had rescued her

life.

3) The other guests represent that monolithic and conventional idea that God is for those who

deserve God.

4) And Jesus who is both center of attention and finally the great wisdom figure who explains what

has been going on in this episode.

C) The drama of this scenes becomes clear once the whole story is out there

1) Simon has invited Jesus but not accepted Jesus, withholding from him all the ordinary signs of

hospitality.

2) The woman has done all the things that Simon withheld.

3) Jesus tells the woman that her sins are forgiven because she loved so much.

4) The other guests can only murmur that Jesus claims to forgive sins, assuming to himself the

power that belongs, in their eyes, to God alone.



5) The narrative ends with Jesus summing up all that this event means: “Your faith has saved you:

go in peace.”

(a) Faith means trusting in Jesus as the one who has restored her dignity and made her his friend.

(b) Love means what the narrative presents: an exaggerated and passionate commitment to the

one who brought this woman dignity and peace, and that personal commitment to Jesus, in

turn, empowered her to act courageously in proclaiming that love.

(c) The public sinner is the heroine of this story, but Jesus is the great interpreter of what her

actions mean to him.

III. What Jesus did he also taught; namely, that heroic women dramatize the meaning of

spiritual courage and persistence.

A) Luke 18: 1-8 narrates how Jesus extols the value of persistence in prayer by telling the story of a

powerful but corrupt judge meeting his match in a widow

B) The widow had only herself, her grit, and her conviction that she deserved justice in her lawsuit, and

she held on to that ethical and moral self-assurance.

C) With wry humor Jesus describes the judge, worn down by the widow’s day-in, day-out complaints:

“Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering

me, I will grant her justice, so that she will not wear me out by continually coming” (18:4-5).

D) The judge capitulates from sheer exhaustion; the widow triumphs from the righteousness of her

cause.

E) From this Jesus exhorts his disciples to learn how to pray—with confidence that God looks with love

of his own when they pray out of quest for justice.

IV. Conclusion

A) Again, in looking at the deeds of Jesus and allying these to his teaching we do more than listen—we

participate in his world.

B) The story of these women of faith engage not merely our minds, but also our imaginations and,

through them, our hearts. And where our hearts are engaged we find God as our great treasure

(Matthew 6:19-24).



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Women play a pivotal role in the Gospel of Luke, and in these reflections we have focused on two—a

sinner and again a widow. Both characters present a particular social and cultural dilemma for Jesus.

What are these dilemmas? How does Jesus resolve each? Does this provide any paradigm for how we are

meant to approach our contemporary cultural dilemmas, sexual, racial, and economic?

2. In the story narrated in Luke 7: 36-50, the narrative takes place around a meal and in what should be a

context of hospitality. How does this discrepancy develop the tension in the story? Does this literary

tension symbolize a recurring theological tension in the ministry of Jesus? How would you describe this

tension? Does such tension exist in the contemporary Church?

3. Jesus places a great deal on the faith of the sinful woman. How would you describe the way that faith is

described within the context of the story in Luke 7:36-50?

4. Finally, Jesus praises the love that this sinful woman has shown him. What constitutes her love? Based on

this narrative, how would you describe the relationship between faith and love?

5. While the parable in Luke 18:1-8 is short, it implies a great deal about the courage of this stubborn

widow. From the parable, what would you cite as the chief characteristics of her courage? How do

courage and prayer relate?



Topic 8: Stories about God: Jesus and Hospitality

I. Introduction

A) Jesus both enjoyed and practiced hospitality, the virtue that welcomes the other.

B) Hospitality is symbolized by food and drink, shelter, embrace, conversation, and safety.

C) Jesus would have inherited a religious tradition as a Jew that explains the inherited reason for his

predilection for hospitality.

D) Hospitality is a universal sign of humanity.

E) In this talk, we are going to look at the stories about Jesus’ hospitality and the stories Jesus told that

featured hospitality.

II. Jesus himself enjoyed hospitality. In Luke 10:38-42, Jesus enjoys the hospitality of

Martha and Mary.

A) The narrative element of setting—the locale, geography, affective tone, symbolic resonances—

establishes a certain mood or environment or tone for a story.

1) The narrative begins with Jesus and his disciples on their missionary journey to Jerusalem.

2) As Luke puts it, Jesus and his disciples were “on their way.”

3) They come to a village where Jesus knows that he will be welcomed; and, indeed, those are the

words Luke uses: “a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.”

4) Luke has set the scene—tired and weary from the journey and all that has been doing, Jesus finds

a place where he can be safe, be fed and refreshed, enjoy the company of friends, and know the

deep satisfaction that he is here a member of the family.

B) The narrative soon establishes a dramatic polarity, for there are two sisters—Martha and Mary—and

within each a different priority about how hospitality ought to be practiced.

1) For Mary, the priority for hospitality is to sit in the position of a disciple, at the feet of Jesus, and

to listen to what Jesus wants to say

2) For Martha, the priority for hospitality is to prepare the meal, set the table, and arrange the

furniture.

C) Impatiently, Martha complains to Jesus, asking him to tell Mary to help her prepare the meal.

D) Jesus responds, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of

only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken from her.”

E) Wasn’t Jesus hungry, thirsty, longing for a quiet time to eat and drink with friends? Of course he

was.



F) But there was a deeper hunger that Mary satisfied: the hunger for friendship itself, for someone who

just rejoiced in listening to him and would let him be totally himself.

G) Jesus had great affection for both these good women and appreciated that each presented herself to

him in true hospitality—one by doing and the other by being.

III. Jesus employed the theme of hospitality in his parables, notably in Luke 15.

A) The Lost Sheep vv. 3-7

B) The Lost Coin vv. 8-10

C) The jewel in this crown of stories, The Prodigal Son vv. 11-32

D) But notably all these parables take place in the context of Jesus confronting the opposition of one

group of religious leaders:

1) “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to him (Jesus). And the Pharisees and

scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’”

E) Jesus continues in the prophetic tradition of Elisha, using hospitality and recognizing that welcoming

the outsider is a way of bringing peace and harmony to a community.

1) Notice that Jesus does not debate about the mercy of God, but rather

2) Jesus shows the mercy of God he represents in very human narrative.

3) These stories present the heart of God’s mercy, which is not only to forgive but to make the

outsiders—the tax collectors and sinners—part of his fellowship and his friends—to offer

hospitality.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why is hospitality a sign of the Kingdom of God?

2. When we say that Jesus himself enjoyed hospitality, what does that mean to you in terms of his

humanity? In terms of his divinity? Explain your responses.

3. Did Jesus love Mary more or Martha more? Explain how you came to your response to this question.

Does Jesus approve of the way Mary expresses her love more than he does the way Martha expresses her

way of love?

4. In the set of parables from Luke 15 and their setting, what do you think that Jesus wants to emphasize:

Forgiveness? What the Father he serves is like? The priorities of his own mission? Do you think that

Jesus loved the tax collectors and public sinners more than he loved the self-righteous? Why does Jesus

confront the self-righteous?



Topic 9: Stories about God: Jesus and Prayer

I. Introduction

A) So far, we have drawn parallels between two sets of stories, one from the Old Testament and the

other from the New Testament.

B) The Old Testament featured Jonas, Ruth and Naomi, Elisha, the prophet, and Jacob, while thus far

we have looked at Jesus living out his story and telling stories about God’s priorities in human life.

C) Those God priorities are told, shown, and narrated as what Jesus wants us not only to know but also

to feel and to imagine about God.

D) Therefore, it is important that you begin to go over for yourself what these stories mean to you, what

resemblances you can find in your own life, how you might even picture these Jesus’ events and

listen afresh to some of the Jesus stories?

E) In short, these are stories that, I hope, lead you to pray over, to think about, to reflect anew, to feel a

little more deeply about what it means to say, “I am a Christian;” that is, “I live the stories Christ

lived and told.”

F) Now we are going to draw a parallel between the experience of Jacob becoming a person more

attuned to God and wiser because he had learned through his own suffering.

G) We’re going to transfer this kind of experience to Jesus, showing how he too experienced God and

how he taught about God from his own human reality.

II. Luke Chapter 11 – Jesus about prayer: What it is to pray and how they ought to pray

A) The chapter opens with the disciples watching Jesus at prayer.

B) Their petition is plain, “Teach us as John the Baptist taught his disciples.”

C) Jesus’s response is simple but profound, the very marrow of his own experience of God.

1) God is Abba, beloved Father, a term of great intimacy and tenderness.

2) The desire of Jesus is that God’s name, the interior identity of God, be understood as holy—to

touch the very depths of God’s goodness and kindness.

3) As yearning for the completion of creation in the work of the Kingdom so that men and women

live in justice and peace

4) But until that fulfillment, pray for the bread that will give life to our bodies and nurture our

flagging spirits

5) We cannot truly be nurtured unless we know that we are forgiven, made whole before God, but

that personal wholeness comes…



6) …only when we forgive one another. That’s the divine deal: forgiveness means to forgive and…

7) …overshadow us with your protection that we be not overcome in the time of testing.

8) In the 22nd

chapter when Jesus prays at the Mount of Olives Luke dramatizes the depths of Jesus’

trust of this Abba—God: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will

but yours be done.”

D) What Jesus teaches is the revelation of his own relationship to God; what he shares is that

relationship is open to us too!

III. Jesus tells the disciples how they ought to approach prayer, narrating a parable from

everyday life but with a special punch to it (vv. 5-13).

A) Jesus says to his disciples that you must pray in this way, with the assurance that God wants you to

bother him for that is what a Father most wants—to be needed!

B) Then Jesus uses the image of the neighbor, knocking at the door in the middle of the night,

“Ask…Search…Knock.”

C) Finally, Jesus concludes his instruction on prayer by asking his disciples to look at their own lives

and at their own human loves.

IV. Conclusion

A) Jesus experienced in the depths of his own searching, seeking, and knocking at the heart of his

Father the trust and intimacy he taught.

B) His story was laid out in the story of his ongoing discernment of what it meant for him to represent

the God he discovered—faithful, loving, merciful, but asking an integrity that knows the human

family can only be kept together if people forgive and bear with one another.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How does the story of Jacob illuminate the story of Jesus?

2. What do you suppose caused the disciples of Jesus to move from their observance of Jesus at prayer to

their request that he teach them to pray? And in his response does Jesus teach them words to recite or

attitudes to assume or a relationship to desire and to develop? What is the difference among these three

possibilities?

3. What do we mean when we say that in his teaching of prayer Jesus also reveals his own relationship to

God? Can narrative reveal the interiority of a person?

4. In the parable on prayer that follows, Jesus exhorts his listeners to ask, search, and knock. What does each

of these verbs mean first in themselves? Then in reference to praying, have you experienced instances

where you feel that you have also asked, searched, and knocked?

5. Do you think that Jesus found prayer easy? Why or why not?



Topic 10: Stories about God: Creating the Church

I. Introduction

A) We have been looking at the ways stories from our religious heritage in the Old Testament and the

New Testament can draw us into a more complete appropriation of our faith, a deeper hope that God

would never reveal to us all the richness of that tradition unless God communicated out of love.

B) Oscar Wilde wrote stories for his children.

C) Stories not only entertain us but also teach us by engaging our heart as well as our minds, our

emotions as well as our reason, our own stories as well as those of others.

D) God teaches in stories that we might become, each in his or her own way, part of the narrative.

E) The way we read to ourselves and retell stories to others is always an act of interpreting.

F) What is true of individual reading is true, too, of the way the Church came to explore and cherish its

own stories.

II. The Acts of the Apostles – The story of Cornelius in Acts 10:1 to Acts 11:18 marks a

crucial turning point in the life of the Church. It is the story of two visions.

A) The vision of Cornelius, a Gentile seeker of truth and a man of just life as well a man of some

authority (verses 1-8)

1) The vision leads him to Joppa where Peter is lodging

2) Telling simply that what he is seeking is tied to Cornelius journeying to Peter in Joppa

B) The vision of Peter in Joppa, which Acts describes as a “trance,” that comes upon Peter when he is

hungry

1) Peter sees the heavens open: a large sheet descends from heaven, filled with all kinds of animals,

reptiles, and fowl, and hears a voice ordering him to take and eat.

2) As an observant Jew, Peter protests against this vision-command, “By no means, Lord, I have

never eaten anything profane or unclean.”

3) The Peter hears the voice again, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

4) Three times this enigmatic vision appears to Peter.

C) At this point, the representatives Cornelius sent to Peter’s lodging arrive, conveying Cornelius’

invitation that Peter come to Caesarea because God has moved Cornelius to seek Peter’s instruction.

1) Prior to their coming poor Peter had been further moved by the Spirit of the Lord to pay attention

to these representatives from the Gentile Cornelius.



2) Peter sets off with them to see Cornelius the next day.

D) Cornelius has been expecting Peter and invited a retinue of relatives and friends to join him in

welcoming Peter.

1) Crucial to all the events of visions and trances and Jews mixing with Gentiles is the power of

God’s Spirit who wants them all to hear one another’s stories.

2) Sharing stories breaks down barriers between these people as they try to make sense of what God

is saying.

3) God is telling them through each of their own narratives that God envisions a community called

to be a more universal and hospitable Church

4) Peter recognizes that something is pushing these people together. Peter makes sense of this

movement by telling the story of Jesus—who he was and what he meant to his followers.

III. From the story of Cornelius comes the next installment as Peter now has to explain to

the brothers in Jerusalem why he went to the Gentiles, baptized them, and

incorporated them into the new community that the Spirit of Jesus was assembling.

A) Step by step Peter tells them the narrative of what happened.

B) The climax is Peter’s final surrender to God’s creative work and to a new sense of Church.

1) “If then God gave them (the Gentiles) the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord

Jesus Christ, who was I that I should hinder God?”

IV. Conclusion

A) There is no Church without the continuation of this story of how God calls.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. How do stories—narratives—teach us? What is the difference between “moralizing” and “illustrating”?

When Jesus teaches through parables, stories, illustrations, what is he doing?

2. When we turn to the stories of Cornelius and Peter and how they connected, we are also telling a story

about the growth of the Church. How would you describe this growth?

3. Both narratives—of Peter and of Cornelius—use words like “vision” and “trance” to describe their

respective experiences. What is the role of such phenomena in the spiritual life? Are these always the sign

of God’s intervention?

4. Peter and Cornelius have to hear one another’s stories so that each can appreciate how God has called

them to meet. But why is it important for Peter to explain to the Jerusalem community what happened to

him and Cornelius?



Topic 11: Stories about God: God as Narrator

I. Introduction

A) We have seen a rich panorama of stories from God, about God, about Jesus, and about the Church.

B) We have moved from Jonah to Ruth and Naomi, to Elisha the prophet and to Jacob the blessed

opportunist.

C) Against this background, we looked at Jesus as one who lived a story and told stories—all centered

on his call to preach and to teach and to call others to the Kingdom of God.

D) Finally, we looked at the way Church extended its identity to be a world Church, embracing the

world beyond Judaism through the narrative of Cornelius and Peter. What does this survey reveal?

II. God is a narrator, a mystery that communicates to the human family out of love and

reverence.

A) A narrator is someone who tells a story in ways that connect action, characters, and setting into a

unified communication.

B) That communication is not just of ideas but also of emotions and affections.

C) Gradually what emerges is a pattern in the communication that reveals the personal style of the

narrator.

1) In world literature, that style can be characterized as realistic, i.e., telling it the way it is, or

romantic, telling it the way it might be.

2) God reveals; that is, open up God’s heart, in the patterns of emphasis that God seems to give in

his stories.

3) What kind of God appears from these stories?

4) What is God’s narrative style?

III. God tells the narration in ways that reveal

A) That God takes seriously the world and its inhabitants.

B) God reveals himself through who people are and how they interact, and

C) the kind of culture or world that people create out of their interaction.

IV. In this narrative revelation:

A) God is a realist.

1) Jonah is stubborn, narrow, and crabby but remains God’s prophet.



2) Naomi and Ruth are make their own way alone in a patriarchal society.

3) Elijah faces a world controlled by kings in which violence is a way of life.

4) Jacob is something of a mother’s boy but through real adversity becomes an adult.

B) Jesus inherits this story as God’s best narrative.

C) But God is also a romantic.

1) Jonah can become a better person.

2) Ruth can bear a son and bring Naomi into new life.

3) Elisha can create a learning situation for these kings.

4) Jacob can discover love in Rachel and hope for reconciliation with his brother Esau.

D) Jesus also inherits this world of romantic possibility.

E) And the Church can become a new reality beyond boundaries of race and cultures, a community that

embraces all peoples.

V. God is a story teller of realism and romance whose narratives are bound by a reverent

regard for being with his people as one of his people, in that great divine mystery we

call the Incarnation.

A) Jesus is, then, the Great Narrative of God, the event whose life explains all that had been before as

part of the preparation for God’s self-revelation

B) And the meaning of that self-revelation is Love, which means the way the compassion and

forgiveness of the Jesus story and the delight he shows in being with the human family expose the

mystery of life which is to love and be loved.

C) If we understand why God had to reveal in story, we also know that every story can speak to us of

the quest for and the discovery of Love.

VI. Conclusion

A) Understanding the way God reveals through story reveals who the story-teller is, a lover of all that is

human as a reflection of all that the mystery called God truly is.



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. In what sense do stories and narratives from God reveal God? Isn’t God a mystery? How can mystery

reveal itself and still remain a mystery?

2. What do we mean when we talk about “the style” of God as a storyteller? What do you understand by the

terms that God is “a realist” and also “a romantic”?

3. If our Christen heritage contains both realism and romantic hope, which do you prefer as your self-

description: a realist or a romantic? Can you be both? Ought we to strive to be both in our spiritual lives?

4. What does it mean to call Jesus “the Great Narrative of God”?

5. What is the connection between narrative and love? Is every story really a story of love? What about

murder mysteries? Stories of violence and revenge? Science fiction? Or are we talking only about stories

that count as literature, a serious effort to communicate experiences worth sharing?



Topic 12: Stories about God: Becoming God’s Partner

I. Introduction

A) In this set of reflections on stories from God, we have emphasized how these narratives reveal who

God is and how God works within the human family and created reality.

B) Narratives endure because they have an audience that wants to become part of that narrative. A

narrative audience that endures becomes a tradition, a heritage.

C) The end of every narrative is to tell someone in such a way that the man or woman who hears or

reads the narrative enters into the first inspiration and then the fulfillment of the author who shared

his or her story.

D) We read the Bible not to know more about Jonah or Ruth but ultimately, finally, to know more about

the God who speaks through Jonah or Ruth.

E) But we can also learn to read stories outside the world of the Bible to learn about God.

F) For every narrative

1) That cares about its characters

2) And examines the way their lives spell out a sequence of events

3) And explores the tone of their surroundings and interprets how this environment shaped their

choices and molded their ambitions

4) Is a God movement, because the imagination that makes the narrative work imitates the

inspiration and the fulfillment of the Divine maker who made the world in his image and

likeness?

II. Theology is not organizing God into intellectual categories controlled through logic and

argument. God also speaks in affective symbols and metaphors that we call narrative

and/or stories.

A) The commanding Christian story is that of the Incarnation; i.e., the Word becoming flesh.

B) Jesus of Nazareth is the definitive metaphor for the presence of God living and dwelling with and in

the human family.

C) By “metaphor”, I mean that Jesus makes the mystery of God present to us in his humanity.

D) The more we dwell on the reality of that humanity in both its moments of grandeur and moments of

emptying, the more we gain insight into God.

E) And the more we understand the humanity of Christ through our own human experience, the more

entry we have to how God reveals God’s presence and reality.



F) All literature widens our heart’s capacity to appreciate what it is to be human.

III. Vatican II, “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”:

A) “The joys and hopes, the grief’s and anxieties of the [people] of this age, especially those who are

poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the grief’s and anxieties of the followers

of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a

community composed of [people] . . . That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with

[humankind] and its history by the deepest bonds.” (#1)

IV. Stories are about God wherever the human author opens the joys and sorrows of the

human journey.

A) The advent of Jesus the Christ has established a love affair between God and the world: “For God so

loved the world that he gave his one and only Son. . .” (John 3:16).

V. The retelling of stories is the glue that binds Christian experience together.

VI. Every story leads to God because the instinct to tell a story is a gift at once creative and

redemptive. Narrative brings the presence of God into human life.

VII. What these talks have tried to arouse in you is a love for the way you can be God’s

partner in appreciating the power of stories told and cherished and stories lived; that

is, in your own life story.

A) Take time every day to review your story, asking these simple question:

1) Where has God led me to find joy?

2) Where has God sustained me in sorrow and struggle?

3) How has my story helped me to understand that the people of my world are also partners in this

human journey to find the God of their stories?

VIII. Conclusion

A) An illustration from a former student



REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Is the source of credible knowledge of God found only in the Bible? Can secular stories also reveal

something to us of God? Does every narrator or author have to be herself or himself a religious person for

insight into God and/or a spiritual experience to be trustworthy? Can an imperfect or even seeming sinful

narrator teach us about God and the ways of God?

2. “Theology is organized, systematic, an intellectual pursuit. How can narratives be classed as theology, as

they are frequently circular in their development, metaphoric in their language, vacillating in their

viewpoint, and more concerned with human emotions than with logical argument? Therefore, the

theology of story is a lightweight entertainment, not authentic theology.” As you review these lectures, do

you think that this is a valid critique?

3. Where have stories been an integral part of your own religious and spiritual development? In what ways

have stories brought you closer to God? Challenged you to be more courageous and faithful in your

commitments?



Suggested Readings

Alter, Robert and Kermode, Frank, editors. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1987.

Boyle, Nicholas. Sacred and Secular Scriptures, a Catholic Approach to Literature. Notre

Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

Brueggemann, Walter. “The Embarrassing Footnote.” Theology Today 44 (April, 1987):

5-14.

Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.

San Francisco: Harper, 1977.

Buechner, Frederick. Secrets in the Dark, a Life in Sermons. San Francisco: Harper, 2006.

Curtis, C. Michael, editor. God Stories. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Drury, John. Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and Their Meanings. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Elie, Paul. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Greeley, Andrew M. Religion as Poetry. New Brunswick and London: Transaction

Publishers, 1995.

Hampl, Patricia. I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. New York:

Norton, 1999.

Wilde, Oscar. Complete Short Fiction. Edited with an Introduction by Ian Small. 3rd

edition.

London: Penguin Books, 1994.

Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Wilder, Amos N. Jesus’ Parables and the War of Myths, Essays on Imagination in the

Scriptures. Edited with a Preface by James Breech. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,

1982.

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