Stories and Hermeneutics

My younger sister and I spent a year with my maternal grandparents while our parents studied overseas. We were 9 and 10 years old. Grandpa Abel was a great storyteller. Every evening, he told us a new story, some from classical Western and Indian literature and some he made up. That’s when I picked up a love for stories, storytelling, and the hermeneutics (interpretation) of storytelling.

Stories have multilayers of meaning. The hearers can identify with the villains, heroes, or one of the side characters. One evening, for example, grandma told grandpa that my sister and I were fighting all day. So, grandpa told us the story of two cats who found an Indian bread, dosa. Instead of equally dividing them between them, the cats fought over their halves. A monkey saw this and decided to take advantage of the situation. He took both their halves in his right and left hand and kept taking a bite to equalize the halves. The cats were never happy, and the money ended up eating the dosa. The moral was that when my sister and I fought, we ended up as losers.

In this story, we knew we were the cats, and we didn’t try to figure out who the monkey or the dosa were. We knew they were props. We also knew that if grandma had taken away our food, which she didn’t, then she would have been the monkey, and we substituted dosa with whatever fights we had that day.  

In the same way, biblical storytellers, like the Lord Jesus, told stories with multilayers. A classic example is the story of the sower who went out to sow his seed, and they fell on different kinds of lands. The hearers were to identify with a path, rocky land, thorny area, or fertile land and change their ways to be productive, as was the fertile land.

A common assumption in modern hermeneutics is that every passage has only one meaning. Imagine Lori telling me, “The trash is full,” and I agree with her, “Yes, hon, the trash is full.” Have I understood her meaning? One could say, “Yes, you have. You both made the same exact observations – the trash is full.” Another would say, “But, Andrew, Lori’s implied meaning was that you take out the trash.” See, a statement like “the trash is full” has a verbal meaning and an implied meaning. Similarly, if I were to say to Larry, “Hi Larry, your foot is on mine,” I don’t expect him to say, “Yes, Andrew, it is” (the verbal meaning); instead, I expect him to remove his foot off of mine (the implied meaning).

I am saying all these because we often see only one meaning in a biblical parable or story like the Prodigal Son story (Luke 15:1–32). The standard meaning we hear is that the Prodigal Son story is about God waiting for the sinners to return to him. This is a genuine meaning, almost a verbal meaning. But behind that are several implied meanings. In the subsequent devotions, however, I want to show more than one meaning embedded in the text. Seeing them helps us to appreciate Jesus as a master storyteller and learn some newer nuances to this amazing story.