Michael Peppard advocates a way to shake loose from stale, abstract interpretations of Jesus’s parables:
One method for refreshing the parables is to experiment with where one “reads oneself in” to the story. Many of the parables speak to multiple audiences at the same time, as when the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16) brings comfort to the poor, while also rousing the rich from complacency. Parables about sin and mercy, such as that of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18), invite listeners to read themselves in to both characters at different moments in life. It’s also among the most clever of the parables because once you imagine yourself as the tax collector (“I’m like the tax collector, a humble sinner, and definitely not like that pompous Pharisee”), then you automatically become more like the Pharisee. The oxymoronic pride in one’s own humility springs the rhetorical trap of the story: most of us are both Pharisee and tax collector.
An example of the method in practice:
One of the best interpretations of the Good Samaritan develops by imagining oneself in to the characters of the priest and the Levite. Why didn’t they stop? What was on their minds? Maybe they had perfectly good reasons — the same kinds that we ourselves give when we pass by? I am referring to a middle section of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Mountaintop” speech (April 3, 1968). We all know the prophetic ending of that speech, but less known is the eloquent interpretation of this parable in the middle…For King, this is a parable about two things: race and fear.
The Dish 