From Proclamation to Narrative

Author(s): Paul Ricoeur

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 4, Norman Perrin, 1920-1976 (Oct., 1984), pp.
501-512
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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From Proclamation to Narrative
Paul Ricoeur/ Universityof Chicago

In his preface to the paperback edition of Rediscovering the Teachingof

Jesus, written in 1975, Norman Perrin places his work under the
patronage of two masters, Bultmann and Jeremias, whom he situates
"at opposite ends of a particular theological spectrum."And he adds:
"Yet they belonged together in the sense that they had together made
possible a new stage in life of Jesus research. I therefore, who knew
them all, took the bold step of attempting to interprettheir insights in a
synthesis of my own."'
In this essay dedicated to the memory of Norman (with whom I
shared a close friendship, growing out of the work we pursued together
in the field of hermeneutics), I should like to show the necessity, coher-
ence, and effectiveness of a synthesis such as this.
I shall attempt to vindicate Norman Perrin'sundertaking by placing
it within the frameworkof a problem that I myself am currently investi-
gating, namely, the necessity of developing the Christian kerygma in a
narrative form-that of the Gospels. For several generations Christian
kerygma was restrictedto a proclamationthat contained but the seed of
a narrative, contracted to an almost pointlike event, as seen in such
ancient formulations as those in 1 Cor. 15:3-8, Christ died..., was
buried..., was raised . ., and appeared to Cephas and others. We can
speak of the seed of a narrative in the sense that the presupposition of
all Christian preaching is the continuity and identity of the earthly
Jesus and the Christ who speaks through the tongues of the prophets in
the community of faith. Now, the minimal event included within the
early kerygma was for a long time sufficient to link the eschatological
event with the factual history, hence with the contingency of time.

I Norman Perrin, the TeachingofJesus, New Testament Library (London: SCM

Rediscovering
Press; New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 11-12 (hereafter cited as Rediscovering). Apart from
the preface written for the paperback edition, the text and pagination are identical to the 1967
original.
? 1984 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/84/6404-0006$01.00

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The Journal of Religion

Up to this point Bultmann and Jeremias are in agreement. Bult-

mann always affirmed that the Dass of the death on the Cross was the
historical minimum required by the Was of post-Easter faith. We see
why: kerygma must include Jesus' past in Christ's present, for if not, it
runs the risk of interpreting the latter in the gnostic sense or in that of a
Hellenistic myth.
The question is then whether the narrative development of this seed
in the form of a new literary mode, the Gospel, stems from the same
necessity or whether it expresses the contingency of a historical situa-
tion and even a dangerous deviation that would require, precisely, the
return to the kerygma possessing only the most impoverished narrative
component. It is in reply to this question that the paths diverge.
We must first listen to what Bultmann has to say: by referring to the
tradition about Jesus are we not setting ourselves the impossible task of
reconstructing a "life of Jesus"? Has not the history of redaction and
form criticism shown us that this understanding has already failed and
that it had to fail? Liberal theology, underestimating the strictly
exegetical obstacles to this enterprise, sought to treat the christologi-
cal interpretations as an added-on superstructure that could be
removed so that one could write a life of Jesus freed of every dogmatic
and ecclesiological prejudice. However, as Albert Schweitzer demon-
strated in his history of these lives of Jesus, in the final analysis each
one reflected the historian's own vision of the world or that of his epoch,
and so each was therefore paradoxically revealed to be just as theologi-
cally motivated as were the narratives it sought to replace.
We have to keep in mind this failure of the liberal attempts to write a
life of Jesus if we want to understand the Bultmannian school's reaction
and its excesses in the opposite direction. It was the very program of
the Leben-JesusForschungthat was overturned by form criticism. Narra-
tivization, accordingly, appeared as a secondary phenomenon,
stemming from the influence of myths and legends on an essentially
nonnarrative kerygmatic base.
For Bultmann himself, this conclusion represented both a wholly
modern requirement of scientificalness and a much more traditional
and Lutheran one that faith should not be defended by works. The first
requirement led him to describe as vain any attempt to separate the
historicalJesus from the kerygmatic framework. The second persuaded
him that this was both useless and even dangerous. If, somehow, such
an effort should succeed, it would be the equivalent of substituting
carnal certitude for the decision of faith, hence of seeking salvation in
some human work rather than in faith understood as pure grace.

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 From Proclamation to Narrative

As regards the first requirement, that of scientificalness, it is of funda-

mental importance to underscore that the exegetical work of Jeremias
and Perrin proceeds from the same requirement of intellectual integrity
as that of Bultmann. While claiming to be just as radical as Bultmann,
they established that the tradition about Jesus does transmit some
memories of certain of Jesus' words and actions, which we may
consider authentic in the sense conferred by radical criticism. Without
being sufficient to allow us to write a history of Jesus distinct from the
kerygma about Christ, such as was sought by liberal exegesis, the iden-
tification of these words and actions authorizes us to isolate what I shall
call later the "occasions" for the narrative composition of the Gospels.
Jeremias and Perrin identify them by means of a method of dissimilar-
ity, which may be summarized as follows. When a word or action
attributed to Jesus is doubly discordant in relation to what we know
about Judaism in that period and in relation to what the history of
redaction obliges us to see as a creation of the post-Easter community,
then that work or action may be taken as authentic, that is, as attribut-
able to the historical Jesus.2
Now the question is, If one is not a professional exegete, why follow
one school rather than the other? For me, the response is clear: because
the attempt to reconstruct or rediscover the teaching and ministry of
Jesus is coherent with other requirements that are partially opposed to,
or at least that complete in a decisive way, Bultmann's other require-
ments, which are not so much directly exegetical as theological and
philosophical.
Bultmann tells us that the search for the historical Jesus is not just
vain but also useless and even dangerous. That it is not vain is proved
by the results obtained by Jeremias and Perrin, which directly concern
the inquiry into the orientation toward the future in Jesus' preaching.
That it is useless and dangerous because it leads the believer to a
modern form of salvation through works may be contested for several
important theological reasons.
First, it may be shown that the rediscovery of the teaching of Jesus
grounds the possibility of exercising a critical control concerning pre-
cisely the labor of thought aroused by the subtle discordance between
the kerygma of the resurrection and the apocalyptic expectation of the
parousia: in short, a critical control of the structure of Christian hope.

2
Along with this criterion of dissimilarity, Perrin adds that of coherence among what is
attributed to Jesus and that of multiple attestation in various documents, which need not all be
canonical (Rediscovering,pp. 15-49).

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The Journal of Religion

Second, by connecting this teaching, in turn, to all that we know about

Jesus' attitude in situations of crisis, conflict, or controversy, we can
elicit a configuration or style that possesses not only critical value but
also exemplary value as well as justifying the great and authentic tradi-
tion of the "imitationof Christ." Finally, the lines that we can discern
between this configuration and Jesus' death allow us to catch sight of
what may become a history of suffering opposed to all forms of victors'
history, which delights in writing chronicles and authorized accounts or
official history. Is this critique, this exemplariness, this breaking
through to another history, useless, even injurious to faith? Does it not
rather belong at the very heart of what is "believed"and what is "con-
fessed"(homologia),at the most vulnerable point where what is believed
and what is confessed are articulated?
It is under the sign of these three functions of the tradition ofJesus in
relation to faith in Christ that I should now like to situate Norman
Perrin's undertaking in Rediscovering and in Jesus and theLanguageof the
In
Kingdom.3 "rediscovering the teaching of Jesus," Norman Perrin
joins the lesson ofJeremias to that of Bultmann, without falling into the
trap of the lives of Jesus. What is actually "reconstructed"is not,
a
properly speaking, narrative, which would indeed correspond to
Bultmann's critique, but what I would call, to borrow Whitehead's
vocabulary, the "occasions"for narration.4
These occasions are of three sorts: announcements, controversies,
and sufferings. Without yet forming a narrative "plot," they act as
mooring points for the narrative activity that is displayed in the Gospel
stories. I would like to show, basing my remarks on Norman Perrin's
work, that these three sorts of occasions, as they are reconstructed or
rediscovered (I consider these to be the same thing), perform a three-
fold critical-exemplary-inaugural function. By showing the relation
between these three sorts of occasions and the three functions, the
internal necessity of passing from proclamation to narrative is shown.
In the same stroke, Norman Perrin's effort to join Bultmann's legacy
with that of Jeremias is also vindicated.

3 Norman Perrin, Jesus and the

Languageof the Kingdom:Symboland Metaphorin New Testament
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).
Interpretation
4 See A. N. Whitehead, Processand
Reality. An Essay in Cosmology,ed. D. R. Griffin and
D. W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), esp. pp. 18, 187, 287ff.; and D. W. Sherburne,
A Key to Whitehead'sProcessand Reality(New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 6-9,
205-7.

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 From Proclamation to Narrative

THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Norman Perrin's major contribution concerns the very sense we are to

give to Jesus' proclamation of the "proximity" of the Kingdom. On this
point his work moves with surefootedness from historical analysis, in
the sense of form criticism, to the work of interpretation, in the sense of
a hermeneutics of symbols.
The decisive breakthrough has been made by Jeremias, who sought
the answer to this question in the parables and other sayings and
similes referring to the Kingdom by attempting to strip Jesus' words of
all that betrays subsequent altering into a Judaizing or Hellenizing
idiom. Two closely related traits, which bear the mark of Norman
Perrin's personal efforts, concern us here. First, Jesus interpreted his
ministry as the decisive anticipation of the Kingdom. Second, he for-
bade all speculation as to the interval remaining, signifying the end by
giving "proximity" a nonquantitative, nonchronological meaning. It is
easy to see how these two traits are related. If the Kingdom announced
in Jesus' preaching is accompanied by the response that it evokes (a
point I shall return to in the next section, Controversy), then the
proximity of the Kingdom lies entirely in the anticipating capacity
linked to Jesus' proclamation and in the crisis it opens. For Jesus,
Norman Perrin says, the Kingdom is always and unendingly
approaching whenever human experience is challenged by the teaching
that announces it.5
To the extent therefore that the ministry of Jesus itself is signified in
the parables, the joyous situation, the crisis, the challenge, the extrava-
gance that is the "point" of so many parables, indirectly describe Jesus'
ministry as being part of the process of the coming of the Kingdom.

5 There is no
shortage of exegetical arguments to support this position, for example, thatJesus
interpretedhis exorcisms as anticipations of the Kingdom. As Perrin puts it, "The saying interprets
the exorcisms"(Rediscovering, p. 65). They are meaningless apart from the interpretation that ties
them to the future Kingdom of God. Here is an example drawn from an eschatological saying,
Mark 2:18ff. The authentic core of this saying, according to Jeremias, must have been, "Can the
wedding guests fast during the wedding?"(S. H. Hooker, trans., ParablesofJesus, rev. ed. [New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963], p. 52, n. 4 [cited in Perrin, Rediscovering, p. 79, n. 3]).
This, in turn, suggests that there was something festive about the announcement of the King-
dom, in its present dimension. The same joyful tone comes across in the parables of the hidden
treasure and the pearl (Matt. 13:44-45). Why such joy? Because the forgiveness of sins is
announced, not just with certitude or generosity, but also with extravagance. Perrin says, "And
no doubt the extravagance is deliberate"(Rediscovering, p. 96). I have also developed the theme of
extravagance in my own study of the parables as narrative fictions. Here I am going directly to
what exegesis takes as the point of the parable, without regard for its literary form. Whether it be
a question of the parable of the lost sheep or the lost drachma, or the return of the prodigal son,
something happens that outstrips every expectation.

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The Journal of Religion

Norman Perrin is in agreement here with Conzelmann when he

ventures to say that the parables belong to Jesus' self-understanding.6
If therefore the parables speak not only of the Kingdom but also of
the tie between the kingdom and Jesus' person, then the problem of
eschatology's orientation toward the future finds the key to its solution
in the same tie. A line is drawn between the present of the person Jesus
and the future, so the interval that opens between the two loses all
chronological significance and is resolved in the tension between this
present and that future.7
Here is where I see the primary function of the rediscovery of the
teaching of Jesus, namely, as a critical instrument in regard to the
kerygmatic interpretation that the Church grafted onto parables and
onto all Jesus' words, insofar as this interpretation bears the imprint of
Apocalyptic, with its dualism of eons, its chronological sense of immi-
nence, and its calculations of the signs. The method of double differen-
tiation that Jeremias and his successor apply to Jesus' words first
reveals that Jesus awaited the coming of the Kingdom with an extreme
confidence, as the certain growth of the harvest.8 This is suggested by
the parables of the sower, the mustard seed, and the leaven. "Simple

6 H. Conzelmann, "Present and Future in the

Synoptic Tradition,"Journalfor Theologyand
Church5 (1968): 26-44; reprinted in R. Funk, ed., Godand Christ:Existenceand Providence (New
York: Harper & Row; Tiibingen:J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1968), pp. 26-44; and appeared
originally as "Gegenwart und Zukunft in der synoptischen Traditionen," Zeitschrift fur Theologie
undKirche54 (1957): 277-96.
7 Even in the
parables of judgment such as the parables of the tares among the wheat (Matt.
13:24-30), the announced separating of the good and bad grain is referred to some undated
future, which excludes all speculation concerning the duration of the interval. Even when this
duration seems at issue, as in the parable of the talents, its length is not so much the issue as is its
use as an extended period of responsibility. As for the similes that seem to sanction speculation
about the signs (the strong man in Mark 3:27; the fig tree in Mark 13:28), they seem rather to put
the accent on the presence among us now of the future Kingdom. The same tie between present
and future existence may be seen in the parables of growth, without the question of the length of
time being appropriate. In short, there are no other signs than those given here and now. No
"picture"of the future makes sense any longer. Once again, this is becauseJesus' existence and his
self-understandingare a part of the substance of what is signified in parables: "The interpretation
of the coming One and of the person of Jesus form a unity" (Conzelmann, p. 37). Rudolf
Bultmann, Conzelmann notes, was correct in saying that "Jesusdisregards time"if this disregard
is given a positive meaning, namely, that the signs that announce the Kingdom are present in the
person of Jesus.
8 Perrin does not hesitate to call the fourth
chapter of Rediscovering "Jesus and the Future."
There he admits that "nopart of the teaching ofJesus is more difficultto reconstructand interpret
than that relating to the future"(p. 154). In fact, the apocalyptic declarations about the Son of
man serve as a screen, and an enormous effort is required to scrape these away in order to reach
the authentic core. Perrin sees in these texts interpretations by the early Christian community
based on Dan. 7:13 and destined to support the theme of the parousia, Jesus returning as the Son
of man, or that of the resurrection,Jesus being raised to heaven as the Son of man, or that of the
crucifixion in liaison with Zech. 12:10, which conjoins mourning (kopsomai)and vision (opsomai).
In the final analysis, the imagery of the Son of man belongs to the apologetics of the passion.

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 From Proclamation to Narrative

beginnings, great endings," says Norman Perrin.9 The same method

reveals as well that Jesus expected the vindication of his ministry as a
result of this coming, without anything being said concerning the form
and date of this vindication.10 In this sense, the dialectic of "already"
and "not yet" is found even earlier than the words instituting the
eucharist in Jesus' preaching. Jesus placed his preaching under the sign
of awaiting the Kingdom that had not yet come, yet made this very
teaching the sign of the already aspect of this expectation. Only in
Jesus' preaching is the paradox fully intact. He could say that the King-
dom "is in the midst of you" (Luke 17:20) and yet in no way weaken the
strength of this hope. Nevertheless, in principle, he cuts off the apoca-
lyptic speculation concerning the interval separating us from the end.
The difficult work of reconstructingJesus' message is therefore not in
vain. It suggests that the eschatological (apocalyptic) interpretation of
the kerygma, however dominant, is not the only one possible and that
the Church could always call on this interpretation of the teaching of
Jesus to grasp better the paradox of hope.11

CONTROVERSY

The announcement of the Kingdom of God is recounted only in rela-

tion to the situation of the interlocutors that frames the parables, the
eschatological similes, and the eschatological sayings. Taken by them-
selves, these sayings only form the logia, a collection of which must
have circulated in the churches before it was set within any (written)
narrative framework, as the Gospel of Thomas verifies. We are in debt
to Dodd and Jeremias, and to Perrin, for having restored to us the
9 Perrin, Rediscovering, p. 158.
10 It is true that the
Gospels attribute to Jesus the declarations that speak of a limited amount
of time remaining, as in Mark 9:1 and 13:30. Post-Bultmannian exegesis tends to see this as a
product of the first Christian apocalyptic from the epoch when the expectation of an immediate
end was at its peak (see Perrin, Rediscovering, p. 202).
1 Perrin
speaks, in this sense, of an "ambiguity of reference" (Rediscovering, p. 202). Compare
W. G. Kiimmel, "Die Naherwartung in der VerkiindigungJesu," in Zeit und Geschichte.Dankesgabe
an Rudolf Bultmann zum 80 Geburtstag, ed. E. Dinkler (Tibingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck],
1964), pp. 31-46 (also in Heilsgeschehenund Geschichte:GesammelteAufatze, 1933-64, ed. E. Graisser,
Otto Merk, and Adolf Fritz [Marburg: Elwert, 1965], pp. 457-70), "Eschatological Expectation
in the Proclamation of Jesus," in The Future of Our Religious Past, ed. James M. Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 29-48, and Promise and Fulfillment, Studies in Biblical Theology,
23 (London: SCM Press, 1957) (which appeared originally as Verheissungund Erfiillung [Zurich:
Zwingli Verlag, 1953]). See also E. Kasemann, "The Problem of the Historical Jesus," Essays on
New Testament Themes, Studies in Biblical Theology, 41, (1964; reprint Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1982), pp. 15-47 (discussed in some detail below). Kasemann concurs that Jesus discerned
the beginning of the coming of the Kingdom in the summons confronting humanity with its cur-
rent situation and with its responsibility to decide. In this sense, the Kingdom is not so much
close (proche) as approaching (il s'approche).

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crisis situations, marked by challenges and controversies, to which the

parables reply in the form of enigmas.'2 In turn, these replies are a
challenge thrown at the interlocutor-the parable thus belongs to
something like a lively colloquy akin to an altercation.13
In order to recover this dimension of the parables as controversy, it
was necessary to dig beneath the parenetic and allegorizing interpreta-
tions that the New Testament writers amalgamated to Jesus' words. At
the end of this process it was apparent that each parable was spoken in
a unique situation. Not only did it say something about the irruption of
the Kingdom beginning here and now, as I said earlier, but it also
revealed the crisis situation in which this irruption created a new situa-
tion, characterized by the challenge and confrontation into which the
interlocutor is placed. In this sense, the Kingdom only comes "in
parables" to the one who in turn responds to the situation of confronta-
tion that preaching creates. Hence the parables must be seen as utter-
ances that vindicate, defend, attack, and provoke. They are arms of
combat and they require an immediate reply.14
12 Once
again, the parables are being considered here not in terms of their individual contents,
as autonomous narrative fictions, but as discourse addressed to someone, as announcing rather
than as announced, or, in other words, as speech acts. In this respect, it is not surprising that
Amos Wilder, who is careful to stay as close as possible to the "new utterance,"to the outbreak of
the word, begins his inquiry into early Christian rhetoric with the dialogue before considering
either the story or the parable. See A. Wilder, TheLanguageof the Gospel:EarlyChristianRhetoric
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964), chap. 1, "The New Utterance." "Oral speech is where it all
began" (p. 48), he reminds us. Jesus did not write, he spoke. And the dialogue is the first matrix
for his words. It always has an other-Peter, the disciples, the crowd, Jerusalem-and the
address always calls for a response.
13 Compare Wilder: the gospel is always more than instruction, it is "radical personal
challenge"(p. 61). Similarly, Norman Perrin places a whole segment of Jesus' teaching under the
title "Recognition and Response" (Rediscovering, chap. 3, pp. 109-53). A person recognizes the
meaning of his or her existence and responds to this recognition. Thus before engendering an
ethics, in the sense of standards of conduct, the parables constitute an "urgent call to recognize
the challenge of the proclamation and to respond to it" (Perrin, Rediscovering, p. 109).
14 Thus in the parable of the workers sent into the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16), the announce-
ment of the foolish generosity of the householder, concealed beneath the paradox of a generous
caprice, questions us: "Are you jealous because I am that good?" The same vindicating and
provocative intention may be discerned in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7; Matt.
18:12-14): such is God'sjoy when just one of the "littleones"is saved! And you, what do you say?
In the parable of the great supper (Matt. 22:1-10; Luke 14:16-24) the point concerns the relation
between the guests and the host: no one is a guest by right, it is suggested. Each person must
respond to an invitation that is put as a challenge. Curses on those who were invited first and
refused. On the other hand, the unjust steward offers a shocking example of a cheat who, con-
fronted with a crisis, knows how to respond (Luke 16:1-8). The irony is strong and quite obvious
in a provocative way. The parable of the workers hired at the last hour is no less irritating. God
accepts some on the basis of their merits and others on the basis of a pardon (Matt. 20:11-16).
Here again Jesus responds to an attack aimed as his conduct with a parable that says what God
does. Everything in the parables is a challenge: the joy of the entry of the heathens into the King-
dom at the eschatological hour (the parable of the great supper); the horror of the refusal of those
to whom the Kingdom will come as a catastrophe, unexpected as a burglar (Matt. 24:42-44),

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 From Proclamation to Narrative

This interpretation of the parables as a challenge, a vindication, a

provocation, allows us to catch sight of one general trait of the whole of
Jesus' ministry, inasmuch as the words thus set within a crisis situation
thereby appear as actions. "How to do things with words?" asked
J. L. Austin.15 Well, Jesus' words do something. They create the crisis
that leads from the announcement to the story of suffering. Contro-
versy provides the mediating occasion that leads from the one to the
other.
We have already said thatJesus must have interpreted his exorcisms
as anticipations of the coming Kingdom. This implies that sickness and
suffering were themselves understood, in Perrin's words, as "eschato-
logical-conflict situations" that will make the crisis of the last days
descend from heaven, where the armies of good and evil already con-
front each other, into human situations essentially characterized by
conflict.
But more than anything else it was Jesus' associating with "tax col-
lectors and sinners" that must have been perceived as the major chal-
lenge of his ministry. Perrin characterizes this behavior of Jesus' as "an
acted parable," that of the "table fellowship of the Kingdom of God"
(Matt. 11:16-19, 8:11). The Kingdom is announced insofar as Jesus
himself interpreted his present fellowship as anticipating the eschato-
logical banquet of the great tradition common to both the prophets and
the apocalyptists. Yet at the same time, the announcement is a chal-
lenge. Jesus' table fellowship with "tax collectors and sinners" must
have been perceived as a major affront to the basic distinctions under-
lying the social and religious structures of the Jewish community. We
have an echo of this in Matt. 11:19: "The Son of Man came eating and
drinking, and they say, 'Behold a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of
tax collectors and sinners!"' This accusation clearly links Jesus' laxness
concerning fasting (in contrast to the apocalyptists around John the
Baptist) and his fraternizing with people outside the law. ForJesus, the
Kingdom is wherever a new relation is made by acceptance of the chal-
lenge. For his adversaries, his table fellowship sealed his fate.
From this, I think, proceeds the second function of rediscovery of the
teaching and ministry of Jesus, namely, the outline of a paradigm for
discipleship. This paradigm gives rise to a certain perplexity, even to

devastating as the flood (Matt. 7:26-27); the patience in waiting for the moment of sorting (the
parable of the seine net [Matt. 13:47-50]); the confidence that the "poor"will hear the good news
(Luke 14:7-21, 16:19-31); the expectation that the vineyard will be given to others (Mark 12:9
and parallels); and so on.
15 J. L. Austin, How to Do
Thingswith Words,ed. J. O. Urmson (London: Oxford University
Press, 1962).

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The Journal of Religion

fear and horror. The festive announcement turns into an arrest leading
to the death of the one who proclaimed it. Salvation is here among you,
he says. The time of the wedding has come. Yet to grasp the meaning
of this requires overcoming a mountain of hostility. It means under-
standing that preaching the joy of God can only engender scandal,
anger, even violence.

TOWARD THE STORY OF SUFFERING

So the announcement engenders confrontation, which, in turn, leads to

the cross.
Do we not have here, if not an already articulated plot, at least a
chain of occasions offering moorings for an eventual narrative? By
forming a chain in this way, do these occasions not suggest as well the
style for the story to be told? In contrast to official history, which cele-
brates the great deeds of rulers and masters, this will be a story of
suffering. It will be the prophecy of the Suffering Servant turned into a
narrative.
This is also signified in the parables. We have already referred to the
wicked tenants. More striking is that the enigmatic saying in
Matt. 11:12 here takes on its full tragic dimension: "From the days of
John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence
and men of violence take it by force." As Norman Perrin puts it, the
sign of the exorcism is inverted.16 It is no longer Satan's kingdom that
is pillaged but God's. Other exegetes say the same thing: "The kingdom
of heaven suffers violence and is hindered by men of violence." We
have already traced the line of this violence from the festive announce-
ment to the challenge to the refusal. This line passes through Jesus'
table fellowship with "tax collectors and sinners."" Here is the tragic
core linking the preaching of the Kingdom of God and the cross that
otherwise would remain unintelligible.

16
Perrin, Rediscovering,p. 77.
17 Perrin,
following a suggestion from Nils A. Dahl's "The Problem of the HistoricalJesus" (in
Kerygma andHistory,ed. C. E. Braaten and R. A. Harrisville [New York: Abingdon Press, 1962],
pp. 138-71, esp. pp. 158ff., which links table fellowship to the cross), writes, "Suchan act on the
part of Jesus is necessary, we would claim, to make sense of the fact of the cross"(Rediscovering,
p. 103). He suggests that Jesus' fellowship was prolonged in the community meals of the early
Christians: "It was the vividness of the memory of that pre-Easter fellowship that provided the
pattern for the development of that remarkable sense of fellowship between Christians and the
risen Lord"(ibid., p. 107). If this continuity could be attested, we would have confirmation of a
regular practice of Jesus' ministry and, hence, confirmation of the decisive role this practice
played in the antagonism it aroused.

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 From Proclamation to Narrative

With this theme of a story of suffering, we have thus reached the

point where the necessity to pass from proclamation to narrative con-
stitutes an internal requirement. What is in fact required is a narrative
that would be not a narrative of action but a passion narrative.
In conclusion, I should like to confirm Norman Perrin's conclusions
with those of Ulrich Simon. In a magnificient little book entitled Story
and Faith Ulrich Simon includes an important chapter called "The Story
of Stories.""1 Before considering the diversity of the Gospels, he, too,
stops to meditate on the uniqueness of a story that has to end in a
passion narrative. This story, he says, disrupts the world of heroic and
fantastic narratives. Not even the lamentable history of man's age-old
misery has produced a similar narrative. "The fact is that the whole
Passion narrative stands in stark contrast to Hebraic and non-Hebraic
accounts of heroic death or martyrdom.... Both hero-worship and
pity are equally excluded by the story." In this sense, the story to be
recounted does not belong to the tragic genre. "The inevitability of the
death of Jesus may appear to spell out tragedy, but the tone of the story
does not. There is too much factual murder in its substance."
What sort of reaction, then, was the original story supposed to pro-
duce? "The answer to our question is not difficult: the primary purpose
of the memorial is to arouse fear and indignation." Thus the story is a
history of suffering because it is required by the confession that "the
wages of sin are death." "The Passion narrative," Simon continues,
"sees death as the final answer to guilt. Jesus betrayed, arrested,
denied, tormented, accused, sentenced, executed, forsaken, becomes
through the narrative the norm of our malign destiny."
Of course, the resurrection gives a radically different horizon to this
death. But it does not belong to the narrative. It is the point of view
from which the story is told and, before being told, required. This story
truly ends with death because its meaning is entirely internal to it. It is
the death of the Suffering Servant. Paul, our first witness to this event,
accredited by its own meaning, attests that no report of the death of
Jesus ever existed apart from this meaning, namely, that "he died for
our sins." "This meaning had shaped the facts a long time before the
gospels were written." Simon can therefore write that "the Passion nar-
rative is therefore inseparable from a long and complex story which is
not told, but assumed."
In a somewhat similar sense I have spoken of a requirement of narra-
tion internal to the proclamation itself. The story of suffering is a "story
which is not told, but assumed."
18 Ulrich Simon,
StoryandFaith(London: SPCK Press, 1975), pp. 53-58. All quotations in the
subsequent paragraphs are from Simon, pp. 55-58.

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The Journal of Religion

This breakthrough to a history of suffering attests more than

anything else to the fact that the rediscovery of the ministry of Jesus is
neither vain nor useless. Indeed, something in the kerygma demanded
shaping "the material within the given tradition by going behind the
death of Jesus to delineate his life."

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