What’s a parable?

My friend Ron Reed happened to quote writer C.H. Dodd today in offering the definition of the word parable. Ron referenced this in summing up the virtues of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, my favorite film of 2004.

It struck me that, while this definition eloquently describes Jesus’s storytelling, it also works in characterizing most of the movies that end up becoming my favorites:

A metaphor or simile
drawn from nature or common life
arresting the hearers by its vividness or strangeness
and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt to its precise application
to tease the mind into active thought.

Doesn’t that apply to most of the films you end up having long talks about with your friends and neighbors?

“To tease the mind into active thought.” That seems to me to be the essential function of art — indeed, of beauty. It is an invitation in space of play. And it seems to missing from most of what is labeled “contemporary Christian media.” In the rush of Christian “artists” to “deliver messages,” they pave right over the spaces meant for mystery, where we find and make meaning of things, where we have the joy of ongoing discovery, where the experience becomes a conversation instead of a lecture.

This is the space I want to live within.