Thus stories about landless peasants and rich landowners, or lords and slaves, or lepers and lawyers are lifted out of their social and historical context and reshaped into theological or moralistic fables bereft of any political or economic edge or consequence. When the sociocultural context indigenous to the story is ignored or suppressed, however, we inevitably recontextualize the story in terms of our own unconscious political assumptions. Our imposed schema often defy the coherence of the text itself. More importantly, though, this interpretive strategy functions to domesticate the parable to conform with our status quo. Thus stories meant to challenge our preconceptions are used to legitimate them.
Parables are, by design, irresistibly allegorical.
This is where the church has too often jumped from trying to understand Jesus' allegory to ourselves allegorizing the allegory. Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed . To illustrate this, let us look at one representative example of each kind of parable. Jesus attempted to illustrate the kingdom with everyday images and examples, precisely to emphasize that God's reign is not an other-worldly proposition. Yet our North American churches have managed to sever Jesus' metaphors from the real social world from which they were drawn, erasing all economic or political characteristics of God's sovereignty.