Reading Claypool: Parables and People

Stories Jesus Still Tells, Glad Reunion, and The First to Follow

By Walter B. Shurden

Anyone who knew Dr. John R. Claypool understood two things about him. He was a people person, and he was a parable person.

He received much of his energy in life from relationships, from interfacing with other people. When you talked with him, you felt his focus, his eyes like lasers. But this was not an intimidating focus, not that kind of presence that tongue-tied you or created awkwardness or discomfort. To the contrary, Claypool’s presence welcomed. It said, “I’m here, I’m interested, tell me more.”

More often than not, when focusing on you, he was encouraging you, affirming you, or learning from you. He was fond of asking, “What’s keeping you alive?” This was not chitchat or small talk, no fishing expedition for brag. He genuinely wanted to learn from you. He wanted to know what kept you going and growing, what kept you afloat during life’s storms.

And his presence encouraged. After I had spoken to a group where he was present one day, he came up afterwards, and we had a brief conversation. He brought up the topic of a position in denominational life that was vacant. “Might that be the shape of your obedience?’ he quietly asked. I am not sure how he intended the question to be heard. But I know how I heard it. I heard it not so much as a question of my vocational intention as his statement of personal affirmation. He encouraged, complimented and lifted with language hard to forget. “Might that be the shape of your obedience?” he asked.

While Claypool was a people person, he was, as all knew who heard him preach or read his sermons, a story person. Of his generation of preachers in America, maybe only Fred Craddock exceeded him in story-telling. They said of the great Hal Luccock of Yale Divinity School, “He had homiletical eyes.” So did John Claypool. He saw nuggets of truth in events in which others paid little attention. I often read him and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” or, “Why didn’t I see that?”

Before I ever met him personally, or heard him preach, a close friend of mine, a member of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, where Claypool was then pastor, wrote me of his preaching. “He takes a text, tells a story, often a very cornpone story, and then applies that text and story in a theological way to the lives of his hearers. It is remarkable for both its simplicity and its profundity.”

I concentrate on three of his books here that deal specifically with parables and people. In 1993, McCracken Press published his Stories Jesus Still Tells: The Parables. Cowley Publications issued a second revised edition in 2000, and this is the edition that I will work from in this article. Also in 2000, Insight Press published a revised edition of Glad Reunion: Meeting Ourselves in the Lives of Biblical Men and Women. Again, any quotations or references I have will come from this revised edition. Claypool’s wife, Ann Wilkinson Claypool, edited and published his last book in 2008, three years after his death. Another book about biblical people, it was entitled The First to Follow: The Apostles of Jesus. Morehouse Publishing released this volume.

When ranking Claypool’s books, for me it goes like this. His first, Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, was his best. In that seminal little book he recounted the heartrending death of his young daughter along with the hopeful birth of a theology that said, “Life is Gift.” His Beecher lectures on preaching, The Preaching Event, is his second most important book. In that book he tells how he did what he so skillfully did in the pulpit. That book will live, especially for preachers. Claypool’s book on the parables, Stories Jesus Still Tells, is the third most important of all his published works. It shows Claypool at work with the Bible and his astonishing ability to make applications to contemporary life.

In the “preface” to Stories Jesus Still Tells, the great preacher said, “No part of the historic biblical canon has blessed me more thoroughly than the parables of our Lord.” The parables, he pointed out, usually began as portraits of other people and suddenly became mirrors in which people saw things about themselves that they had not seen before.

Recalling how King David eventually saw himself reflected in the parable of Nathan, Claypool said,

“This is how Jesus worked the miracle of reconciliation again and again. People would come to him in all degrees of panic, fear, and anger. Yet instead of confronting them head-on and driving them deeper into their defensiveness, he would, like Nathan, defuse their anxiety by saying, ‘Let me tell you a story . . .  “ Then drawn in by the narrative and with their defenses down, the listeners would see the story as a mirror, and its light would make their personal darkness visible” (5).

But this was not only Nathan’s approach with David or Jesus’ approach in his parables; it was also Claypool’s approach to preaching and to pastoral ministry. He never came across as the mad prophet, excoriating his hearers because of their moral shortfall. Their spiritual power and surprising endings have caused some to refer to the parables of Jesus as “spiritual hand grenades.” The parables certainly uprooted, but Jesus, said Claypool, did not use them to “blow people up” but to “calm people down.” Ditto Claypool!

With 10 chapters in his book, Claypool included all of the major parables of Jesus, including, among others, the parables of the Talents, the Petulant Children, the Good Samaritan, the Rich Fool, the Pharisee and the Publican, and the Final Judgment. Each of Claypool’s expositions contains dazzling spiritual insights, memorable lines and marvelous stories about the stories that Jesus still tells.

One reason ministers and laity alike read Claypool so regularly and enthusiastically was because he often had some slightly different angle on scripture. For example, in his exposition of the parable of the Good Samaritan, he asked the question as to why the Samaritan rather than the priest or the Levite stopped to give aid to wounded one. “What keeps us,” he asked, “from acting out of our highest and best identities?”

With artistic imagination, something that always enriches the preacher’s work, he gave five responses.  We fail to stop and help the wounded in life because (1) we lack courage, (2) we lack time, (3) we lack compassion, or (4) we lack the things that can be of help. Each is a sermon in itself! But Claypool’s fifth reason for why we fail to move toward suffering was his most creative. (5) We lack deep hurt in our own lives.

Samaritans knew what it was like to be hurt, to be ignored, and to be insulted and forgotten. People who have suffered terrible injustices in life respond in one of three ways. They give up; they fight back; or they give back. This Samaritan took the third approach. He took the injustices and sufferings of his own experience in life and transformed them into acute awareness and sharp sensitivity to others lying on the side of life’s road.

Personally, I have never been surprised at the anger of African Americans, given their tormented history in our nation. What surprises me most is the deep compassion of so many Black people. More often than I would ever imagine some have taken deep personal pain and transformed it into concern for the wounded, just like the Samaritan. Remember your own suffering, Claypool seemed to say, and you will find ways to ease the suffering of others. You can find this kind of creativity in each chapter of his book on the parables.

Claypool published two books about biblical people. Glad Reunion contains 17 sermons on characters in the Old Testament. These sermons include two women, Rebekah and Ruth, and 15 men, stalwarts such as Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

After describing a Thanksgiving reunion on his old family farm in Kentucky, Claypool said,

“I have come to believe that what is true in a physical-family sense is also true in a religious sense; that is, in order to understand ourselves as the people of God, we need to look back across the centuries to all that lies behind us. And this, of course, is where the Old Testament fits so beautifully into the scheme of things, for the Old Testament is to the church what that family farm in southern Kentucky was to my particular family—namely, a place of remembrance, a repository of history and tradition. It can even be thought of as a family scrapbook in which pictures and memorabilia of the past are preserved. The Old Testament is where we get in touch with our religious root system, and this is as important to our faith as family stories are to a particular family heritage.”  

You do not have to read much of Claypool to realize how important the Old Testament was to him as a Christian preacher. He harks back constantly to the lessons of Genesis 1-11, especially 1-3. One is not surprised, therefore, that he spent extensive sermonic time with the major personalities of the Old Testament, people who lived their faith in light of those early biblical chapters.

The last book that has John Claypool’s name on it was assembled, edited and published posthumously by his wife, Ann Wilkinson Claypool. Consisting of studies that he presented to Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1992, the book profiles New Testament personalities, specifically the apostles of Jesus. Appropriately, the book bore the title The First to Follow, including material on Andrew, Simon Peter, Philip, Nathanael, Thomas, Simon the Zealot, Matthew, Thaddaeus, Judas, James the Greater, James the Lesser and John.

In The First to Follow as in Glad Reunion, Claypool often provides helpful historical background for understanding the Bible. For example, pages 82-85 of The First to Follow contain a lucid overview of the history of Israel as background for understanding the Zealots, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and other groups of first century Judaism.

But one can never forget who Claypool was. He was not primarily a technical biblical scholar. He was a preacher. As so many have said, “He was the preachers’ preacher.” Regarding the apostles, he said, “As I write about these twelve individuals who lived long ago, my concern is more personal and contemporary than it is historical.” Citing Brueggemann, he said, “If ‘the Story’ does not connect with our own stories, then studying the Bible is only a spectator sport.”

Claypool preached and taught about both Old and New Testament characters because he believed that “one of the best ways to understand ourselves is through stories about other people.” And he noted about the apostles, “Jesus did not wait for people to be perfect in order to call them into the circle of God’s love.” Innocence is gone. What remains is a guilty self and what to do with it.

Perfectionism, he asserted, is one of the highest forms of self-abuse. We are frail and flawed beings. To try and hide that reality only separates us from an authentic relationship with God. “As I look at these disciples Jesus chose,” he said, “it is clear that there is hope for every one of us, for they were far from perfect.”

You can read Claypool for information alone. But that is not why he preached and taught. You can read Claypool for inspiration alone. But neither was that the reason he preached and taught. You can read Claypool for interpretations alone. But he neither preached nor taught to be unique. He preached and he taught to help you realize that creation is a huge party God gives so you can find joy and self-worth. He preached and taught to urge you to use your power and freedom to bless others. He preached and taught to help you understand that you can’t pay too much for the right things in life but that you can pay too much for the wrong things in life. For all those reasons and more, “reading Claypool” makes you want to live more deeply, more devotedly, and more lovingly.

— Walter “Buddy” Shurden is a Baptist scholar, preacher, writer, connoisseur of good preaching, and mentor to many. He is an emeritus professor at Mercer University and lives in Macon, GA with his wife, Kay. This essay is the fourth in a 6-part series which he has written for Christian Ethics Today.

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