I also very vividly remember my response.
A congregation's first response, I told them, upon hearing a sermon on a parable of Jesus, ought to be dread. These things are sharp and simple. You should hear your heart pound. Because Jesus is announcing and challenging us with the Kingdom of God in the parables.
Thing is, by the end of their sermons, all my fears would be alleviated -- no need for alarm; God's command isn't so uncompromising; Jesus really demands nothing of me after all!
It's curious to me that pastors find the parables so easy to preach -- so easy, in fact, that by the time my preaching students got to preach, these parables were so tame that they all had a common way of preaching them.
In truth, I think, Jesus' parables ought to be difficult to preach. At least they are for me.
Difficult to preach, I think, because Jesus is so straightforward. These parables as so hard because we want to preach them in a way that keeps us from going all-in on the Kingdom and obedience to King Jesus.
Or maybe we preachers are trying to protect our congregations from God. After all, it's God himself who bursts through these stories, coming on the scene with the unaccountable strangeness of a seed in the ground, with the disruptive suddenness of a thief in the night.
In his great book on The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer highlights our tendency to "interpret" the teaching of Jesus in a way that leaves us safe, comfortable, unchallenged. Referring to typical interpretations of the story of the rich young ruler, Bonhoeffer remarks: "Everywhere it is the same -- the deliberate avoidance of simple, literal obedience. How is such a reversal possible? What has happened that the word of Jesus has to endure this game? Anywhere else in the world where commands are given, the situation is clear. A father says to his child: go to bed! The child knows exactly what to do. But a child drilled in pseudo-theology would have to argue thus: Father says go to bed. He means you are tired; he does not want me to be tired. But I can also overcome my tiredness by going to play. So, although father says go to bed, what he really means is go play".
In a different context, Karl Barth once told a little parable of his own: "To what shall I liken the basic principles of [liberal] theology? Is it not like a clock which is so cleverly constructed that the hands move from right to left instead of from left to right?" Our preaching about Jesus is often "cleverly constructed" in exactly the same way.
See, our preaching of the parables these days makes Jesus so tame, so easy to follow, that he just anoints the status quo, and we thereby make the Kingdom so small and simple and ... tame and bland. We're all so Liberal with our preaching these days (conservatives and liberals), that we're hardly preaching Jesus.
Preachers who want to preach Jesus' parables well need to work through Robert Capon's Kingdom, Grace, Judgment and Richard Lischer's new Reading the Parables.