I had a homiletics teacher, Steve Brown, who taught us, that if you have a thought in the study that you think is to bold or shocking to say in the pulpit, say it. I would not go that far. But Jesus, in his parables, did make some shocking statements or at least introduced the element of surprise. Craig Blomberg acknowledged this dimension of parables: “More often than not, there was a surprising reversal between the character a first-century Jewish audience would have expected to be the hero or good example and the one who actually turned out to play that role.”[1]