What’s the first task of every communicator, be they teacher, preacher, politician, communicator of any sort? Gain Attention. Get people’s attention. In order to be memorable and to get your message across, you have to be both surprising and familiar.

Nobody was better at making the familiar strange and surprising than Jesus. You can hear it coming when he says: “You have heard it said, but I say.” Jesus’ crowd communication combined this technique of defamiliarization with incredible charisma and, as we shall see, acoustical savvy. The familiar oral tradition that told the story of Israel and her relationship with God was now presented in parable form — a story format not totally unfamiliar to Jesus’ listeners, but a story format reformatted with metaphors and a tantalizingly open-ended tw…