"When a metaphor contains a radically new vision of world it gives absolutely no information until after the hearer has entered into it and experienced it from inside itself. In such cases the hearer's first reaction may be to refuse to enter into the metaphor and one will seek to translate it immediately into the comfortable normalcy of one's ordinary linguistic world.... From the outside it may sound squietly or even stridently insance. One must risk entrance before one can experience its validity.... [I]t is not a question even of imagining at the limits of one's imagination but rather or imagning wholly new ways of imagining."
In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan.