Well, we all agree floods happen and God creates and sustains everything.
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
The rabbi isn’t failing to reduce, he is simply rejecting the central thrust of the story. I have to wonder what to also make of God’s promise. Was he saying he was never going to allow a natural local flood again?
For me, Jesus mentions both Noah and the Ark. The proper way to understand this is a reference to a historical person since that is what everyone believed at the time and he shows up in Biblical genealogies. Jesus would have grown up—along with with all the other Jewish kids—hearing this story over and over again as events in the past. The only way to make Jesus’s statement a “literary reference” is via ad hoc harmonization where you know coming in the flood never happened/wasn’t specially sent by by God so Jesus couldn’t possibly have meant that. Despite the intention of Jesus in teaching preparedness, that is not the natural way of taking the account in context.
And I’m going against my own thoughts here:
It just seems a very rehearsed way of understanding Jesus…
Vinnie