Many Things in Parables

For the Week of June 16, 2003

In the Gospel of Matthew we read that one day Jesus left his house and went to a lake. Perhaps he was seeking some solitude, but as was often the case large crowds followed him, so much so that he was pressed on every side. He thus got into a boat, pushed off from shore, and separated himself from the crowds. Matthew then writes, “he told them many things in parables.” A little later he writes that Jesus “did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Matthew 13:3, 34).

Matthew uses deliberate exaggeration when he says that Jesus never taught without using parables, but in a sense that is not far from the truth. Depending on what you think passes for a parable, scholars agree that there are at least forty to fifty parables in the three synoptic Gospels, and maybe as many as seventy. The attached chart lists forty-eight parables. There are no parables at all in the Gospel of John, and although rabbinic parables are common, outside of the Gospels the Greek word “parable” only occurs two times in the New Testament (Hebrews 9:9; 11:19).¹

In the Gospels the notion of a parable clearly encompasses a wide range of uses—an enigmatic saying, a metaphor or a figurative saying, an expanded story, an allegory, a moral story meant to provoke us to decision, and even a parabolic action such as when Jesus cleansed the temple. Jesus used these simple, down to earth stories to make his message of the kingdom accessible to the ordinary Galilean peasant of his day. They illustrate and expound the nature of the kingdom of God. Very often they demand a decision from us. Although they might be simple, we should be careful not to miss the inherent shock value of so many of them. The worker who worked one hour is paid as much as the worker who labored all day?! Jesus praises an unrighteous steward?! A father throws a party for a vagrant son?! So, although the parables might be simple, at their best they should hit us like a sledge hammer and demand a kingdom decision. They are not, as the Sunday school definition would have it, merely earthly stories with a heavenly message.

Parables have one other function that is disturbing, even scary. After telling the parable of the sower and the soils, the disciples asked Jesus what it meant. In response, Jesus makes a clear distinction between the “insiders” like the disciples, and people whom he describes as “those on the outside.” Jesus then quotes Isaiah 6:9–10 to the effect that for those on the outside, parables are given to conceal or hide the truth, to prevent the listener from grasping his message (Mark 4:10–12; Matthew 13:11–17; Luke 8:10). What in the world can this possibly mean?

We know that even the disciples were sometimes puzzled by the parables, and had to ask Jesus to explain them. Further, we also know that for practical reasons Jesus sometimes had to hide or obscure his message from the hostile religious and political establishment. To talk about mustard seed, salt and fish nets was, in theory, hardly as subversive as talk about a kingdom more important than Caesar. The parables, then, would have made it at least a little more difficult to charge Jesus with sedition. Third, there is the so-called “secrecy motif” regarding the nature of Jesus’s mission. At least eight times Jesus gives instructions to remain silent and not to tell who he is or what he is up to (Mark 1:34, 44; 3:12; 5:43; 7:36; 8:26, 30; and 9:9).

Still, it seems like Jesus’s quotation of Isaiah 6:9–10 says more than that he was biding his time or being careful with the authorities. Jesus says that he uses parables deliberately to prevent people from understanding his message, and even to prevent them from being forgiven (Mark 4:12)! Parables clearly have an educational function, but perhaps for the careless they also have a judgmental function. The Greek prepositions hint that at the level of human decision cause and effect are intertwined. The parallel texts in Mark 4:12 and Luke 8:10 use the word “in order that.” Jesus used parables to cause confusion. But the parallel text in Matthew 13:13 uses the word “because,” indicating Jesus used parables as a consequence of people’s hardness. With the parables, there is clearly enough light for those who desire to see and follow Jesus, but enough obscurity to befuddle those who are only playing games with the kingdom message.

For the better part of 1500 years the church interpreted the parables as allegories, an interpretation that is universally rejected today. In an allegory, the literal elements of the story stand for something else, something religious, moral or spiritual. That is, there is a “deeper” meaning beyond the simple reading of the text. If nothing else, these allegorizations are incredibly creative. Irenaeus (c. 130–200) interpreted the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16) as follows. Those called to work at the first hour are those called at the beginning of creation, those called at the third hour are those who lived under the Old Covenant, those called at the sixth hour are those present during the ministry of Jesus, those called at the ninth hour he understood as his contemporaries, and those called at the eleventh hour are those present at the end of time. To take one more example, according to Tertullian (c. 160–215), in the parable of the Prodigal Son, the ring that the father gave to the son is baptism, while the banquet is the Lord’s Supper.

There were some objections to such allegorizations of the parables, but for the most part this errant interpretation held sway.² During the Reformation both Martin Luther and John Calvin objected to allegorization which, as one might easily imagine, lent itself to all sorts of fanciful readings. Both were eager to recapture the simple, literal meaning of the parable in its first century historical and cultural context. But even as late as the influential book Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (1841) by RC Trench, the allegorical method was alive and well. It was left to the German scholar Adolf Julicher and his book The Parables of Jesus (1888) to fully and finally discredit allegorization. A parable, insisted Julicher, has one major point of comparison or one key theme. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, the point is love of neighbor, and whether the Samaritan was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho or from Jerusalem to Bethlehem is incidental. Today, with but a few exceptions, the scholarly consensus follows Julicher.³

The parables are not cute stories or moralistic tales. Jesus used them to help us understand the implications of the reality that “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15). Thus, as Joachim Jeremias writes, “The strong man is disarmed, the powers of evil have to yield, the physician has come to the sick, the lepers are cleansed, the heavy burden of guilt is removed, the lost sheep is brought home, the door of the Father’s house is opened, the poor and the beggars are summoned to the banquet, a master whose kindness is undeserved pays wages in full, a great joy fills all hearts. God’s acceptable year has come. For there has appeared the one whose veiled majesty shines through every word and every parable—the Saviour.”⁴