Why
Parables?
October
28, 2020
It’s one of the
most characteristic things about Jesus. It can also be one of the most
irritating. Jesus almost never told anybody anything significant straight. He
didn’t give logical, coherent explanations of much of anything. Instead he
spoke in two primary ways. One was through short aphorisms, pithy little
sayings that raise as many questions as they answer—or more. Love your enemies.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Most Christians and
many non-Christians know a lot of Jesus’ aphorisms. (I won’t include any from
the Gospel of John here because I don’t think Jesus ever said any of them, not
that that necessarily detracts from their meaning.)
Jesus’ other way
of speaking can be even more confounding than his aphorisms. He mostly taught
by telling parables. Some of Jesus’ parables are famous and well known,
especially two of them from the Gospel of Luke, the Parable of the Good
Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Others are much more obscure,
the parable of the ten bridesmaids for example. Jesus taught through these and
many other parables, some of which are famous and some of which are not.
People have
wondered why Jesus taught in parables rather than giving his listeners God’s own truth simply and directly from his day to
ours. I mean, why did he tell a whole story about a man beaten by robbers and a
Samaritan who helped him rather than just say do what you can to help people in
need? Why did he tell a whole story about a wayward son whom his father
welcomes back no questions asked rather than just say when you turn to God, God
will welcome you home no questions asked? It’s a good question without an
obvious or easy answer. Jesus’ disciples certainly heard all of his parables.
They knew that he used parables when he was talking to throngs of the people
but not when he was talking to them. They asked him at least once why he spoke
to the people in parables. He answered, “The reason I speak to them in parables
is that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do
they understand.” Matthew 13:13 NRSV. That’s essentially all the answer the
disciples got to their question of why Jesus spoke to the people in parables.
I’ve long been
puzzled by that response of his. Jesus seems to be saying that he speaks to the
people in parables because they are dull and slow to understand what he has to
say. I’ve always thought wait a minute there Jesus. If they can’t understand
straight talk about the kingdom of God wouldn’t you want to make it easier to
understand what you say not harder by hiding your point in some little story
you made up? Parables make you harder to understand not easier. I admit that
maybe I say that because I learn better from straight talk than from stories,
but still: Why parables?
For some time now
I’ve had an answer to why I think Jesus taught in parables, but it’s not quite the
one he gives in the passage from Matthew that I quoted. To get at that answer
we need to understand just what a parable is. In form a parable is a very short
story. A man gets beaten half dead and is left beside the road. A priest and a
Levite walk past doing nothing to help the beaten man. A Samaritan comes along
and does help him. Jesus says go and do likewise. A man has two sons. The
younger of them gets his father to give him what would be his share of his
father’s estate upon the father’s death. The son gets the money, takes it to a
far away place, squanders it, and falls into dire need. He returns home, and
his father welcomes him back no questions asked. His brother doesn’t get it.
Very short little stories indeed.
Jesus however
didn’t teach in parables because he wanted to entertain his audiences as a
great storyteller. He always had a much more serious intention when he told a
parable. Jesus’ parables are teaching tools, but they aren’t direct statements
of some lesson Jesus wanted people to learn. Sometimes the point of a parable
is fairly obvious. Be like the Samaritan and help people in need. Sometimes
however the point isn’t obvious at all. Why did that vineyard owner pay all the
workers the same amount in wages when some of them had worked far more hours
than others had? Even a parable like that of the Good Samaritan that has one
quite obvious meaning can turn out to have many more meanings than the obvious
one. The Parable of the Good Samaritan has at least five distinct meanings.[1]
Perhaps the greatest virtue of Jesus’ parables is precisely that they don’t
give a moral teaching directly. Instead they invite the listener in to do her
own work of discernment to discover what the parable means for her. The
parables’ vagueness and different levels of meaning give the listener room to
poke around, look in all the corners and under the rug to see what he can
discover. Jesus doesn’t dictate truth to us in his parables. Rather he invites
us on a journey of discovery that we undertake in a quest to discover meaning
for ourselves and our world.
That’s what I’ve long
understood as a possible reason for why Jesus used so many parables. As I recently
mused on what Jesus said his reason was, however, it occurred to me that Jesus
was probably right in his explanation of the matter. Many of the people of his
audiences wouldn’t easily grasp Jesus’ truth if he just laid it on them in straight
statements of fact. Very few of them were at all educated or culturally
sophisticated. Most of the were desperately poor country folk just trying to
get by under very difficult circumstances. Jesus’ truths were radical in the
extreme in his day. (They are in our day too, but that’s a subject for another
essay or maybe a whole book.) Virtually no one, not even Jesus’ closest
disciples, found them easy or their meaning for their lives and their world
obvious. So Jesus put them into little stories, told those stories to the
people, and trusted that by hearing and entering into the story at least some
in his audience would get some important meaning out of them.
Whatever his
reason was for doing it, telling parables was Jesus’ primary teaching tool. We
don’t know how Jesus’ little teaching stories were received in his day. We do
know that many of them continue to be powerful teaching tools today nearly two
thousand years after Jesus told them. They invite us in. We can have dialogues
with them. We return to them again and again, often seeing a new meaning in
them or noticing some little twist in the story that we missed before that
offers new insights or at least leads us to ask more questions. So why
parables? Mostly because they’re great teaching tools. Jesus’ first audiences
learned from them. So do we. Thanks be to God!
[1]
See Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour
for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume 3, The New Testament
(Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, 2019) 126-133.
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