With Many Parables Jesus Spoke the Word
Introduction
It is estimated that parables represent over one third of Jesus’ teachings found in the synoptic Gospels; they have become in the eyes of many the hallmark of his teaching style. In the fourth chapter of his gospel, after only a handful of parables have been recorded, Mark says that Jesus used many other parables to speak the word to the people. Mark 4.34 : 34 He did not say anything to them without using a parable. Clearly then, if we want to hear the actual ticking of Jesus’ mind, if we want a entryway into the meaning of the Gospel, we can hardly do better than to study his parables, with our minds open not only to learning but to joy.
Any study of the parables faces one troublesome obstacle from the very outset. That obstacle, strangely enough, is familiarity. Most Christians, on reading the Gospel’s statement that “Jesus spoke in parables” assume they know exactly what is meant. “Oh yes,” they say, “and a wonderful teaching device it was, too. All those unforgettable stories we’re so fond of, like the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.” But familiarity can be deceiving. It can give us the illusion that we have understood the meaning of something just because we have heard it over and over. Most of this study, therefore, will be devoted to the removal of the obstacle of a too-facile familiarity.
The biggest source of error bred by our familiarity with the parables is the tendency to read and interpret them as if Jesus were speaking directly to us, Christians of the twenty-first century. In fact, in the Gospels, Jesus is not directly addressing modern Christians, nor any Christians at all. His audience is composed entirely of first-century Jews. As a result, the meaning that we tend to attribute spontaneously to a parable, looking at it from our own perspective, may be different from the meaning that it had when Jesus first spoke it. We often miss the point because we don’t put the parables in their original context: the ministry of Jesus as a prophet if the kingdom among the Jews of the first century.
The important thing is not the what we want to read into a parable, but what Jesus wanted to put into it. Our work will therefore be more exegetical than homiletical, more textual than practical. We are not going to treat the parables as sermon illustrations or as an reservoir of proof texts for current church doctrine but rather as elements of the central message that Jesus proclaimed to his Jewish contemporaries. This means we will have to do something very difficult: step out of our own churchly perspective and put ourselves in the context of Jesus’ first audience.
What Is a Gospel?
The first question to look at is the nature of the writings in which the parables appear. What is a “gospel”? The original Greek word eu-angellos means “good news” or “joyful message”. Two unique facts about Christianity emerge from this word.
First, Christianity is news: concrete facts, specific historical events that really happened and were seen in the space-time world of ours. All other religions (except biblical Judaism) are essentially systems of abstract truths: philosophies, moralities, religious laws, mythologies, spiritual techniques and disciplines, mystical intuitions, rituals, psychological or social ideologies. In other words, something abstract and timeless. Buddha could have lived and written in 18th-century France instead of 6th-century B.C India without any appreciable change in his message. Not so Jesus of Nazareth.
Second, it is good news. J.R.R. Tolkien says, “There is no tale ever told that men more wish were true.” Rightly understood, the Gospel is “tidings of great joy”. But in the modern world it is often not rightly understood, and is seen as bad news: as repressive, negative, dehumanizing, imperialistic and threatening. That fact says nothing about Christianity, but a lot about the modern mind.
The Gospels pursue essentially one single objective: to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament, the one the Jews were waiting for. John 20.30-31: 30 Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. Here is the good news that the four evangelists want to proclaim and establish as true: the story of Jesus—his birth, his teachings, his miracles, his ministry and especially the events of the end of his life (his death-resurrection-ascension, which John calls the “Hour” of Jesus)—accomplishes the eternal purpose of God foretold in the Old Testament. This eternal purpose comprises two essential elements: the reign of the Davidic Messiah over Israel and the whole world; the redemption of the chosen people and of all the nations.
In general, the scope of the four Gospels is messianic and Jewish instead of churchly and Christian. Their center of interest is not the Church or even Christian discipleship but the passion of Jesus. The Christ did not come to bring a new Law to the world or a new religious teaching; he came to establish his reign and redeem mankind. And he would do it by the completely surprising and unexpected means of his death-resurrection-ascension. If the Gospels recount the public teaching ministry of Jesus among the Jews, it is because his actions and his teachings serve to prepare Israel, the chosen people, for this disconcerting fulfillment of the messianic prophecies.
The Nature and Purpose of Parables
The second question to look at by way of introduction is the nature of parables and the parabolic method. What is a parable anyway? The English dictionary defines a parable as: “a short fictitious story using events or facts of everyday life to illustrate a moral attitude or a religious principle.” That definition reminds me of the one I learned as a kid in Sunday school: a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. We tend to see parables as a kind of fable from which we can draw a practical lesson or moral.
This conception of parables proves to be entirely insufficient and even misleading if we adopt is as our starting point for understanding the parables of Jesus. In Greek, the word parable derives from a preposition and a verb. The verb ballo means “to throw”, and the preposition para means “alongside”. A parable is a throwing alongside, a comparison. The very essence of Jesus’ parables lies in the juxtaposition of two things or two situations.
The first term of the comparison is the story that Jesus tells his listeners. Actually, a parable is not always a complete story, such as the tale of the prodigal son or the good Samaritan. Sometimes it is simply an example or object, such as the fig tree at the approach of spring (Matthew 24.32-34), or a house divided against itself (Mark 3.22-26), or the wind that blows wherever it pleases (John 3.8). But usually, it is a brief story or a descriptive scene, a picture in words.
Whatever the specific form Jesus gives to a parable, his method is always active. Twenty-two of his parables begin with a question: “What do you think?”, “How can…?”, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like…?” “Who among you…?”, “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” The question can also come near the end of the story. The whole parable appears as a question which the listener is invited to think about and answer. Even in the parables which do not explicitly ask a question, Jesus draws his listeners into the interplay of the story so they cannot remain passive spectators. His whole technique is to get them to react personally. They have a role to play, an approval or an assent to give, a position to take, a judgment to render, a moral verdict to form.
Every parable has what scholars have regularly called a point of comparison (tertium comparationis): not the moral of the story, but the precise point toward which the whole story converges and about which the listener is called on to take a position or to make a judgment. The first step in interpreting a parable is to look for the point. That is not as easy as it may first appear. In general, however, the point appears at the end of the parable, which helps us to distinguish it from the secondary details.
A parabolic story does not stand on its own, it is only the first term of a comparison. It is a fictitious story meant to shed light on, make clear and help understand a real situation. The comparison works by taking the judgment we are called to make about the point of the story and applying it to the real situation Jesus intends to clarify. The point serves as the bridge, the link between the two terms of the comparison.
Sometimes, a parable offers multiple secondary points of comparison or links, each detail having its own particular meaning. In this case, the parable looks somewhat like an allegory. Such is the case, for example, of the parable of the Sower and of the Tares.
Now we come to the key question: Where do we look for the real situation that Jesus wants to shed light on in a parable? Most of the time, this is where we fall wide of the mark. Because we bring to our reading a preconceived idea that to us is perfectly obvious: a parable must have a direct practical application for us, Christians of the 21st century or of any other century. So we look for the second term of the comparison in the life of the church or in church history, or in Christian discipleship or the great timeless principles of Christian ethics or theology.
In other words, we disregard the real context of the parables: the ministry of Jesus among the Jews of the generation that would witness the fulfillment of the messianic promises. Jesus uses parables so his original Jewish listeners can understand what is happening before their very eyes.
Does that mean we can never use the parables of Jesus to draw theological, moral or practical lessons for ourselves? Of course not. But we have to take into account that in general the parables are not aimed directly at us.
The General Scope of Jesus’ Teaching
When all is said and done, it is the preaching of Jesus that constitutes the context which will allow us to understand a given parable. So, before moving on to the parables themselves, it will be useful to briefly list the three parameters that define and delimit the scope of his message.
1. The public teaching ministry that Jesus exercises during his life on earth is addressed above all and almost exclusively to the people of Israel. Matthew 15.24 : 24 “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” We can therefore expect that the parables have to do with the specific situation of their original audience: the Jews of the time of Jesus.
2. The one central specific subject of Jesus’ preaching in the Gospels, from the first day of his ministry to his death on the cross, is the imminent coming of the messianic kingdom. Mark 1.14-15: 14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”
In his public teaching, Jesus never explicitly declares to a Jewish audience that he is the Messiah. On the contrary, he adamantly forbids the use of that title by demons, disciples and multitudes. Why? Because his messiahship is to be revealed only at the end of his life, by his death, resurrection and ascension. In the meantime, Jesus limits himself to proclaiming the nearness of the time when God will finally give a descendant of David royal authority over Israel and the world. In other words, before becoming the king of the messianic kingdom, Jesus will be its prophet, its messenger, its herald with the mission of proclaiming to the Jewish people that the kingdom is at hand.
This proclamation includes a call to repentance, whose requirements are defined in the ethical and “religious” teachings of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount. The Jews have strayed from the Father and need to turn back to him. Unrepentance of their sin and their deformed religiosity will prevent them from accepting the kingdom when it arrives. We can therefore expect that the teaching of the parables is related to a specific moment of redemptive history: the moment when the reign of the Messiah is about to arrive in Israël, the moment where Israël must prepare itself for the coming kingdom by repentance.
3. In the public teaching of Jesus the good news of the coming kingdom is counterbalanced by some bad news: the prophecies of divine judgment that the Messiah-King will carry out against the unbelieving Jewish theocracy. A terrible punishment threatens the generation of Jews who will reject their Messiah and persecute his church. This judgment consists in being excluded from the kingdom and will be consummated historically by the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman armies in 70 A.D. Matthew 24.36: 36 “I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation.”
Here then is the chronological framework in which we must, in general, seek the real life situation that constitutes the second term of the comparison in the parables of Jesus.
That is the theory. In future posts, we will be applying this approach to some of Jesus’ parables to see if we can bring them more sharply into focus. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.