Kingdom Stories: Introduction

One of Jesus’ most distinctive traits as a teacher was his extensive use of parables, short stories using everyday images to deliver messages on spiritual themes. While most teachers use analogies from time to time, this was a particular hallmark of Jesus’s teaching. Depending on how you define the term, the Gospels count from between thirty to over eighty parables. Moreover, parables make up a significant proportion of Jesus’ most famous teachings: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Sower, the Lost Sheep among many others. While these are familiar texts and I’ve reflected on them often over the years, I’m always aware that our reading of them can suffer from our familiarity with them. Like a knock-knock joke we’ve heard too many times, our minds jump immediately to our expected understanding of them without actually hearing what the story is saying. And so, they’re ripe for the more intentional kind of thought and hearing my Integral Hermeneutic method can provide.

As we saw in my recent series re-introducing this methodology through the Big Questions it asks, the goal of such a study is not to find “the” correct interpretation of a text — an impossible feat — but to emerge with an interpretation that is at the same time personal, informed, critical, and action-oriented.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring a selection of Jesus’ parables through this methodology. I trust the process will leave us better informed about and more engaged with these core pieces of Jesus’, and therefore of Christian, thought.

Today, drawing extensively on my post in my series exploring biblical genres, I’ll provide an overview of what parables are. Then next time, I’ll quickly reflect on some of the challenges we have in understanding the parables. Finally, in a third preliminary post before exploring the parables themselves, we’ll tackle the teacherly side of things and look at what Jesus himself said about why he taught so extensively in parables.

Defining Parables

Parables are notoriously difficult to define. Here is a smattering of definitions by biblical scholars:

• “brief comparison stories that challenge accepted values or illustrate a point” (SBL)*
• “stories or analogies involving people and activities familiar to one’s audience. But often they contain surprising twists that help listeners understand God’s ways with humanity from new perspectives.” (NIV)
• a story capable of “arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought” (C.H. Dodd, quoted in OSB)
• “A parable is a story or epigram which does not carry its meaning on the surface [but] challenges the hearer to engage with it in an educational process which, if the hearer brings to it the right attitude and openness, will result in their perceiving and responding to the truth. But it can equally be resisted, and dismissed as a mere story.” (France 509)

But what has been for me the most helpful definition has been that proposed by Ruben Zimmerman:

A parable is a short narratival (1) fictional (2) text that is related in the narrated world to known reality (3) but, by way of implicit or explicit transfer signals, makes it understood that the meaning of the narration must be differentiated from the literal words of the text (4). In its appeal dimension (5) it challenges the reader to carry out a metaphoric transfer of meaning that is steered by contextual information (6). (Puzzling the Parables of Jesus (2015)).

This sounds complicated, but each of the six pieces is easy enough to understand. He’s basically saying that a Parable is:

1. a story (e.g., a woman who loses a coin and is desperate to find it)
2. a story that makes no claims at being anything other than a story (e.g., Jesus was not talking about a specific woman in history who lost a specific coin)
3. grounded in people’s lived experiences (e.g., misplacing money is something most of us can relate to)
4. metaphorical, and is therefore not about what it says it’s about (e.g., the story is not really about losing coins)
5. asking something of its hearer/reader (e.g., the story is told to get the audience thinking about God’s persistent love)
6. a story that requires the audience to make the leap between the story and its meaning — a leap that often defies expectations (e.g., making the connection between a woman losing coins and God ‘losing’ humanity)

Most of the work of a parable happens in elements four through six of the above definition. And in this way, parables fit under the broader umbrella of Wisdom Literature: they explore themes of practical philosophy (that is, how to live well) but their wisdom comes in the process of wrestling with the stories and discerning the nature of their meaning. (Just as the wisdom of proverbs comes from discerning which ones apply in which situations, or the wisdom of folk tales comes from discerning which interpretive threads are most relevant.)

Before wrapping up this introductory post I’d like to take a quick look at how they relate to other parables in ancient Judaism.

Jesus’ Parables in Context

The parables of Jesus are found in the three ‘synoptic’ Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. (John’s Gospel also has Jesus teaching in extended analogies, but these have enough unique features that they are generally treated separately in New Testament scholarship.) In Matthew’s Gospel they make up the entirety of his third of five teaching discourses, giving them pride of place in his teaching (Case-Winters).

Like any religious teacher worth studying, there are aspects of Jesus’ teaching that make him very much a man of his culture, time, and place, and aspects that set him apart from it. Jesus’ parables are no exception to this rule and both of these are worth thinking about.

When thinking about parables in the Jewish tradition, some obvious Old Testament parallels come to mind. The most obvious one is the prophet Nathan’s story of the lamb with which he confronts King David about his shameful treatment of Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 12). But there are plenty of other extended analogies, such as the Song of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5.1-7) or Parable of the Farmers (Isaiah 28.23-29). (For more extensive examples, see Lischer 27, Gale, and Walton & Keener). The prophets’ actions could also carry a ‘parabolic’ weight. Many of these fit the model of Jesus’ parables in their strangeness and the challenge of their interpretation — think of Hosea marrying a prostitute or Ezekiel eating a scroll.

Despite these examples and the way the parables of Jesus fit nicely into broader Jewish Wisdom literature, the most instructive parallels come from early rabbinic literature (D Stern, Lischer 27, Walton & Keener). David Stern notes more than a thousand prables (or similar stories) in rabbinic midrash, dating from the first few centuries of the Common Era (D Stern). Many of these rabbinic examples share common forms, motifs, and archetypal characters with Jesus’ parables, demonstrating a shared cultural and literary heritage. But more interesting and helpful for us are the ways Jesus’ parables differ from those of the rabbis. Here are a few that came up in my research:

• Rabbinic parables are not found in free-form or narrative teachings, but only in Bible commentaries (D Stern, Scott 51, Lischer 28)
• Rabbinic parables are purely exegetical (about interpretation of existing texts) and lack the apocalyptic (revelatory), kerygmatic (proclamation-oriented), and prophetic (confronting the status quo and its leaders) sensibility characteristic of Jesus’ parables (D Stern, Lischer 30)
• Rabbinic parables are (almost) always explained, whereas explanations are only rarely provided in the Gospels (Walton & Keener)
• Jesus’ parables often defy expectation and convention in a way the rabbis’ do not (Lischer 30)

So what we have here is Jesus and the rabbis working in a common cultural framework and literary genre, but using it to significantly different effect. As Richard Lischer helpfully summarized it:

Jesus was a “dissenter” and a “protester” vis-à-vis his inherited tradition, which would have necessarily lent to his narrative art the confounding element of reversal… Given the presence of reversal in most of Jesus parables, we might claim the epiphany associated with reversal — the aha experience — as the distinctive mark of Jesus’ parables within the larger and diverse parabolic tradition. (Lischer 30)

This sense of dissent and protest gives Jesus’ parables a distinctive prophetic flair. And so it’s no surprise that, like the prophets of old, Jesus too sometimes acted in parables: Taking a coin from the mouth of a fish, calming the seas, feeding the five thousand, and even the cross itself could all be considered parables in action. And so, Robert Farrar Capon summarized Jesus and his relationship to parables nicely when he noted:

He balked at almost no comparison, however irreverent or unrefined. Apparently, he found nothing odd about holding up, as a mirror to God’s ways, a mixed bag of questionable characters: an unjust judge, a savage king, a tipsy slave owner, an unfair employer, and even a man who gives help only to bona-fide pests. Furthermore, Jesus not only spoke in parables; he thought in parables, acted in parables, and regularly insisted that what he was proclaiming could not be set forth in any way other than in parables. He was practically an ambulatory parable in and of himself. (Capon)

This post has introduced the series, defined parables as a literary genre, and discussed how Jesus’ parables both fit in and diverged from their use elsewhere in the Jewish tradition. The next post will look quickly at some added barriers we have today in understanding the parables.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.