Why Parables?

Last week, we defined a parable as a short story that twists scenes from everyday life to speak on some spiritual theme, requiring a leap of understanding that subverts the audience’s expectations. Then last time, we discussed some of the added complications we have today in reading the parables well. But today we’ll see that those complications are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of our interpretive challenges. Because, according to Jesus, the parables may not have been meant to be understood in the first place. (Or were they?)

We often think about parables as object lessons, analogies used by Jesus to make it easy for his audience to understand him. This is the obvious answer to the question of why Jesus taught in parables — any good teacher would do the same. But Jesus’ own words suggest that this isn’t what he was doing at all. And so today we’ll look at what Jesus said and what it could mean for us as we study the parables over the next couple of months.

(If you don’t have the time or interest to read the whole, very long, post, feel free to skip to the summary and conclusions at the end.)

Text

All three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) record Jesus explaining the use of parables and their story is pretty much the same, differing in only the details. For today’s study, we’ll be using Matthew’s version, since it’s the longest of the three:

….[13.9] Let anyone with ears hear!

[10] The disciples approached him and said to him, “Why are you speaking to them in parables?” [11] And answering, he said to them: “Because to you it has been given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it has not. [12] For to those who have, [more] will be given — and it will be abundant; but to those who do not have, even what they have will be taken away from them. [13] This then is why I speak to them in parables, that: “seeing they do not see and hearing they neither hear nor understand.” [14] Indeed Isaiah’s prophetic oracle is fulfilled in them:

In hearing, you will hear but never understand, and in seeing, you will see but never perceive.
[15] For the heart of this people has become fat;
They have heard with heavy ears, and they have shut their eyes,
so that they might never see with their eyes or hear with their ears
and understand with their heart and turn and I would heal them.

[16] But blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear. [17] For, Amen!, I say to you that many of the prophets and righteous longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it.

While Mark and Luke’s versions differ a bit (mostly in the extent of the quote from Isaiah), all three follow the same structure:

• An exhortation from Jesus to really hear what he’s saying (bridge between the the Parable of the Sower and the question about parables)
• A narrative setup and question from the disciples about parables
• Answer:
  • Secrets given to insiders
  • Quote from Isaiah 6
  • Ending (Matthew and Mark only)

Matthew’s version also includes a comment about more being given to those who already have, which is included in the other two Gospels a bit later in the same general discourse (Mark 4.24-25; Luke 8.18-19).

Experience & Encounter

I find this to be a confusing and surprising text. At first glance it doesn’t sound like Jesus. It sounds harsh and has Jesus promoting rather than tearing down divisions of religious ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, which runs against the grain of his teaching. The saying about more being given to those who already have, while those with less lose what they already have, seems unjust, and Jesus’ appropriation of the Isaiah text feels as shocking as the Isaiah text itself. What’s happening here?

In addition to this unexpected version of Jesus, we also encounter ‘the disciples’, who form the insiders given special insight into God’s workings. There’s also the mysterious ‘other’, the nameless and countless masses presumably on the outside looking in (yet who are generally portrayed as being open to Jesus’ message).

So, I leave my initial reading with a few questions that will guide the study:

• Is there anything in the literary context that can help us understand the text?
• What might Jesus be getting at with his insistence that more will be given to those who have?
• What is the significance of the Isaiah quote?
• What is the relationship between insiders and outsiders that Jesus seems to be getting at?

Explore

Literary Context

All three Synoptic Gospels record these words from Jesus in response to the Parable of the Sower. We’ll look at that text next time, but on the surface, it is about various kinds of reception and response to God’s message. In this way, the exhortation to really hear (”Let anyone with ears [to hear] hear”) carries an emphatic meaning: Jesus wants his audience to understand what he’s saying in the parable, but that’s also the theme of the parable itself.

All three versions place the discourse at around the time when opposition to Jesus starts to grow. Here in Matthew’s Gospel the interaction is placed right after Jesus raises the ire of the Pharisees by healing on the Sabbath, which is the point at which the narrative shifts from one of success to one of opposition. Mark places the story earlier in Jesus’ ministry, but on the heels of a growing conflict with his family and his subsequent redefinition of what family means. And Luke places it right before Jesus begins to teach about this coming death. So there seems to be a transitional function here: At a time when the differences between those who are receptive to Jesus’ teaching and those who reject it are growing more defined, Jesus begins to teach more in parables, and his words here suggest that this is to make that difference even starker.

God’s Justice? (More will be given…)

About the common Gospel saying “to those who have, more will be given … but to those who do not have, even what they have will be taken away from them” (Matthew 13.12, cf. 25.19; Mark 4.25; Luke 8.18, 19.26), the commentaries have surprisingly little to say. The important question is whether this is a prescriptive saying or a descriptive one: That is to say, does God actively give to those who already have and take away from those who don’t, or is it a general truth that one has to have in order to get more? The latter seems the most likely solution, both logically and theologically. It was a basic economic principle known in the ancient world as much as today that the best way to get further ahead in the world is to already be ahead (Walton & Keener).* As the saying today puts it, there’s nothing harder than making your first million and nothing easier than to make your second. (We might also think about the phenomenon in youth sports where the best players get spots on better teams, with better training, coaching, and competition, and so get even better as compared to the rest of their cohort.) The flip-side is the well-known phenomenon of how it’s expensive to be poor, with cheaper products having to be replaced more often, and fees being waived for those who have more money. So in our world it often does seem like the rich do get richer and the poor poorer.

Here Jesus applies this principle to spiritual perception: The harder one’s heart, the more crowded one’s life, or the more certain one is about one’s existing beliefs, the more difficult it will be to truly hear and understand God. Conversely, the more attuned one already is to hearing God’s messages, the easier it will be to hear and apply further. In the ancient Mediterranean world, what the New Testament refers to either as the ‘mind’ (from Greek thought) or ‘heart’ (from Semitic thought), was understood to be primarily an organ of interpretation; not unlike a radio, it had to be properly tuned for the messages received from the world to become intelligible and useful. The spiritual life was understood to be a means of refining that tuning process to get an ever clearer signal. Applying that understanding here, the sense is that if your tuning is already off signal, you’re unlikely to be able to hear anything other than static; but if you’re already dialed in to something approaching the right frequency, you’ll be able to hear and understand what’s being said.

Robert Farrar Capon summarizes this approach to the text nicely:

[This] seems to be more reasonably understood as giving a simple description of the way things are. “If you grasp the fact that the kingdom works in a mystery,” he seems to say, “then that very grip will give you more and more understanding; but if you don’t grasp that, then everything that happens will make it look as if your plausibility-loving understanding is being deliberately taken from you.” (Capon)

Isaiah 6

Even trickier is Jesus’ application of Isaiah 6.9-13 to the situation. When asked why he speaks in parables, his answer is to quote from the shocking commission Isaiah is given: that through his words Israel’s leadership would become more deaf and blind to God’s words. So we have to ask ourselves a couple big questions here: First, what did that text really mean? And second, how might it apply to Jesus’ decision to teach in parables?

Isaiah’s Commission

The Isaiah passage is so complex that I did a full Integral study on it as background to today’s post. To summarize the findings there:

• In the midst of the Syro-Ephraimite invasion of Judah, Isaiah is commissioned to offer a stern message to Judah’s leaders. Even if Jerusalem will be spared this time and the kingdom of Israel will soon fall, its leaders are just as corrupt and faithless as Israel’s and are doomed to suffer the same fate.
• This faithlessness is symbolized, revealed, and compounded by their inability to make heads or tails of Isaiah’s divine message. Isaiah’s commission is not about creating the sense of deafness and blindness in his audience, but about compounding their pre-existing attitudes. And so, where they should see Israel’s fall as a warning sign, Judah’s leaders wrongly see it as a sign of God’s inviolable preference and protection.
• While God has had it with Judah’s leadership and is leaving it to its full and complete destruction, there is still hope to be found. But this hope is for fresh start some time in the future, not for any relief in the interim.

Jesus’ Appropriation of Isaiah’s Commission

Jesus says this prophecy (which in his day was already about 800 years old) is fulfilled in his own audience. It’s important here to remember that prophecy should not be thought of as one-time boxes to be checked off. Indeed, in that case, Jesus’ appropriation of Isaiah 6 (along with most New Testament use of Old Testament prophecy!) would be ridiculous. Isaiah’s commission was clearly about his own day, not about events hundreds of years later. Prophecy is better imagined as big jars that get filled up over time but are never exhausted. What Jesus is doing here is saying the two historical situations are analogous, and that the same jar filled in Isaiah’s day continues to be filled up in his own (Bartlett 457; Witherington 64-67).

It’s hard to see many similarities between Isaiah’s time and Jesus’. After all, Isaiah was speaking to the kings, judges, and priestly classes of a middling but independent kingdom, while Jesus spoke to mixed crowds in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. But yet, despite these differences in political circumstance, the dynamic really hadn’t changed that much. Isaiah railed against the rulers’ self-satisfaction, exploitation of the poor, and lack of any genuine leadership. Similarly, Jesus railed against the religious authorities’ self-righteousness, exploitation of the poor (e.g., the cleansing of the temple), and lack of genuine leadership. The Pharisees occupied themselves with minor details of the Law while leaving the greater parts of the Law undone, the Sadducees were desperate to placate the Romans in order to allow the Temple to keep functioning, groups like the Essenes had given up on broader society altogether, and the Zealots were about to bring fresh doom upon the land and its people. Once again, God’s people were in crisis and their leaders were clueless. And once again, it was the leaders of God’s people who were the most resistant to hearing God’s message (Case-Winters).

As Ben Witherington III summarizes it, “Jesus sees a repeated pattern in the story of Israel, a drama being played out in parallel fashion as it has before with God’s people, with the same sort of results, because of course the character of God remains the same, as does the sinful nature of God’s people” (Witherington 65; cf. Capon: “[This is] another one of those sad, head-shaking reflections on the way things are. Jesus thinks about the obtuseness he sees all around him” ). So the situations are analogous because Jesus was facing the same willfully deaf and blind audience as Isaiah had; and in that context, parables give insight to the open-minded, but provoke only confusion in the proud and intransigent (Witherington 67).

Challenge: A Universal Teaching?

So in light of all this, who exactly is Jesus’ teaching for? He tells his disciples in the clearest language that they are insiders and so he can speak plainly to them, but among outsiders he speaks in parables in order to differentiate between those who are capable of understanding him and those who are not (Witherington 66; Williams 35; Case-Winters). There’s an apocalyptic sensibility at work here, only reinforced by his use of the expression “the mysteries of heaven” (Walton & Keener; Witherington 66). If the mysteries of the kingdom have been given to some, but not others, what about those to whom it has not been given?

While Matthew, Mark, and Luke all put these words in Jesus’ mouth, it’s important to note that they also have him — in the very same discourse — say that “Nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light” (Luke 8.17; cf Matthew 13.35 and Mark 4.22).” Paul would likewise write that in Christ all the mysteries of heaven are revealed to all (e.g., Ephesians 3.9, Colossians 1.26, 1 Corinthians 2.7).

So once again, we seem to be arriving at the idea that it’s not that those ‘on the outside’ are excluded but that they have excluded themselves by their own attitudes: The mystery is available to all — indeed, if they have ears to hear and eyes to see, they will be able to understand the parables (France 511). The question is their own receptivity. As Williams puts it, “the parables can only be understood by those who are prepared to think and to ask: to participate” (Williams 35; cf. France 509; Walton & Keener). If, as Donald Hagner points out, there is an “obvious lack of symmetry” here, in which the ability to understand is said to be a gift from God but the inability to understand is the responsibility of the individual, this is characteristic of the awkward balance the Scriptures generally convey on the question of divine sovereignty and human freedom (Hagner 105).

These answers aren’t entirely satisfying, but I think they’re the best we can do with the biblical record being what it is. There are heavenly mysteries, but they are revealed — at least in potential — to everyone in and through Jesus. Those who have their eyes already opened and ears unplugged are able to handle the truth straightforwardly (though really, despite Jesus’ kind words here, the disciples seem to misunderstand him as often as anyone!), but to everyone else, it’s veiled in stories designed as much to confuse as to clarify. For indeed, those already in on God’s message can understand these riddles, but those who are not need to be confused, to have their expectations overturned and their complacency shaken by not understanding. As Robert Farrar Capon put it nicely, “The mystery of the kingdom, it seems, is a radical mystery: even when you tell people about it in so many words, it remains permanently intractable to all their attempts to make sense of it” (Capon).

Expand

The emerging interpretation here is helpful in a couple different directions. First, it suggests a salvific intent for even the confusion misunderstanding the parables provokes: Even if one doesn’t ‘have ears to hear’ a parable, the confusion reveals the unsatisfactoriness of one’s existing understanding and can, therefore, begin the long and humble road of deconstruction so often required before the pieces can be put back together again (Capon). And second, as readers today, it brings us into the conversation, putting us on the same playing field as Jesus’ original audience (Wainwright et al 9): Have we understood all this (Matthew 13.51)? If we’re honest with ourselves and with God, the answer should be ‘no, not really.’ And that should be an invitation to deep reflection, repentance, and active re-engagement with the stories before us.

Summary and Conclusions

Far from our common assumptions that Jesus’ parables were object lessons designed to help everyday people understand complex spiritual truths, Jesus’ own reasoning is that they were intended to confound as much as to enlighten. To those who are receptive to God’s message, they are easy enough to understand, but to those who are not, the parables are confusing and likely to be misunderstood. If these ‘outsiders’ are to have any hope of eventually understanding, they must first be disabused of their self-confident and self-satisfied notions. This is particularly true of the religious leaders, who, in Jesus’ day just as in Isaiah’s time, were self-righteous and over-confident of God’s favour. As Robert Farrar Capon puts it, “In resorting so often to parables, his main point was that any understanding of the kingdom his hearers could come up with would be a misunderstanding.”

We find ourselves in a similar position today. “Good religious folk” again tend to be over-confident and self-righteous, preferring to use the Scriptures as a weapon instead of a mirror. And so we would all do well to come to the parables with an open mind and heart, lest anything get in the way of our understanding.

Unsurprisingly, considering Jesus’ discussion of parables is placed within it, this connects to the main theme of the Parable of the Sower, to which we will turn in the next post.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.