A police squad was sent once to arrest a man condemned by the authorities as a dangerous public agitator. That he had a way with crowds there was no doubt, but they were convinced he was a menace. But no sooner did the police squad come within sound of his voice than they too fell under the speaker's spell. So much so that they forgot their purpose; they returned to their superiors, shamefaced, without their man. And all the excuse they could give was, "Never man spake like this man." (John 7:46)
The man was Jesus. And nothing was more characteristic of His public teaching than His use of parables. Matthew and Mark both tell us He never did preach without telling them. (Matthew 13:34; Mark 4:34)
The reason, surely, is quite simple: they rivet attention. That is the first thing a teacher must do; and nothing engages our interest like the drama of daily life - witness the popularity of that regular feature in the Reader's Digest, "Life's Like That."
But the parables commanded attention also because they made such an appeal to the imagination. Once your imagination is stimulated your mind is alive - and open. And how the language of Jesus did that! His hearer's minds were simply showered with pictures ... vivid, colourful, arresting pictures. As you listened, you saw a man fiddling to remove a speck of dirt from his friend's eye, while a telegraph pole was sticking out of his own. You saw great trees uproot themselves from the soil, fly through the air, and crash into the sea. You saw a Pharisee take pains to filter a midge out of his drink ... and then, said Jesus, "he swallowed a camel!" Do you see it, that hairy great lolloping brute slithering down the Pharisees' throat? And he never even noticed!
When Jesus preached, there was never a dull moment! Small wonder the common people heard Him gladly. He did not say, "If men whose minds are degenerate have power over the ignorant, their common end will be disaster." He said, "If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the ditch." His language was picturesque.
In the use of such picturesque images you have the beginning of a parable. Sketch in the picture with a little more detail, introduce a bit of action, shape it all to a swift climax ... and you have a parable. The parables are simply stories with a point. The point is always in the story's climax, and so superbly did Jesus tell His stories that He never needed to labour the moral. The point of the story and the truth He used it to convey came together so perfectly in the punch-line, that no further elaboration was needed. Jesus did not use parables like preachers use an illustration to elaborate the point, but to make the point. Our Lord's parables do not illustrate His message - they carry it.
This supplies a first simple rule of interpretation to apply in our understanding of the parables.
There had been a long tradition of story-telling like that in His people's history, by the prophets. A familiar example is the prophet Nathan's little tale about a wealthy farmer with large flocks of his own, who, to provide a meal for a visiting friend, stole a poor peasant's one little ewe lamb. He told it to David, who, having a king's harem of his own, had stolen Bathsheba, the only wife of Uriah, a humble private in his army. Nathan said nothing about that at first. He simply told David this heart-rending little tale, and then trapped David in his reaction to it. (II Samuel 12:1-5)
A parable used like that is something you cannot argue with, because it lures you into making a judgement of your own. It lowers your guard so that you are defenceless when its sword-thrust strikes home.
And this brings us to the second rule of interpretation we must apply if we are to understand the parables rightly.
To try and interpret a parable without taking into account the life-setting which called it forth is futile. Tear a parable out of its setting and you are left with a disembodied tale, floating about in space, anchored nowhere, which can be made to say almost anything. Take for example, St. Augustine's explanation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of how not to interpret.
"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho ..." The man is Adam, St. Augustine would have us believe. Jerusalem represents the heavenly state from which he fell, and Jericho (which means the moon) signifies the mortality of death into which he fell (for the moon waxes and wanes, does it not?). The thieves who stripped the poor man are the devil and his angels. The Priest and the Levite signify the Old Testament dispensation which was powerless to save, and the Samaritan (a word meaning 'Guardian') is of course, the Lord Himself. The binding up of the man's wounds represents Christ's restraint upon our sin, the oil is the comfort of hope, and the wine is the fervour of service. The beast stands for the flesh of Christ in which He became incarnate, and when in the story we read that the man was placed on the beast, we are to understand this to mean that he rested his faith in the Word made flesh. The inn where he rested and was refreshed represents the church, the morrow is the resurrection morning, the two pence are the two commandments of love; and best of all perhaps, the inn keeper is none other than the Apostle Paul!
To say the least, it is all highly ingenious - though another Church father, Origen, claimed that the oil stood, not for the comfort of hope, but for the gift of the Holy Spirit; and the wine, not for the fervour of service, but for the blood of Christ. No doubt, the two pence were not the two commandments of love, but the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper ... or the two Gospel requirements of repentance and faith?
But what a very long way from the lawyer's question to Jesus Augustine had wandered! The lawyer's question was, "Who is my neighbour?" It was to answer that question that Jesus told the story. He told it to make the point that the neighbour is not someone you must go out and find, but someone you must go out and be!
Martin Luther, bless his forthright soul, grew impatient with the church fathers and the fantastic webs of doctrine which they spun out of the parables, and dismissed them all as "ecclesiastical jugglers performing monkey tricks!" They had not interpreted the parables; they had made tailor's dummies of them to hang their doctrines on.
It is of the utmost importance to recognise that, with only one or two fairly obvious exceptions, the parables are not allegories. They are simply stories with a point. In an allegory, every detail in the story is a clue to something else outside the story. The allegory and its meaning proceed together step by step, detail by detail, so that the whole thing is like a message in code, where every symbol has to be deciphered. But in a parable, the story and its meaning come together at only one point - the story's punch-line. Which leads to ...
If we treat the details in these simple tales Jesus told as pieces of a puzzle, we shall end up confused and bewildered. But if we treat them for what they are - the vivid touches of a master story-teller in his craft - we shall find they delight us, and sharpen our appreciation of the parable's lesson.
Not infrequently a parable's appearance in one Gospel can be compared with its appearance in another; sometimes it is placed in a different setting; sometimes it carries allusions to others; sometimes it carries allusions to Old Testament scriptures. All these considerations can help in establishing its point and its purpose. To summarise:
1. The story first - simply as a story.
2. Its real-life setting.
3. Find the point in the punch-line.
4. Compare Scripture with Scripture.
Jesus Himself supplied the reason why He made such frequent use of parables (recorded in Mark 4:11-12). At first sight it appears to be a very curious explanation indeed. "To you," He said to the disciples, "has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God. But to those outside, everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn again and be forgiven."
On the face of it this would appear to mean that Jesus used parables deliberately to blind the people to the truth so that they should not find forgiveness! Can that be true? Surely Jesus came to reveal the truth, not to hide it. He came, not to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved; indeed, He said so Himself. Surely His purpose in telling the parables would have been to lead people to forgiveness, not to drive them away out of reach of it.
But this verse seems to say the opposite. What are we to make of it?
Here is where the fourth rule of interpretation we have suggested will be seen to be vital - to compare Scripture with Scripture. Trace the same passage through the Bible, and you find that Jesus was here quoting God's words to Isaiah (6:9-10). It was with these words that Isaiah was commissioned to preach. Strangely perhaps, they read too as though God meant Isaiah to preach in such a way that he shut everyone's mind to the truth. The explanation of this puzzle is supplied by Paul. He too quoted this Scripture to the Jews who disbelieved his preaching in Rome. (Acts 28:26) Paul used a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, and when translated it comes out like this: And God said, 'Go and say to this people, "You shall indeed hear, but you will not understand. You will indeed see, but not perceive; for the heart of this people has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and become converted and I should heal them."'
This throws a new light on it altogether. God is not saying that He means the people to be deaf and blind to the truth, but that the people have made themselves so. So deep-rooted was their hostility, so wilful their blindness that not even Isaiah's preaching would be any use ... not at first ... not until their disobedience had brought them into ruin, and their cities were laid waste. Then it would.
The futility of Isaiah's preaching was expressed in a tone of heavy irony. God spoke out of frustrated longing: "For all the good your preaching will do, Isaiah, I might as well send you to preach to a brick wall. But preach you must, and send you I must, for although your preaching of my truth will only harden their resistance, nevertheless you must proclaim it. It cannot be that I should withhold the truth from them. Hear they shall: but be warned, they will not listen."
We have all had this sort of experience, and expressed ourselves in the same despairing way. "One word from me," complains an exasperated mother of her disobedient son, "and he does as he likes." A frustrated father may say, after an exhausting and fruitless effort to help his thick-headed son with his homework. "Of course, I'm showing you all this just to confuse you."
Jesus quoted Isaiah to express just the same sort of frustration and with the same sort of irony. He had done everything He knew to make them see the truth. He could not make it clearer than the parables made it. But still they did not see. The brighter He turned up the light the tighter they screwed up their eye so as to shut out the light.
"You, bless you," He said to the disciples, "can see. But these dear folk haven't seen a thing. Not even the parables open their eyes. They won't be forgiven. You'd think I'd been sent to drive them away so they couldn't be."
The verse in Mark's Gospel is exactly right as it stands. Mark has recorded precisely what Jesus said. What Mark could not convey with the printed word alone was the tone of voice in which Jesus said it. But of the Lord's intention he has left us in no doubt: Jesus goes on to say (v. 21), "Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? There is nothing hidden except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret, except to come to light!" That was the Lord's purpose - to lift the light of truth up high where all could see it!
"O take heed what you hear! These folk hear the Word God has given me to preach to them, not as a proclamation of deliverance from the bondage of their sin, but as a threat to their life in the sins they love too much and won't let go. They won't hear! Their ears betray them. My message, far from setting them free as it is meant to do, only condemns them. Who among you has ears to hear? Let him hear. Take heed what you hear, for your ears betray you!"
In the thought of Jesus, the sound of His voice had not travelled all its course until it had reached our inner ear - our heart. And when His words travel that far, something in us either leaps up to welcome them or rushes up to repel them. By the way we hear them we give ourself away. It is not a failure of intelligence that disturbs our understanding of Jesus' words but a wrong attitude.
Not only by the hearing of our ears do we hear the Gospel message, but
... by the passions that rule us, which we feel are threatened by what He says to us
... by the dreams we dream, whether wholesome or murky
... by the hunger that gnaws in us
... by the loves and hates that have a hold of us.
Those are the real ears we hear with. What we hear reveals what is in us. Our ears betray us.
And what we give to our listening comes back on us. If we respond to the light we see, the light will grow. But if we shrink from it, we lose what little light we had. It is true: "To him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." It is useless to protest that that is not fair. That is how it really is. Used muscles grow in strength; unused ones whither. It is a rule of life.
Before every one of us there lies the real possibility of final ruin, of lasting condemnation. Only by our response to the Word of God as He speaks it to us in His Son can we turn our life away from that. From that condemnation, God sent His Son to deliver us. Whether He does depends on how we choose to hear Him.
If we should any of us come into that final condemnation, it will not be God who is to blame for it but ourselves. He has not withheld His saving truth from us; He has shouted it from the house tops, and whispered it in our hearts. Only if we close our stubborn hearts against it can it fail to save us.
But open our heart to receive it, and God will pour all the light and blessedness of His salvation and His love into our barren hearts till they blossom like the rose.
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