Lecture

The parables, too, are central to Jesus’s ministry. If we think of His life as divided into two major facets that the gospel narratives record—His teachings on the one hand and His miracles on the other—the parables certainly form both the dominant and characteristic portion of those teachings. Depending exactly on what we count as a parable, there are approximately fifty that appear in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

The parables are well known, too, because of their great appeal. Their story or narrative form grips our attention. They involve us in their accounts in ways that mere abstract propositions or lists of principles never would. One thinks, for example, of the story of the wicked tenants who are given a vineyard to tend, who reject the servants of the master who come to receive the fruit, who then finally kill some of them and ultimately kill the son in hopes of taking over that vineyard. And yet the master says that he will come and he will destroy those wicked tenants and he will give the vineyard to others who will produce the fruit worthy of it.

The story seems to be so straightforward and simple, and yet we’re reminded particularly from Mark 12 that the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees and the scribes who heard Jesus tell that story, went away and realized that He had told that story against them, and it says that they plotted how they might put Him to death.

Other aspects of Jesus’s parables that seem so lifelike involving the people to whom Jesus spoke, the ordinary peasant folk, the Galilean farmers, as He told stories about the soil, about sowing seed in different kinds of soil, and which ones would produce a good crop. About a mustard seed, one of the most common plants that one can still see today beside the shores of the lake known as Galilee. Of a woman putting yeast into several lumps of bread in order to produce a large batch of dough. And yet with all the familiarity, as well known as the parables are to so many people today, even twenty centuries after they were first uttered, there are numerous problems that come with that familiarity. Let’s consider five of them by way of introduction.

The first is that we may have lost sight today of the original historical background that informs a correct understanding of the passage. The good Samaritan was not originally good, was not perceived as the good guy. If we think of Samaritans only as people that we name hospitals after, only as people that we enact laws concerning, if we forget that in the ancient world, Jesus the Jew speaking to a Jewish audience chose a Samaritan as a hero precisely because he was the epitome or paradigm of one of the most outcast and despised categories of people in the eyes of most Jews. If we lose sight of that historical background, then we fail to grasp the entire dynamic of the passage, the shock value of having a Samaritan as a hero.

The same is true, for example, of the parable of the Pharisee and of the tax collector. We are used today of thinking of the Pharisees, as Jesus so often lambasted at least one small group of them, as hypocrites. We are not prepared to think of the passage as the first century Jewish audience would have, expecting the Pharisee to be the hero. Realizing that of all the various Jewish sects and leaders, the Pharisees were the most beloved and the most popular. It was the tax collect, the Jew who had sold himself out, so he was perceived, to the Roman system to collect tribute for an oppressive government who according to Jewish law was not supposed to be governing the Israelite people anyway. It was he who was expected to be the goat and the Pharisee to be the hero., but, in fact, in that parable in Luke 18 where the Pharisee brags of how good he is and the tax collector merely beats his breast in repentance, Jesus says that it was the latter who went home justified and not the former. We need to recapture in many instances the original historical background of the parables.

Second, as already suggested by these last two examples, we need to realize how subversive, how countercultural, how radical the teaching of Jesus was in many of the stories that He gave. This shock factor, unexpected twists, something unusual, extravagant even, that His audiences were not prepared for. Yes, much in the parables was lifelike, much was down-to-earth examples taken from everyday life, and yet in that parable of the mustard seed, a plant that can be seen and could be seen just about anywhere in the fertile fields of Galilee, we are told that it grew to become a large enough shrub, almost a small tree, that it could give shade to the birds of the heavens who come and nest in its branches. And if you look at the average mustard plant along the shores of Galilee today, it’s perhaps four or five feet tall, scarcely more than a medium-size shrub and not something you would naturally call a tree. This particular mustard seed grew exceedingly and unusually large, but that was precisely Jesus’s point to illustrate that the kingdom of God, which seemed so small with the ragtag man of disciples alive and following Him in His day would one day grow to surprising size and significance.

The same is true of the hundred-fold yield of the good soil in the parable of the sower. A number like that may mean little to us today until we realize that even a ten to twenty-fold yield was often considered quite good by ancient standards. And again there are numerous other parables in which there is an unexpected role reversal. The little parable of the two debtors in Luke 7. Simon the Pharisee and the sinful woman whose actions suggest she may have been the local prostitute, and yet her anointing of Jesus with oil receives His praise, and He says that her love, love which the Pharisee Simon has not shown, demonstrates that she recognizes her sins have been forgiven. She is praised and the upstanding religious leader is left without such praise.

Thirdly, there is symbolism in many of Jesus’s parables that makes them slightly less then as straightforward as they often seem to be at first reading. One of the simplest definitions of a parable often told to children in Sunday school is that it’s an earthly story teaching about heavenly or spiritual realities. But in order to do that, not everything in each story is quite as straightforward as it seems. The wicked tenants to which we have already alluded contain numerous characters who, it becomes clear, are not simply ordinary folk of first century Jewish life. The landlord clearly stands for God. The wicked tenants clearly stand at least for the Jewish leaders or those corrupt Jewish leaders of a larger body in Jesus’s day who were rejecting God’s Word and God’s messengers. Jesus clearly wants us to see the son who is killed in that story as standing for Himself, and the new tenants as His disciples who will produce the fruit which at least some of the Jewish leaders failed to produce.

In two parables, the parable of the sower and the parable of the wheat and the tares, such symbolism is made explicit. In these two passages, both available in Matthew 13, Jesus gives a detailed point by point explanation of what each kind of soil stands for in the case of the parable of the sower, of what the birds stand for who come and snatch the seed from the soil that fell on the path, and so to in the parable of the wheat and the tares or the wheat and the weeds, no less than seven items are explained as having symbolism at a spiritual level. Not all of these would perhaps have been understood had Jesus not spelled out that interpretation.

This leads us to a fourth point which makes the parables a little bit less than straightforward once we begin to study them more carefully, and that is their someone cryptic nature in places. Parts of the stories that are not entirely understandable without some explanation. Perhaps the most puzzling parable of all, at least the one that has given rise over the centuries to the most numbers of different interpretations, is the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1–13). The story of a particularly unscrupulous character who, because he has been mismanaging his master’s finances and books, finds himself soon to be fired and out of a job, but has one more illegal activity left to do in order to secure his own future by reducing the debts that several of his master’s creditors owe so that they will then grant him favors once he has been fired. And yet it seems that Jesus, by way of the master in this story, praises that unjust steward at least for his shrewdness and commands believers in some sense to imitate. It’s not self-evident exactly what it is that Jesus is teaching there.

There are at least two other parables in which Jesus seems to be likening Himself or God to an unscrupulous or immoral character. The parable of the unjust judge, also known as the persistent widow in Luke 18:1–8 in some sense seems to be comparing, though also contrasting, God with this judge who has to be badgered in order to grant a widow justice. And in one very short narrative, Jesus, in the parable of the householder and the thief, compares Himself to a robber, at least in the sense that He will come back in a surprising and unexpected way. Not surprisingly many who read these passages for the first time do not find them to be quite the straightforward and simple stories that some of the rest of Jesus’s parables seem to be.

Finally, and fifthly, under some of the problems that come as one looks at the parables and moves a little bit beyond their superficial straightforwardness and familiarity, are the theological demands that seem to be implied in these narratives. Two of Jesus’s parables, for example, speak very harshly about those who have the riches of this world: the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12) and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16). Each seem at first reading to be condemning their main characters simply because of their needless accumulation of wealth. Is Jesus against capitalism? Some radicals in our age have claimed so. We will need to return to these passages later on in our series and look at them more closely.

Or what of the two short little parables in Luke 14, of the tower builder and the king going to war, that each conclude with the lesson that we must count the cost of discipleship. How can one anticipate in advance of following Jesus what is actually going to be involved, whether the sacrifices are worth it or not? How can one predict? And how does this theme more generally of counting the cost fit in with the message of faith, of salvation as a free gift by grace? Can we have it both ways? Not surprisingly, numerous approaches to these passages over the centuries have suggested that these parables, at least, were not meant for all of Jesus’s followers, but perhaps for one particular class willing to go the extra mile, as it were, of discipleship. Hopefully, this introduction makes it clear why the parables need some further attention.

The second part of this introductory lecture will survey, very briefly, some of the major approaches to the history of the interpretation of the parables down through the centuries to help us understand in a bit more detail the rival approaches, the different options available to us, and prepare us for trying to access what the most valid approach is for our day.

The parables of Jesus are among the most familiar of all of the parts of Scripture. Many people who seldom go to church or perhaps have no association with the Christian faith, know well the famous stories of the prodigal son or the good Samaritan. We name hospitals after the latter today, and we enact laws that are called “Good Samaritan” laws.

First, in the so-called Patristic Era, the era of the Greek and Latin church fathers, roughly the first five centuries following the completion of the New Testament, the era in which the gospel quickly moved from a Jewish world into a Greek and Roman millenium and in which Jewish believers receded into a very insignificant minority, sadly, as part of the church of Jesus Christ throughout the world. In this period, an approach that is usually known as allegorizing came to predominate. This was taken in large part from the prevailing approaches of interpretation within the Greco-Roman world more generally of other kinds of literature, and in the case of the Bible, of other parts of Scripture. A concern to try to find often hidden and esoteric meaning, but it had its biblical foundations as well. It took its lead in the case of the parables from those two stories to which we have already referred. The story of the parable of the sower and of the wheat and the tares where Jesus detailed point by point interpretation is, in fact, precisely what the Greeks and Romans were doing typically with literature and what has come to be known as an allegorizing interpretation, an approach that finds symbolism or a double level of meaning with numerous details, sometimes virtually all of them, of a particular story. Things are not what they seem, but they stand for something else.

One of the most famous examples from no less a Christian leader then St. Augustine in the Patristic Era. His exposition of the Good Samaritan illustrates this allegorizing very well. That story in Luke 10:30, 37 that is known so well even today, for Augustine, was an allegory of the fall of man from his pristine innocence in the garden all the way through his redemption with the coming of Jesus Christ. Thus, the man himself stood for Adam who left Jerusalem, the heavenly city, from which he had fallen, took the road down to Jericho, and along the way was robbed; that is, he fell into sin. The thief stood for the devil who deprived Adam of his innocence and his immortality. The priest represented the Old Testament law which was unable or unwilling to save him. The Levite, the Old Testament prophets, which were equally impotent. The Samaritan came along as a symbol for Christ, the one who would forgive the man’s sins, who took him on his beast to the inn, the church. The beast being the body of Christ. To the innkeeper, the apostle Paul, notwithstanding the fact that Paul was not even known and not even a Christian yet at the time Jesus spoke this parable.

Numerous other examples could be given and many people hearing Augustine’s interpretation today would admit that it is very clever, that it, in fact, is eternally coherent, it makes sense at one level, and yet it is not an interpretation that in many or perhaps any circles is still accepted as a legitimate approach to that passage. We will have to return again later on to the question of why that is inadequate, but for now it suffices as a good representative of the type of allegorizing that quickly came to predominate.

As we very quickly sweep through the centuries of church history, the next major period is the period of the Middle Ages or of the Medieval Church, roughly a thousand-year period from AD 500 to 1500. Little new developed during this period, except that the method of allegorizing was honed and fine tuned into a sophisticated art. Different characters might be identified with different meanings, the symbolism could change from passage to passage and detail to detail, but the basic method continued to predominate. In fact, at its height, allegorizing during the Middle Ages took on a four-fold sense of interpretation so that details in the passage might have a literal meaning, but might have one or two or even three additional figurative or symbolic or allegorical meanings. The city of Jerusalem in the parable of the good Samaritan could, therefore, stand not only for paradise from which Adam fell, but also for the New Jerusalem one day to which humanity would be restored, or in the intermediate period to the pristine state of the human soul as it was redeemed on earth.

With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, with the writings and preaching particularly of Martin Luther and of John Calvin, major question marks began to be placed before this approach of rampant allegorizing. Luther began to move away from allegory in his interpretation of many parts of Scripture, but at least in the case of Augustine’s interpretation of the good Samaritan, in one context continues to quote it with a fair amount of favor. Luther was more inclined, however, not to find detailed allegories in the parables of Jesus, but, as he did throughout his study of the Scriptures, to look for Christ as the hermeneutical key to any passage. And so in parables where preceding commentary has seen characters standing for God, Luther tended to see them directly as standing for Christ. So, for example, in the parable of the prodigal son where Jesus speaks of the loving and compassionate father, where most previous interpreters, though not all, would have seen this as a beautiful expression of the Father’s love, Luther applies it directly to Jesus. So, too, in the case of the parable of the lost sheep or the good shepherd. Jesus in John 10 calls Himself a Good Shepherd, and so that image is then applied in the parable of the lost sheep.

It was not until slightly later with the monumental work of John Calvin that a genuine break occurred from the allegorizing of the Patristic Era and of the Middle Ages. Calvin said that this had gone too far, that this was unwarranted, and that what was needed instead was a quest for a central truth or theme in each passage. But although his own commentaries and writings exemplify this principle well, the truth largely went unheeded in the Lutheran and Calvinist successors in generations and centuries to follow.

As late as the 1870s, Archbishop R. C. Trench from the Anglican Church in Britain could write a very famous work, which has gone through multiple editions and continues to be reprinted and sold even today. A book entitled Notes on the Parables of Our Lord, in which in passage after passage, although not necessarily agreeing with every detail, his exegesis remarkably resembles that of the ancient medieval allegorizers.

The next major development, therefore, does not come until the very end of the twentieth century. It was left to a German liberal scholar by the name of Adolph Jülicher to produce a two-volume work of detailed examination of the history of the interpretation of all of Jesus’s major parables and then offering himself a fresh reading and exegesis of these passages was left to Julicher to inaugurate a brand-new era in parable interpretation. Julicher’s massive and meticulous study finally published together in one volume in 1899 makes three major points that continue to be widely accepted today, but signal a remarkable break from the previous eighteen centuries of parable interpretation.

First, the parables are not allegories. Second, they make only one main point a piece, and third, they are very natural, down to earth and life-like. The type of story that would have been readily understandable by a Jewish peasant audience.

Now Julicher because he was an old line nineteenth century liberal tended to find as the one central truth of each passage what today would seem to be a fairly bland and general moralization. The good Samaritan teaches us simply to love our neighbors. The parable of the unjust steward to make a determined use of our present as a prerequisite for a happy future. The parable of the talents, that reward is earned only by performance. Fairly general statements that could be applied quite widely.

The history of twentieth century scholarship is in essence a history of reaction to Julicher, but the majority of people have accepted more of his views than they have rejected. Nevertheless, we can note briefly four ways in which his perspectives have been slightly modified.

First, the main point of each passage has been more concretely anchored in Jesus’s original historical setting. Remembering that Jesus spoke about the coming of the kingdom of God, the two major interpreters of the parables in the twentieth century, C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias, English and German writers respectively, have tried to put Jesus’s parables in the context of eschatology, of teaching about the end. So, for example, the parable of the unjust stewards is not just generally a preparation for our future, but is a preparation for the coming of Christ, a preparation for the new age to come and the fullness of the kingdom, which will be inaugurated, that we must make use of our material possessions now in a shrewd way as that steward did to prepare us for the new age yet to come.

Secondly, the level of the unexpected or the unusual, as we suggested earlier, has been seen increasingly as a key to some of those central truths of the parables. It’s not true that rewards are simply earned by performance as Julicher claimed. In numerous passages, for example, that parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, it is mercy that triumphs over merit.

Thirdly, against Julicher it is recognized that there is a limited measure of allegory in the parables, at least as they now stand in the gospels. It’s undeniable in the case of the sower and the wheat and the tares, it’s probable in the case of the wicked tenants, and probably most scholars would say in at least a few other passages. But what remains disputed is whether these allegorical elements are original to Jesus, whether He, in fact, spoke such detailed interpretations, or whether they are the additions of the later gospel writers or the early church who already in the New Testament period began to misunderstand and to allegorize Jesus’s interpretations.

Finally, and fourthly, there’s the challenge of the nonpropositional interpretation. Numerous people who have studied the functions of metaphor and figurative speech more generally argue that one cannot encapsulate parables in one central truth or in any number of declarative sentences, but that they must be seen as narratives, which act upon people and cause them to behave in different ways. What philosophers would call speech acts or performative utterances. Therefore, at the end of the parable of the good Samaritan, there never is an answer spelled out to the question, Who is my neighbor, but rather there is the command, “Go and do likewise.”

Here then is where parable scholarship has brought us and in our next lecture, we will turn to the current state of the question.