Sayings of Jesus: Parables
Within both Old and New Testament Scripture, we find many different styles of writing, called “genres.” We’re familiar with this word today in a number of artistic fields, such as music and drama, as well as in literature. When I teach classes on biblical interpretation, I will often set a group exercise to identify as many genres as possible in one of those fields in five minutes; whatever the field, the winning group usually comes up with well in excess of twenty.
In the literary world, we encounter genre when we visit a library or a bookstore. Everything is organised by genre. The simplest categorization of genre is fiction versus non-fiction; but we all know there are multiple sub-categories for each. The same is true of the Bible. Hence, the genre of a piece of writing is crucial in terms of what it is saying and how it has chosen to say it. If we are to correctly grasp what any piece of writing is saying, we must take full and proper account of its genre.
A simple example from a biblical genre that we’re likely familiar with may suffice: a parable is a work of fiction. A parable is not a true story (though it teached truth). When Jesus said, “A man had two sons . . .” (Luke 15:11), there was no such man. Jesus didn’t say, “I’m about to tell you a story I made up about a man who had two sons, please don’t take it literally . . .” because he didn’t need to. Everyone knew that he was about to tell them a made-up story. Nowadays we might make that clear by starting with, “Once upon a time,” but in Jesus’ context it wasn’t necessary. Parables were a genre of the day, and they had their own interpretive “rules” that went with them. So, in order to read them as the original audience would have read them—or rather, as they would have heard them—we need to follow their rules.
Things do get a tad more complicated, insofar as one book can quite easily—and frequently does—include more than one genre. In the Gospels, for example, we encounter narrative (a story), history (events that actually occurred), parables (made-up stories used for teaching purposes), overstatement and hyperbole (exaggerations, as attention-grabbers), idioms (jargon, sayings, and euphemisms), instructions (commands), and prophecy (forward-looking statements concerning future events). There’s even song lyrics (but sadly, no tune) in Mary’s Song, in Luke 1.
Some of Jesus’ best-known teaching, within and without church circles, comes in the form of parables. Parables were by no means unique to Jesus; they were a way of teaching used by other Jewish rabbis. They come to us in various forms (there are different views as to how one defines “a parable”) ranging from simple idiomatic sayings, though metaphors, to short stories (occasionally quite a long one, such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son). What they have in common is to be painting a picture with words—so-called “picture-language”—to convey a truth or truths and by doing so engage the hearers more effectively than simply stating propositions.
A parable is a made-up story featuring archetypal characters and contexts of a kind that would be familiar to the hearers from everyday life, engaging their attention and imagination, and challenging them to reflect and act upon the underlying truth that the parable teller intends the story to convey.
The first and most important thing to grasp in the interpretation of parables—and this can hardly be stressed too much—is that the story has an obvious “surface” meaning (which is never the point) and a less-obvious “deeper” underlying meaning which is actually the point. The idea was for the hearers to figure out the deeper meaning since that was the teaching. The teaching is not in the surface features of the story, they are just the props and the stage setting. In the Parable of the Sower, the point is not for farmers to take care where they sow seeds (it’s not teaching agricultural truths). Watch out for a tendency for people to misread parables in this way by over-interpreting the surface features.
The extent to which the meaning of Jesus’ parables was intended to be concealed from the hearers should not be overstated based on Matthew 13:13-14 (and parallels). In many cases, we do see the meaning and application explained. For sure, though, to really grasp Jesus’ intentions requires (a) an engagement of the heart as well as the mind and (b) locating the “message” of the parable in harmony with his other teaching.
Does a parable have one teaching point or more than one? Yes and no! The idea of a single “point” to a parable came about as a much-needed corrective to an over-allegorizing of parables in the pre-modern era in which a multitude of supposed equivalences were identified (“this” means “that,” to warp factor 10) which could not possibly have occurred to either Jesus or his followers as anything to do with the parable’s intended “meaning.” But that said, in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, there are surely equally-valid teaching points that Jesus intended in relation to the younger son, the older brother, and perhaps most of all, the father. Our best course usually is to seek to identify “the main” point in a parable, but also to be open to additional points, whilst avoiding those being too abstract, far-fetched, or strained in relation to how the original hearers would have heard what it was and wasn’t saying.
In terms of a parable’s meaning, we start from our standard definition of the meaning of anything we read in the Bible: the meaning that was intended by the original author as that would have been understood by the original audience. To which as always we need to add a postscript: as best we can reconstruct that, taking account of all of the hermeneutical tools at our disposal (such as, context, language, and genre). And here we come to the biggest single challenge that we have as interpreters of parables. The stories feature characters and contexts of a kind that would be familiar to the original hearers from everyday life. But we are very far removed from them. It is extremely hard for us to “hear” the references to the characters and events as they would have heard them. For example, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, for us the Samaritan is obviously the hero. To speak of someone as a Good Samaritan is to pay them a huge compliment: respect! But nothing could be further from how the word Samaritan would have been heard by Jesus’ audience. Samaritans were the lowest of the low: heretical, mongrel-Jews, worse than pagan gentiles, held in utter contempt. In Luke 10:37, when Jesus asks the expert in the law to tell him who the (surely by now, obvious) hero is, the man cannot even bring himself to say, “the Samaritan” (instead he says, “The one who had mercy”). When some of Jesus’ enemies are looking to find the worst insults they can throw at him in John 8:48, they say, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” Our lack of familiarity with the biblical world is our single biggest obstacle when it comes to reading parables well. What would it have meant (what would it have been saying, how would it have been heard) by those people, then? Quite often with a parable, if we do not find at least something in it a bit odd, or even shocking, then we may need to be working a bit harder, to find it.
Speaking of the risk of reading badly, let’s pause for a moment on one aspect in our working definition, “featuring archetypal characters and contexts of a kind that would be familiar to the hearers from everyday life.” This does not mean that they are real or true. When a preacher uses a story or characters from, say, Star Wars to illustrate a truth, she is simply using a modern parable as a vehicle. The communicative power of the illustration relies on the fact that the congregation will be familiar with the movies. She is not teaching express or implied truths about outer space, far-flung galaxies, or space travel; it’s just a stage setting.
The same is true when it comes to characters and events in Jesus’ parables. For example—and this is an important example, given how influential what it isn’t teaching about has been in the evangelical world—the Parable of Abraham, Lazarus, and the (unnamed) Rich Man in Luke 16. The parable is set in Hades, which was popularly understood not as “hell” (in our terms) but simply “the realm of the dead.” The popularly-assumed “surface” meaning is that Jesus is describing the kind of thing that happens in a real place. But the “deeper” meaning intended is that there are consequences in the afterlife to the choices we make in this life, especially in how we treat others.
Since this life was known to be “unfair” (cheats do prosper; rich and powerful abusers do get away with it, and so on) the Jewish understanding was that at the end-of-life God would ensure there was a “balancing of the books” in favor those who are life’s victims, along with adverse consequences for those who are the abusers. Jesus setting a parable “in Hades” simply reflects the widespread cultural assumptions of the day about what happens after death (a bit like we might use “standing at The Pearly Gates” in a sermon—as I for one have done). Jesus is not teaching facts about hell (notice that Abraham is also there, within speaking distance) and nor is he teaching that somewhere called Hades really does exist as a kind of transit lounge on the way to heaven or hell (and that these are the things that happen there). It’s simply a stage setting. If we are unfamiliar with Hades in the popular imagination of that first-century world, we will miss the point, and especially if we assume that Hades = hell (as the KJV translated it, but most modern versions quite rightly no longer do).
Separating the teaching truth from the vehicle it is conveyed in is important. A further example would be the Parable of the Unjust Steward (a rich man’s business manager) in Luke 16, where the principal character is an embezzler. Though it’s the parable’s setting, it is not encouraging fraud against one’s employer, as a shrewd way of behaving; it’s simply a vehicle for the truth that it is teaching.
Why did Jesus so often teach through parables, picture language, and metaphor? Mainly for the same reasons that the Bible is mostly narrative. Especially in an oral culture, stories are easy to remember, and therefore to pass on. They also engage the imagination in a way that facts and propositional truth statements do not. And they encourage relational dialogue in debating their meaning.