Alison
Morgan, Holy Trinity May 2001
Reading
1 Cor 1.22-29.
Introduction
Good morning/evening.
W are just beginning a new sermon series on the
parables of Jesus as they are told in gospel of Luke. My job today is to offer
an introduction to the world of the parable, before we get down to specifics.
So there’s no nice story to get stuck into this
morning. But please don’t think this is going to be boring. I’ve thought a lot
about Jesus’ parables over the last year or so, and I’ve come to the conclusion
that they are about as far from boring as it’s possible to be. In fact they are
mindblowingly challenging. But I’ve also come to the conclusion that we have to
do something before they can challenge
us, and that is to let go of everything we’ve always assumed about them. So
please fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a bumpy ride.
1. What is a parable?
Let’s begin at the beginning with the simple question: what is a parable? It does matter that we know, because one third of Jesus’ recorded sayings have come down to us in the form of parables.
But before we answer that question, I need to point something out. This is what it is. It’s obvious, but it’s not obvious what difference it makes:
Jesus never wrote the parables down himself, and they survive only in carefully crafted gospels written for a different audience a whole generation later. That audience was the early church. It was a Christian audience. It was trying to understand Jesus’ teaching and work out how to live by it. And so the gospels often contain not only the parable but also an interpretation of the parable. Sometimes the parable seems obscure, and so they say that the parable is not meant to be understood at all. Sometimes the different gospel writers don’t tell the stories quite the same way. And John tells no parables at all, which comes as a bit of a shock.
What this means is that we have a double context for the parables: the audience Jesus originally spoke to, and the audience the gospels were written for. Of the four gospels, it is Luke who seems to offer us the parables in their purest form, with least added interpretation, and so it is from Luke that we have taken the parables we will consider in this series.
Now in a sense none of that matters. It seems that in the stories themselves, even in the Greek gospels, the inflections of spoken Aramaic are still discernible, and so it seems reasonably safe to assume that although the framework in which we have the stories is not the original one, the stories themselves do genuinely go back to Jesus. But what it does show is that right from the time of the composition of the gospels, people were already wondering about how to take the parables. The parables have always been controversial.
So let’s go back to the question. What is a parable?
Well, I think we all have quite a clear idea of what a parable is. After all, we’ve heard them often enough. And this is what we think.
A parable is a story used for teaching purposes. It uses images and examples from the everyday life of those who first heard it, and is especially suitable as a teaching form for an uneducated audience. After all, these weren’t the sophisticated inhabitants of Athens, these were the peasants of rural Galilee. Jesus couldn’t have offered them a string of academic concepts; so he explained the kingdom of God and its values in this simple story form. So we learn about loving our neighbour from the story of the Good Samaritan, we learn about evangelism from the parable of the sower, and we learn about God’s care for us from the stories of the 99 sheep or the prodigal son. We’re used to that. We know that. We’re on familiar ground.
2. The parable traditionally defined
Well partly of course you would be right. Parables are stories. They have been likened to fables. We know that Aesop told good moral tales about hares and tortoises, and oaks and reeds, long before this. A parable is based on a comparison - the Greek word parable just means place alongside. It is is essentially a translation of the Hebrew word masal, which means ‘to be like’ or ‘similar’. And we also know that the rabbis of Jesus’ time used this kind of story to illustrate their teaching – one rabbi is said to have had no fewer than 300 fox parables. So the idea of telling a story comparing one thing to another in order to make a point was not new. Indeed, large chunks of the Old Testament are told in story form, and the whole point is not just to know what happened to those people all those years ago, but how their lives speak to ours, and how their relationship to God teaches us about ours; and that has always been so. God, it seems, is and always has been a story-telling God.
3. The parable tamed
So parables have meanings, otherwise there seems very little point to them. And over the centuries, generations of commentators have struggled with those meanings. Let me give you the two main approaches.
The first approach says that the parable has an allegorical meaning. That is, that it is a symbolic story in which everything functions perfectly on the literal level, but in which everything also stands for something else. This approach was developed by the early Church Fathers, in particular by Augustine, and it lasted throughout the Middle Ages. So if for example we look at the parable of the Good Samaritan, we can say that the man leaving Jerusalem is fallen man leaving the garden of Eden. The robbers are Satan, the priest is the law, the Samaritan the Christian, and the inn is the church. In other words, the whole thing is a description of the predicament of the human race as a whole. This remained the standard way of interpreting parables for centuries, until it was finally debunked by a man called Julicher in the C19th. Julicher said the whole thing was daft, that it wasn’t the Jewish way of doing things at all, and that insofar as each parable had a teaching message it was not an allegorical one but a moral one. In other words, a parable tells you how to behave, and it would have made sense to those who heard it, which all this allegorising stuff would not.
Now neither of these ways of looking at the parables can be completely ruled out. The parable of the sower in Mark, for example, comes with an allegorical interpretation already attached, in which the seeds landing in different soils correspond to the gospel landing in different types of hearer. And the moral interpretation often seems the obvious one to us, and many sermons we have heard on the parables will have taken this approach.
Right, now it’s time to take a break.
Here is Bethy. It’s her birthday, so give her a clap.
4. A different way of doing things
Bethy has something to say to you.
‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.’
I read a book recently by a theologian whose wife has given up her job in medical research to become a Christian clown. While he teaches theological concepts, she mimes the gospel. And as she does it, she finds people connect with the figure of the clown. Clowns have a long history. A clown is a comic figure. We go to see them in circuses, and they do children’s parties. But why is a clown funny? A clown is funny because he or she brings two worlds together, and the two worlds clash. A clown is funny and we laugh, but a clown is funny because he gets everything wrong. A clown is funny and we laugh, but he has sad crosses painted on his eyes. A clown is always ranged against authority, but he always gets away with it. A clown doesn’t treat you the way you expect. A clown never gives up hope. A clown lives in a world upside down, and pokes fun at the rules and norms of this one. A clown is a living paradox. And a clown doesn’t think, he feels.
And I think that when we read the parables, we can do a lot worse than to think clown. The parables are full of humour, full of the unexpected. Like the clown, the parables turn the world upside down and defy convention. Like the clown, the parables bring two worlds together, and they clash. The parables aren’t meant to be homely illustrations of moral points, supporting the status quo; the parables are meant to be a challenge to the usual way of doing things, they are meant to sow revolution. The parables aren’t your grandmother’s attempt to get you to wash your face before you go out, they are weapons of warfare. The parables aren’t instruction manuals, they are pictures of a new world order in which the current values are reversed. And the parables are well pictured by the clown, who is a success precisely because he is a failure.
Thank you Bethy.
5. Let me illustrate
Well, that sounds very provocative, doesn’t it. Can I prove it?
Well, here’s a parable. It’s a very short one, and it just
consists of a couple of simple comparisons from everyday life. Jesus is in the
synagogue.
He said therefore, ‘What is the
kingdom of God like? And to what should I compare it? It is like a mustard seed
that a man took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the
birds of the air made nests in its branches.’ And again he said, ‘To what
should I compare the kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and
mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’
In this parable Jesus offers a double comparison to
help his hearers understand about the kingdom of God. The comparisons are
straightforward: the kingdom is like a mustard seed, and it is like yeast. The
property of the mustard seed and the yeast that is being evoked here is the
capacity to grow from something small to something large. The meaning therefore
is that the kingdom also will grow.
But if you think about it carefully,
there are some things about this parable that aren’t quite as straightforward
as it would seem.
Firstly, there is the context.
Jesus was speaking in a synagogue, and synagogues are places where the sacred
scriptures were studied and learnt by heart, along with the oral tradition
which stood as a commentary on them; the language spoken in the synagogue was
the language of law and theology. But Jesus isn’t using that language. Jesus is
using the language of the garden and the kitchen. He’s inviting his audience to
relate their faith not to the application of the law but to the mundanities of
what men and, even more unusually, women do in their daily lives. This in
itself was a challenge – he’s not taking the occasion seriously, and he’s not
using the right words. But if the way he chose to explain this theological
concept was unusual, it was as nothing compared with what it was that he was
trying to say about it. The kingdom of God will grow, he said. But they knew
that the kingdom of God was fixed. Of course it doesn’t grow, they must have
thought; its inhabitants are predetermined, and they can even be counted. The
kingdom of heaven isn’t for flocks of incoming starlings, it’s for observant
Jews. And the number of observant Jews is finite, traceable by ancestry,
recorded by census, and known to every member of every community.
And so we see that this parable, apparently simple and straightforward, in fact must have mounted an enormous challenge to the way of thinking of those who heard it – a challenge so great, in fact, that they would not have been able to even begin on the process of interpretation unless they were prepared first of all to set aside some of the assumptions which they had held all their lives. This parable is more than a helpful comparison.
And this applies to most of the parables. The thing about the clown is that he always does the unexpected. And in the parables there is always something which is unexpected, and it turns out that this is the place to look first. This, if you like, is the key to the map. This is where to dig for the treasure. So for example in Luke 14 Jesus offers two story comparisons. A man is buildling a tower. He has to draw up an estimate of the cost before he calls in the builders, otherwise he’ll run out of money half way through. And a king is going into battle. He has to assess the strength of the enemy before committing his men, and if it is greater than his own he is wise to try the negotiating table instead. Well, this is all fine, they know just what he’s talking about, nothing controverisal here. But then he says, And so it is with you, if you want to be my disciple. It’ll cost you everything you’ve got, and you need to be sure you want to pay it. Well, at this point they must have thought he’d gone barmy. It was perfectly usual for a rabbi to travel round teaching, taking a group of disciples with him; you signed on for a fixed period, and left when you felt like it. No different from going to university, really. Quite normal. But you didn’t expect it to cost you everything you’d got, any more than you do when you go off to university. OK, you come out with a bit of an overdraft, but really the stakes aren’t as high as this guy seems to be implying. What’s so different about being his disciple? This is only Leicester, after all, no one’s asking you to go to Harvard. So this time it’s a massive exaggeration which constitutes the unexpected element to the parable. Jesus isn’t just explaining a concept; he’s issuing a massive personal challenge. Who does he think he is?
And on it goes. Another thing you discover about
the parables is not only that they break the rules of the expected, but that
they aren’t even consistent with each other. Take the ones about money. In Luke 16 Jesus tells of a dishonest accountant given
notice by his rich employer. Aware that he is going to need a new job, this man
sets out to make friends for himself by rewriting the bills of his employer’s
clients for lesser amounts. And his
master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, said
Jesus; you do the same. This parable is surprising. Firstly because no real
employer is likely to congratulate his employees on diddling him. Secondly
because in that it clashes violently with the value system of its hearers, who
know the difference between right and wrong. But even if we ignore all that, we
find that this parable comes into clear conflict with what Jesus said and did
on other occasions. Levi and Zacchaeus enter the kingdom precisely because they
are willing to turn away from their
posts as dishonest revenue collectors. And even if we manage to keep our heads
and decide that Jesus is advocating the shrewd giving away of money to ensure
we get a job offer in the eternal economy, we are then brought up short when we
reach the parable of the talents, and find that we are apparently being
encouraged to make as much money as possible on the basis that to all those who have, more will be given.
The parables simply will not work as helpful and systematic illustrations of
moral points. Jesus isn’t expounding a new morality, he’s doing something else.
The parables have to be taken one at a time, and regarded not as nice
explanations from the world’s greatest teacher, but rather as carefully
packaged boxes of explosives, innocently presented and devastatingly detonated
in any number of different places. In so far as they do have a coherent
message, it is simply this: that things are not as they seem, and that we must
be open to having our tidy vision of reality shattered.
6. How does this work? Metaphor
So what are we actually saying about the parables. What is a parable, to go back to the question with which we started. It isn’t an allegory. It isn’t a moral tale. It is in fact a metaphor, and this is the way the most recent critics look at it.
Now at this point it’s important not to panic, and not to allow yourself to think even for a moment about the bishop of Durham. Forget about theology for a moment and think poetry, because that’s where metaphors belong. I said that a parable was a comparison. Well, a metaphor is a particular kind of comparison in which the characteristics of one thing are attributed to another; and the result is that it makes you think about that second thing in a new way. Now when a metaphor becomes familiar it no longer has this effect – we talk about the leg of a table, for example, without batting an eyelid. And that is precisely why so many of the parables have lost their original impact. We are simply too used to them. But a new metaphor can be revolutionary, because it puts together two things which previously had no connection – like yeast and the kingdom of God, for example. And in doing that it opens up a whole new avenue of imagination and thought. In this case, the kingdom of God grows. It’s for women. It’s for ordinary people. You can talk about it in everyday language. Every one of Jesus’ parables does this, and so we can say that each one works as a metaphor. Let me just illustrate for you.
This is the thing we’re talking about. In this case, the kingdom of God. [circle]. When I use the phrase, kingdom of God, you immediately think of certain things. You already have a mental picture of the kingdom of God.
Then Jesus says, the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. OK, so that gives you another picture. And when I say, mustard seed, you immediately think of certain things there too. Here’s another circle.
But when Jesus compares one to the other, he is saying these two things share certain characteristics. So they aren’t separate circles, they’re overlapping circles.
And this is how a metaphor works. It’s like two overlapping circles. And now when you think about the kingdom, this circle, you have to think about it with all this stuff attached. And so you are forced to think about it in a new way.
7. Why does he do it this way ?
So the question is, why does he do it this way?
I think he does it this way because he wants to jolt us into a new way of thinking.
Think about how you learn things. When you’re born you can’t make sense of the world at all. I remember watching Edward in his push chair at about 5 months, turning his feet from side to side and looking at them in complete astonishment as he worked out that they actually belonged to him. And I remember Katy demanding at 2 that I mend a ladybird she’d just trodden on. As we grow up we gradually acquire a mental framework which explains the world and tells us how to find our place in it. We don’t do this by having it explained to us; we do it unconsciously, by assimilating one experience after another into the way we think about things. So by the time we are adults we know not just about feet and ladybirds, but what different facial expressions mean. We have beliefs about what will make us happy. We have learnt what the rules are. We have acquired a world view. And whenever anything new comes along, we slot it neatly into the framework we already have.
For the people Jesus spoke to it was the same. They had a shared world view, and it was one that wasn’t working very well. It was based on a fixed set of assumptions about what the law meant and how it should be obeyed – mostly in ways the ordinary people couldn’t afford. It was based on the idea that social status and wealth were the important things, and most people had neither. It believed strongly in Jewish sovereignty as against Roman rule. Now Jesus wanted to bust this world view and replace it with another. And he did it not by delivering long philosophical and ethical lectures, but by feeding his hearers piecemeal with a new way of looking at things, by presenting them with a series of abrupt challenges which they couldn’t fit into their inherited mental framework. Each of the parables requires the hearer to make an immense adjustment to the way he saw the world, and therefore to the way he lived his life. A parable sounded like a helpful story to explain a point; in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Every parable is totally subversive of a world view. And I hope that as we potter through them over the next few months, that will become apparent.
So Jesus did it this way because this is the way that a world view is formed in the first place. Unconsciously, bit by bit. Paul would do it a different way in Athens, where they all loved talking philosophy. But these are the ordinary people of Palestine, and he spoke to them in metaphor. Metaphor is for everyone. We all use metaphor all the time, even children. All you need to do metaphor is eyes and imagination. The parables aren’t addressed to the mind, so much as to the imagination.
Conclusion
So what do we take into our study of these parables.
Firstly, that they are meant to be
surprising. They are so surprising that biblical scholars are still struggling
to interpret them two thousand years after they were first uttered. When Jesus tells
a parable, he isn’t turning something complicated into something clear and
simple. He’s turning something clear and simple into something complicated. He
isn’t so much answering questions as asking them. He isn’t so much offering
solutions as demanding that you redefine the problem. He’s blowing up the
universe, and leaving you to put the bits back together again. So what seems at
first sight like a helpful picture from the ordinary, familiar world, in fact
has the habit of suddenly becoming the vehicle for a whole new way of looking
at things. Story it may be, but a story which has an alarming tendency to carry
within it a revolution, and to demand a decision. Many attempts have been made
to soften the blow, to smooth the edges and find a way of dealing with the
implications of Jesus’ parables in a way which is not too destructive to the
carefully constructed philosophy of the hearer. But the parables won’t play
ball, and their essential demand always springs back: the demand to recognise
that things are not as we thought they were, and that we must open our
imaginations to the task of starting again, and embrace the task of
constructing our reality a different way. A way which belongs not to the
national curriculum world of the government approved classroom, but to the
topsy turvy clown world of the kingdom of God. The parables are fun. But they
should be handled with care, sold only under licence, and you should always
remember to stand at a safe distance once you have lit the blue touch paper.