Parables

In the gospels, Jesus is represented as teaching the people mostly in parables, vivid symbolic stories taken from ordinary life, which were usually presented without any kind of explanation of what they meant or what moral should be drawn from them. Most of his explicit moral teaching was given to his disciples only. For example, in the Sermon on the Mount as reported in Matthew 5, the introductory narrative makes it clear that Jesus went up the hill to get away from the crowd, and that his disciples gathered around him there before he started to teach.

Naturally the disciples noticed the difference and were curious. They asked him, “Why do you teach us in plain speech but use parables with the people?” (Mt 13 v.10)

Jesus’s answer is remarkable: “To you it is given to know the secrets of the kingdom but for them everything comes in parables. Because (or so that), as Isaiah wrote, they look and look but do not see, and they listen and listen but do not understand.”

Calvinists seize on such passages with glee as proof that God wants most people other than themselves to be damned and has taken precautions to prevent them from finding out truths that might save them. Only the elect get plain teaching! But quite apart from the moral issues which that view raises, there is the purely practical problem that Jesus spent hours teaching the people, who, we are told, hung on his every word. He is frequently described as being exhausted after these long preaching sessions (which admittedly often involved healings as well). But why would he have wasted a single minute on teaching people if he did not actually want them to learn? After all, there is a much cheaper and easier way to prevent people from learning if that is really your aim: just don’t teach them anything!

That was how gnostic teachers like Simon Magus worked. They taught their disciples secret knowledge. In fact the word gnostic means “someone who is in the know”. No teaching of any kind was given to outsiders because the whole point of the exercise was to exclude them. Jewish rabbis likewise taught their disciples their interpretations of the Torah or argued about them with other rabbis. Unlike the gnostics, they did not deliberately set out to exclude anyone, but they did not preach to crowds because rabbinical argument was a scholarly discipline of limited interest to the masses. But Jesus did preach to the crowds, so we must assume that he expected his peculiar style of preaching to have some useful effect on them.

Furthermore the few parables that are “explained” to the disciples (for example the sower and the seed or the wheat and the tares) come over, not as thrilling mystical teachings of which the common people were unworthy, but as plonking Victorian-style allegories, far less interesting than the parables they replace. It’s almost as if the disciples were being challenged to reconsider their desire for a simple explanation. The densely argued eucharistic and trinitarian theology of the dialogues in the Gospel of John would be a far better candidate for the secrets of the kingdom if you accept them at face value as actual oral teaching by Jesus, but clearly they have nothing to do with the parables.

Also the gospels were written down for the instruction of baptised Christians, people who were already citizens of the Kingdom and entitled to know its secrets, but the evangelists still made no attempt to explain most of the parables to their readers.

I believe that in the passage that Jesus quotes (Is 6 vv.9-10), Isaiah is not giving a formula for concealing knowledge from the unworthy. Rather he is complaining bitterly about people who do not wish to learn. They may come to a prophet or preacher with a superficial interest in what he has to say, but they are not willing to put in the hard work of encoding his message into the circuitry of their brains. As a result, it goes into one ear and straight out of the other. They hear but don’t understand because they aren’t really listening. This corresponds to the sower sowing seed on the hard-trodden path where it doesn’t go in and is soon carried away by the birds.

It’s a perennial problem for school teachers too. Children simply don’t want to learn. There are a million other things they’d rather be doing. The traditional solution was to drill them in the necessary knowledge and make them regurgitate it on demand: “Six ones are six, six twos are twelve, six threes are eighteen...”. I still have my times tables in my head and very useful they have proved to be. Or we might be given memorable and amusing mnemonics. I remember one we learned that gave us the order of the planets moving outwards from the sun: “Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serving Useful Needs”. But when it came to chemistry, we were lucky enough to have at our school a teacher who made the subject interesting in itself, so that we wanted to learn it, and that may be how I ended up with a chemistry degree.

So how do you impart spiritual and moral teachings to people who are superficially interested in learning such things but not interested enough to want to do any actual hard work? The answer is always the same across a wide range of religious traditions. You tease them with riddles and parables. Jewish wisdom teaching, as found in Biblical books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, is full of such riddles. The Book of Job is one enormous parable where all the obvious explanations of Job’s story provided by his friends are obviously wrong, and the supposed final answer by God Himself only raises more questions. Hinduism too has its riddling upanishads,and Buddhism its koans. Everywhere spiritual teachers have twigged that people will after all put in the work if they feel sufficiently piqued by something that just falls short of making sense.

So maybe the correct answer to the question “What does this parable mean? Explain it!” is “What does it mean to you?” And when your parish priest preaches on one of the parables of Jesus and expounds its meaning, file that meaning away as one useful possibility, but don’t forget to ask, “What else could it mean? What does it mean for me?”