Why did Jesus teach in parables? Even when it was easy enough to state things in more common terms, He insisted on using parables. His disciples were puzzled and oddly, in response to a parable about parables, asked why. “Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some of the seed fell by the wayside … on stony places … among thorns … but others fell on good ground…” (Matthew 13:3-9).
I find it sad people insist on reading their cultural and intellectual biases back into this parable, just as they do with the rest. Jesus echoed in His preaching much of the same message as His cousin, John the Baptist. The seed is the Word of God as it was known in that day, and Jesus Himself taught it in terms of a call to repent from the shallow, trendy Hellenistic approach of the Jewish leadership. Jesus called people to restore the ancient ways of understanding the Scripture. This call to repentance is not the same thing as the soul-winner’s canned gospel sales pitch. Such a sales pitch is little different from what was offered by the teachers Jesus disputed. If we lose the context in which Jesus operated at the time, we miss the point of this, and every other parable He taught.
The revelation of God is like seeds for the soul. The seed is the call to repentance. The various types of soil are hardly a catalog of the full range of human response to such a call, but the list offered is representative of all the various reasons people can’t seem to embrace that call and make it stick. Some never seem to understand it, others underestimate the implications, and others have worldly priorities preventing a sincere change of heart. If there is going to be an eternal change in the human soul, it begins with repentance, planted by the message of revelation. Embrace the part the mind can understand — the Laws of God — and you are ready to walk in whatever divine miracle of spiritual change which might come. If there is going to be any fruit of spiritual change, it has to come via the call to repent.
So much Jesus explained to His associates, but He first hit them with something few today understand, largely because they prefer to see all things in the Hellenistic terms of the Pharisees, not in the ancient Hebrew sense. The parable itself is about parables, and how they fit into the mission of revelation.
“Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. Therefore, I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13:11-13)
Jesus then goes on to quote Isaiah 6:9-10. The quote is not simply shoring up His assertions by some literal wording, but is meant to call up a much larger contextual frame of reference. The call of Isaiah included the prophet understanding many of the people had chosen to reject a sincere adherence to the Covenant of Moses. They were sure they understood the world better than some quaint old fables. Having made such a choice, they would be hardened in it. Choose sin and God will give you all you can take, and then some. As long as you cling to man’s assessment of what is good and right, you’ll never understand God’s justice. That’s true now, and was true then. So if you reject His truth, you’ll be driven even farther from it.
Parables serve the purpose of driving sinners farther away, and drawing the righteous closer. In more modern clinical terms, the effect of using parables is polarization. It serves as a filter. Those who find themselves drawn to the message of repentance would keep coming even if their minds didn’t understand it all. Those unmoved would find no reason to hang around. We who cling to Christ have neither ability nor need to withdraw completely from the fallen world in which we live. When we cling to the truth, living it and speaking it, we will be as separate as God intends. All the human details will take their own course, as it were, while we keep our focus on what matters.
We as Christians throughout history, and throughout Western Civilization as a whole, have suffered long enough with our souls hardened by constant running to and fro, chasing the false promise of Hellenized intellectual assumptions. We have been for too long shallow in our assessment of Scripture as mere propositions. Our spiritual growth has been entangled in the drive to be respectable to those whose spirits are dead. Jesus called His own people to return to the ancient ways, and we are not excused from seeking that same ancient Hebrew approach to understanding revelation.
Let the seeds of revelation find root in your soul.
(This completes the series.)
This is your best post on parables yet Ed. I hope that your seeds have been sown in fertile soil even though you may walk among the thorns and the stones.
Thanks, David. Best of all would be if I could cultivate your sensitivity among my fellow Christians.