00.00 The use of parables in the teaching of Jesus
THE USE OF PARABLES IN THE TEACHING OF JESUS THE use of parables was the special mark of Jesus’ popular teaching “without a parable spake He not unto them.” It is easy to see the fitness of this kind of teaching (i) It was a method to which His hearers were accustomed. Orientals are born story-tellers; their common speech is proverbial and parabolic. Teaching otherwise clothed would have been unreal, inaccessible to them. Our Lord when He came among men came not outwardly as a marvel, but as a brother, moving freely among the people with whom He lived and of whom, “as concerning the flesh,” He came, using their customary ways of thinking and speaking. He taught men in their own language; taught as a Rabbi, differing from other Rabbis, not in His method, but in the originality, the force, the strange and compelling authority which He showed in His use of it. (2) It was a method which arrested attention. You must always have clear in your imagination the scene of each parable the Teacher standing there with the burden of truth upon His heart, and the crowd before Him; and remember what a crowd of men, a thing always so wonderful must have meant to the Son of Man. Well, He must make them listen. With the sympathy and earnestness of the true Teacher He would swiftly and spontaneously use the suggestions of the moment things passing before the eyes of His audience, familiar in their daily life, the ways of husbandman and housewife, the tales and news of the countryside and thus catch and keep their attention. (3) It was a method which aroused thought. The great Teacher knew that He could not teach His hearers unless He made them teach themselves. He must reach their own minds and get them to work with His. The form of the parable would attract all; but only the thoughtful could read its meaning. It could not be found without thinking. The parables therefore both attracted and sifted the crowd. Those only who “had ears” could hear those only who were in earnest would either care or come to understand. (4) Hence it was a method which preserved the truth. What men think out for themselves they never forget; the exercise of their mind makes it their own. Moreover the language of symbols expressed in what is seen by the eye or pictured by the imagination is more powerful and enduring in its effects than the language of mere abstract words. It conveys and brings back to the mind the inner meaning with swiftness and sureness; it carries with it a wealth of suggestion and association. And mere words are constantly changing their meaning, whereas the symbols of Life and Nature such as our Lord used in His parables are as abiding as Nature and Life themselves.
Among all the teachers who have used this method of teaching, Jesus stands unrivalled. There is nothing in literature which can be compared with His parables.
How familiar they are, yet how everlastingly fresh! Interwoven with all the memories of our lives, wrought into the texture of our daily speech, they yet retain a force and vividness wholly their own. So simple in form that a child may understand them, they are yet so deep in meaning that Christian thought for nearly two thousand years has pondered over them without exhausting their treasures. The criticism of the Gospels, historical and literary, which has in so many ways changed and disturbed (as well as deepened) our knowledge of the life and words of Christ, leaves these stories for the most part untouched. No one can doubt that in studying them we are quite literally studying the very words of Jesus.
They bear the mark of personality, the stamp of unique and incommunicable genius. They bring us to Him who spoke as man has never spoken. From these thoughts two principles spring which shall guide our study. The first is, we must remember that each parable was spoken not primarily to unborn generations, but to living groups of bystanders and disciples. It had a single special lesson, meant for them, which they could understand. That primary lesson must always be our first concern. It must remain the touchstone of the worth of all our own interpretations. They must be consistent with it. No detail must be pressed to teach something plainly outside its limits. Thus (to quote familiar and egregious instances of a method only too common in all ages of Christian teaching) to see in some of the details of the story of the Good Samaritan a proof of the order of process in the Fall of Man, and an anticipation of the institution of the two great sacraments; to look upon the story of the Unjust Steward as a history of the apostasy of Satan; to discern in the Pearl of Great Price a description of the Church of Geneva this is to ignore the unity of meaning given by our Lord Himself in the immediate lesson which He was impressing on His immediate audience, and to make interpretation fanciful, artificial, even violent. On the other hand and- this is our second principle of study He who spoke these parables was the Son of God and the Son of Man the Word of God incarnate. However simple His words may have been they had in them the width and depth of the Truth itself. We shall therefore expect that the main lesson of each parable will carry us far, if we have power to follow it, into the deep things of life and God nay, that the details will possess in relation to this main lesson a significance of their own. The parables will soon lead us to the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. We may even see “a mystery” in the very use of the parables by the Word Incarnate the truth, namely, that the connection between the parable and the lesson is not merely accidental; that it corresponds to some inner harmony of thought and things. I cannot do better than quote the words of Archbishop Trench (whose introduction to the study of the parables in spite of the lapse of years since it was written remains unique, full of scholarship, insight and beauty): “This entire moral and visible world from first to last, with its kings and its subjects, its parents and its children, its sun and its moon, its sowing and its harvest, its light and its darkness, its sleeping and its waking, its birth and its death, is from beginning to end a mighty parable, a great teaching of supersensuous truth... Christ moved in the midst of what seemed to the eye of sense an old and worn-out world, and it evidently became new at His touch; for it told to man now the inmost secrets of his being, answered with strange and marvellous correspondences to another world within him, helped to the birth great thoughts of his heart, which before were helplessly struggling to be born these two worlds, without him and within, each throwing a light and a glory on the other.”
Jesus was man and God; His ’parables were simple, suited to the men He met on earth, yet were they also glimpses of truth deep and divine. May the Holy Spirit of God, the Giver of Life, througK our study of them, make these venerable stories of Jesus live anew in our minds and lives!