Parables, Part I

Once a upon a time, one Sunday morning, a pastor mounted his pulpit for the sermon and said the following:

A troubled young man walked into a downtown high-rise building. As he approached the directory on the wall, he took out a small booklet and looked back and forth from the booklet to the directory. Satisfied, he moved over to the elevators and waited so he could enter one by himself.

When an empty elevator opened, he entered and punched four buttons: 9, 35, 42, 46.

When the door opened on the 9th floor, he leaned out of the elevator and looked around. The floor appeared to be empty. He could hear many people talking, but could make no sense of the words. And the level didn’t seem to have a solid floor. Vertigo seized him when he looked down. He ducked back into the elevator and rose to the next stop.

Poking his head out again on the 35th floor he saw frenetic activity: people running, jumping, and moving the human body in every conceivable way. The confusion of colors and the noise of huge crowds made his head spin. So he allowed the door to close and punched button number 42.

When the door opened this time he was awash with astonishing colors and wave after wave of music. Again, he heard many voices but could understand nothing.

Back into the elevator he ascended to the 46th floor and when the door opened the floor was luxuriously decorated with gold, silver, silk, and more. He began to step out through the door but a putrid smell, like a large dead animal, forced him back into the elevator.

Hesitating for a moment, he pushed the main level button. Down he went. Once the elevator door opened at the ground level he walked out of the building, only pausing to toss the crumpled paper into a trashcan by the door on his way out.

Outside he surprised himself, embracing the familiar noises, sights, and smells of the city. He stepped into the river of people on the sidewalk and smiled.

[Pause]

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

That’s the end of my message. I’m sorry to make you come back to the organ so soon, Mrs. Jones. But that’s all I’m going to say today. I have nothing else to say.

But this afternoon, after lunch, I want to meet with those of you I’ve contacted earlier. You know who you are. There’s about a dozen of you. We’ll meet at 2 PM in my home for further instruction and discussion.

You are dismissed.

What if you were a member of that congregation and that’s all you heard that Sunday? What your pastor always and only spoke to you like that? What if he left you to figure out the riddle, the allegory, the parable for yourself every week? And what would you think if you knew a dozen or so men were at the pastor’s house every week afterwards getting the true interpretation of the riddle-like stories?

Now, I’m not suggesting that we can fully appreciate the first-century situation with that illustration. Because you know that no pastor today would do something like this. No pastor would end the sermon like that. But that’s precisely what Jesus did, over and over again. He told a parable or two, then he walked away. He didn’t explain the parables, at least not initially and not to everyone.

All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. . . . When he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven” (Matt. 13:34; Mark 4:10-12 [Isa. 6:9-10].

Perhaps the first thing we need to know about Jesus’ use of parables is that they were not meant to illustrate. Parables were not designed to make things easy for the crowds.

You have read and heard this kind of explanation of Jesus’ use of parables before. I read it in countless books on sermon preparation and delivery. Jesus used these parables as homely illustrations for agricultural people so that they could get their simple minds around deep spiritual truths. It goes something like this: What an ingenious and effective teacher Jesus was. He is our model. Look at how marvelously he embodied truth in these lovely parables, stories that were so well suited to his hearers’ culture and situation. How quaint they are. How powerful. Jesus really knew how to connect with people. How people listen and what they retain. He used that knowledge to construct these highly effective sermonic illustrations we call parables.

Well, this is a mistake. There are at least two reasons we are apt to make this mistake: 1) we tend to isolate the parables out of the context of the story of Jesus’ ministry to the first century Jews. They become timeless illustrations of eternal spiritual truths. We don’t appreciate how parables function in the Hebrew Scriptures, so we don’t even recognize how Jesus is using them to address first-century Israel. More on this later.

2) We make the mistake of thinking parables are clever, effective sermonic “illustrations” because we have access to the explanations. And so it all seems pretty simple and homely and obvious to us. But this is like having the answer key to a test and chiding the people taking the test without it for taking so long thinking about the answers.

If anything is clear in the text of all four Gospels, it is that the meaning of these parables was not clear to anyone who heard them. Even more significantly, when asked why he spoke in parables, Jesus openly admits that he was not propounding parables to people in order to make things easy for them to understand. They were not simple sermon illustrations. Nobody “got” them at first. In fact, they were intentionally coded so that the meaning was not easy to arrive at. If you wanted to understand the parables, you had to be gifted with extraordinary wisdom.

To be continued. . .

[Note: I have no clue where I got that elevator parable. Perhaps I made it up. But I probably borrowed it from somewhere. I just don't remember where.]