Reflections on Jesus and Parables

Generally speaking Jesus’s parables draw on agricultural imagery, daily village life, stock character types, and everyday situations to discourse on “God, God’s people, and God’s word.”[1] They draw on a “collective store of Jewish imagery”[2] by rehearsing Old Testament images of a farmer and a vineyard or that of a shepherd and his sheep which often describe God’s relationship with Israel. Or else they resource common images for God and Israel such as a master and his servant, a king and his subjects, or a father and a son. The parables often explain God’s character, kingdom imperatives, and the nature of discipleship; precisely why they were probably preserved and promulgated by the early church. However, put specifically, the parables are very often “weapons of controversy”[3] in the adversarial context of Jesus’s ministry in that the parables retell Israel’s story in shocking ways affronting to the official and unofficial leaders of Israel. The parables redraw Israel’s boundaries around tax-collectors, fisherman, whores, and lepers; they critique those who were supposed to be above critique; they challenge things that were untouchable! Parables explore what it means if Israel’s protracted period of exile is ending, if the new exodus is underway, what does that mean for God, who’s in and who is out, whose way of being Israel avails, who’s in the right, what about the nations, and what are the signs of belonging to the covenant? These are not stories everyone wanted to hear if it left them off the page or put them on the wrong side of the ledger.

Parables invite hearers to nod their heads in approval until they suddenly realize that Jesus is insinuating that the stories people live by are unstable or undercut. That is because parables are, as B.B. Scott suggested, a form of “antimyth,”[4] which attack and disorder resident myths, i.e. cultural stories about power, privilege, and proximity to God. The parables make jolting claims like God loves a penitent publican more than a strict Pharisee (Lk 18:10-14), that the kingdom does not come by focus on of the details of legal minutia (Lk 17:20-21), that wealth is a risk for judgment not evidence for divine blessing (Lk 16:19-31), that many audiences are apathetic like people who can’t be bothered for either a dance or a dirge (Mt 11:17/Lk 7:32), judgment will come unexpectantly like a flood (Mt 24:37-39/Lk 17:26-27) or a bird caught in a snare (Lk 21:34-35), and Israel’s ruling class are thieving usurpers who have seized control of a vineyard that does not rightfully belong to them (Mk 12:1-12). The parables deconstruct competing agendas for Israel’s restoration and rival accounts of what it means to be God’s Israel. The parables attack assumptions that God is on our side as long as the temple stands, the teaching of the elders is a fence around the Torah, Israel will tower over its neighbors like a cedar of Lebanon, God praises the honorable and casts out the shameless, the kingdom will look like Pharisees forming a phalanx, if Israel keeps three sabbaths then the Messiah will come, separation from sinners is true holiness, etc. This is why Jesus responds with a parable when accused of being in league with Beelzebul (Mk 3:23-30), for not fasting (Mk 2:19-20), for not washing his hands according to custom (Mk 7:1-23), when criticized for eating with sinners and tax-collectors (Lk 15:1-3), and why parables result in plots to kill him (Mk 12:12)! The parables use word pictures to redescribe the hope of God’s kingship and to redraw Israel’s boundaries and vocation in ways that rendered all the other sects and groups as either irrelevant or an obstacle to Israel’s restoration.

Accordingly, by telling parables Jesus was doing more than provocative social commentary against the establishment and more than smugly saying “It ain’t necessarily so” to offend the scruples of religious conservatives. In the parables, Jesus was taking the stories and assumptions that people lived by, which they simply assumed and often cherished, and turning them on their head. Jesus declares in the parables, often cryptically, that there was another way to tell Israel’s story, there was not just a problem for Israel but a problem within Israel, which required either the repentance of Israel or a rupture within Israel, and in this story of Israel’s deliverance there was a big plot twist, and a stranger ending still to come. It was like Jesus was teaching American colonial history and was saying that King George III was the hero of the American war for independence and his reign over America is eternal and inviolable; or he was telling a class of four-year olds a fairy-tale where Little Red Riding Hood was devoured by the wolf and he lived happily ever after; or he gave a sermon illustration where Methodist clergy turned away a homeless gay teenager and a Muslim family took her in; or he retold the story of Faust except that it turns out that Faust is the Church of England and Satan is the House of Lords; or he was quoting lines from Henrik Ibsen’s play Enemy of the People in the European parliament, and while everyone thought he was talking about Russia, he was in fact describing the Europe Union itself. It is the kind of thing you’d hear and think to yourself, “Oh yeah, tell it like it is brother!” then “What the hell?” to “OMG, is he talking about us?” to “That’s blasphemy and treason!” to “Away with him, give us Barabbas!!!” Parables are designed to either change the mind or cause people to look for the nearest pitchfork.

[1] Bockmuehl 2006, 216.

[2] Theissen & Merz 1998, 343.

[3] Cadoux 1900, 13; Jeremiah 1972, 21.

[4] Scott 1989, 39.