Tag: Parables of Jesus

Parables

My wife and I have been reading Eugene Peterson’s Living the Message together to begin our day. On the day that the previous post (Pocket Gophers – a Parable), was published, Peterson provided us with a wonderful treatise on parables and the value they bring to readers/hearers. I thought, “There’s the next blog post!” So, I have captured that excerpt below for your reading pleasure…

Jesus was a master at subversion. Until the very end, everyone, including his disciples, called him Rabbi. Rabbis were important, but they didn’t make anything happen. On the occasions when suspicions were aroused that there might be more to him than title accounted for, Jesus tried to keep it quiet –”tell no one.”

Jesus’ favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sounded absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seed, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers, and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in the church, and only a couple mentioned the name of God.

As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren’t about God, so there was nothing in them, threatening their own sovereignty. They relax their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded! 

Parables were “thrown alongside” what Jesus was doing – explaining his actions and God’s kingdom

Jesus continually threw odd stories down alongside ordinary lives (para, “alongside “, bole, “thrown “) and walked away without explanation or alter call. Then listeners started seeing connections: God connections, life, connections, eternity, connections. The very lack of obviousness, the unlikeness, was the stimulus to perceiving likeness: God, likeness, life, likeness, eternity, likeness.

But the parable didn’t do the work – it put the listener’s imagination to work. Parables aren’t illustrations that make things easier; they make things harder by requiring the exercise of our imagination, which, if we aren’t careful becomes the exercise of our faith.

The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?” Jesus replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” Matthew 13:10-13 (MSG)

Seed Scattering

Recorded in Mark 4 are two of Jesus’ agrarian-related stories (parables). The first one is about sowing seeds in God’s economy. The kingdom message is sown indiscriminately in all kinds of soil – rocky, gravely, and good soil. Since we tend to be people focused on outcomes, we have terribly moralized this story with a focus on trying hard to be good soil, entirely missing the point of the story. Wanting to continue our conversation about doing right things, we are going to turn our attention to the second seed-sowing parable in Mark.

In first century Israel, farmers did not prepare the seedbed in any manner close to the way it’s done today. Same when planting seeds. In the first century, the farmer found a plot of ground capable of growing a crop, scratched the surface with primitive tools, and then threw seed randomly over the “prepared” soil. This seed scattering is what the first Mark 4 parable is all about – some seed landed on the road, some landed on less favorable soil, some among weeds, and a majority (presumably) of the seed landed on the prepared seedbed.

Because of the tendency to moralize Jesus’ words, the second seed scattering parable gets overlooked. It’s short and can be found in Mark 4:26-28:

He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.  All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.

Back to the Hinkle farm. Each spring, after preparing a good seedbed (doing right things) and sowing seeds in a meticulous manner (doing things right), my dad used to say something to the effect of, “Well, not much we can do now. It will be interesting to see what kind of crop we end up with.” That’s the exact point of the parable! The farmer sows the seeds and goes to bed! And all by itself, the soil produces grain. In the margin of my Bible, I jotted, “And all by himself, God can…”

Through the centuries, God has enlisted his people to be the seed sowers in his kingdom. As Christ-followers, we are kingdom people with one basic job – scattering seeds. Reading these two parables, it appears that we are to do this randomly, intentionally, and indiscriminately. The rest is God’s job. All by himself, God can produce fruit. This is what doing right things is all about!

Next week: I will share the contents of an email that a friend of mine, Mark Johansson, wrote to a friend of his after a conversation over dinner. His little epistle is focused on this parable. It is one of the most freeing things I have ever read! You will not want to miss it.