It’s no secret that parables present interpretive problems. A parable is simply a short story that has a double meaning. That is, there’s the obvious meaning of the story and then some other more abstract meaning conveyed by the story. The stories Jesus told were very simple, so you’d think both interpretations would be easily discerned. Not really.
Many writers, preachers, and Bible readers have approached the parables for centuries as though they are allegories. In an allegory, all the characters, events, and objects in a story have a specific meaning. But parables really aren’t like that. More recent scholarship on the parables rejects that approach since it’s artificial and contrary to what you actually read in the Gospels. When Jesus interprets parables for his disciples, he usually zeroes in on one or two teaching points. He doesn’t assign meaning to everything or everyone in the parables.
Jesus actually told the disciples why he taught in parables—and therefore tells us. He draws out the reason by quoting Isaiah 6:9–10:
And [Jesus] 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.’ ” (Mark 4:11–12)
What Jesus said isn’t hard to parse. Parables are meant to obscure and reveal the kingdom of God—which is not so much a place as it is the status of being part of God’s family and a follower of his good rule. Jesus taught in parables to convey who he was, what God was up to by sending him. Believers would understand. The spiritually blind and hard of heart would not.
As a result, when reading and interpreting parables, our eye needs to be trained to what they tell us about these things—how they reveal the kingdom of God and its King. The elements of the stories that do that are the important ones. Characters and components on the periphery shouldn’t be assumed to have meanings or to serve as elaborations on the central idea that we need to figure out. If we stray from what Jesus tells us to see in parables, our unchecked imaginations will have too much influence over our thinking.