Jesus told parables because they serve, as Song of Songs Rabbah notes, as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life that God wants us to live. They are Jesus’s way of teaching, and they are remembered to this day not simply because they are in the Christian canon, but because they continue to provoke, challenge, and inspire.
Jesus knew that the best teaching concerning how to live, and live abundantly, comes not from spoon-fed data or an answer sheet. Instead, it comes from narratives that remind us of what we already know, but are resistant to recall. It comes from stories that prompt us to draw our own conclusions and at the same time force us to realize that our answers may well be contingent, or leaps of faith, or traps. It comes from stories that community members can share with each other, with each of us assessing the conclusions others draw, and so reassessing our own.
The parables, if we take them seriously not as answers but as invitations, can continue to inform our lives, even as our lives continue to open up the parables to new readings.
Jesus knew that the best teaching comes from stories with memorable characters who are both familiar and strange, who play upon our stereotypes even as they confront them. The concept of a good Samaritan would have been an oxymoron for Jesus’s audience. The idea that a tax collector could tap into the righteousness of both the Temple system and the Pharisee would have been recognized, but I suspect not particularly liked. The idea that an elder brother—Cain, Ishmael, Esau, the second lost son—is sympathetic again prompts a challenge to our expectations, and perhaps a recuperation of our history and our family. As for the kingdom of heaven being compared to a high-end wholesaler, or leaven, or mustard seed . . . If this can be the case, the kingdom can be compared to anyone or anything.
The parables, if we take them seriously not as historical portraits of real people but as challenges to our stereotypes, help us to locate both our eccentric traits and our excellent talents; they can inspire and humble, challenge and comfort.
Jesus knew that the best teachings come from stories that make us laugh even as they make us uncomfortable. The rabbi from Nazareth offers us images of a conniving young man, amid the pigs, salivating over the bread enough to spare available at his father’s table; tenacious widows threatening judges with physical harm; a rich man unable to realize that death has changed his position of privilege; a baker surreptitiously hiding yeast in dough that will produce more bread than can possibly feed a single family; a mustard seed that can provide shelter; a lucky fellow who finds treasure in a field . . . We smile, and at the same time we wonder. Are we to be sympathetic to the young man or not? Do we want the widow to achieve her goal? Should the rich man suffer even more, until he learns his place? What would we do with all that bread? Do seeds really have such potential, and if seeds, why not us?
The parables, if we take them seriously not as “meaning” but as soliciting our meaning making, and if we allow ourselves to be open to various interpretations, become not tools for shaming or inculcating guilt, but for good, hard lessons learned with a sense of playfulness.
Jesus himself, as we know from the rest of the Gospel tradition, cared deeply about reconciliation, and so he told stories about people torn apart and how they might be brought together. He constantly taught about laying up treasure in heaven rather than on earth, and so he told stories about rich men whose wealth does them no good and poor people who find the real treasure they need. Jesus insisted we should not judge, and that the criterion by which we judge others will be used to judge us. Therefore he offered parables in which those who judge others are trapped into being in relationship with them; he told parables in which those who judge themselves righteous may be wrong or may not realize the full implications of their righteousness.
He sought to prepare his people for the inbreaking of the kingdom of heaven, the time when we would recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and so he set about enacting the messianic banquet among a mixed group of saints and sinners, tax collectors and patrons, women and men, faithful and doubters. He also told stories about baking and banquets and feasts and so in his stories nourished his followers even as he left them hungry for more.
To prepare his followers for that inbreaking, he also asked them to prioritize. What really matters, and what does not? The parables ask us questions. What is our pearl of great price? What would we do were we to find treasure in the field? What would satisfy us, and what should satisfy us?
It may be that no matter how good the teachings, we will still resist them. Such resistance begins with the Gospels themselves. Luke tames the parables. For Luke, the parable of the Widow and the Judge is about the need to pray always, certainly not about women asserting themselves in public, and even more certainly not about threatening people if they do not get their way, regardless of the justice of their case. For Luke, the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, and Lost Sons are about repentance and forgiveness, and thus provocative, humorous, and celebratory stories become tamed into banal statements of the obvious. For Luke, the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector reinforces the idea of bad Pharisees and good tax collectors rather than calling into question the meaning of prayer, good deeds, repentance, and justification.
Domestication of the parables’ provocation then continues as we move from text to interpretation. In many settings the Pearl of Great Price is about the importance of the church, or faith, or Jesus; surely Christians already know this. The Laborers in the Vineyard can’t be about economics, we say, because that would completely discombobulate labor relations; imagine, a CEO who is interested in providing employment for those who need it, and a group of workers who are so selfish that they demand more than their original contract even while begrudging others a living wage. The Rich Man and Lazarus can’t really be about heaven and hell, because that would suggest people could be saved apart from the cross or, conversely, that poverty and suffering may warrant heavenly reward, apart from good deeds.
The parables we have looked at in this volume, as well as all the others, began their process of domestication as soon as the evangelists wrote them down, and probably before that. This process should not surprise us. As much as we might respect the idea of divine freedom and mystery, we are ultimately more comfortable with answers rather than questions, with the tried and true rather than new thoughts. Debate can be messy; it can lead to disagreement, or worse. Better that everyone remain on the same page.
Jesus understood that God does not play by our rules. His God is a generous God, who not only allows the sun to shine on both the just and the unjust, but also gives us the ability to live into what should be rather than what is. The parables help us with their lessons about generosity: sharing joy, providing for others, recognizing the potential of small investments.
His God wants us to be better than we are, because we have the potential to be. We are made but a little lower than the divine (Ps. 8.6; see Heb. 2.7); we should start acting in a more heavenly matter. Those who pray, “Your kingdom come,” might want to take some responsibility in the process, and so work in partnership with God. We too are to seek the lost and make every effort to find them. Indeed, we are not only to seek; we are to take notice of who might be lost, even when immediately present. The rich man ignores Lazarus at his gate, and the father of the prodigal ignored the elder son in the field. For the former, it is too late; for the latter, whether it is too late or not we do not know. But we learn from their stories. Don’t wait. Look now. Look hard. Count.
These are all hard lessons, despite the humor with which they are delivered. Therefore we resist them. Worse, our resistance, our efforts in refusing the challenges parables make to our presuppositions often take the form of anti-Jewish stereotypes. When I began working on this volume, years ago, I knew of certain problematic readings, but I was actually shocked to find out how pervasive and persuasive they are. Rather than accept the challenge, including those challenges that, were we honest, would convict ourselves, we turn the parables into screeds against Jewish practice, ethics, or theology. Such approaches, as we’ve seen throughout the volume, misread Jesus, and misread Judaism. We can do better.
Parables will continue to be open to new understandings, but not all understandings have the same weight. If our approach is to learn more about ourselves, we can simply say, “What does the parable mean to me?” If we find a challenge, so much the better. If we want to learn more about Jesus, we have to do a bit more work.
If the interpretation requires an answer key or a decoder ring, then we are not hearing it as those who first heard it did. Jesus told parables, not allegories.
If the interpretation is a platitude or a banality—be generous, God loves you, the kingdom of God is important, pray a lot—we may have a surface reading, but we are not fully appreciating the genius of Jesus’s storytelling or the respect he had for the people who listened to him.
If the interpretation of a story told by a Jew to other Jews is based on or yields a negative stereotype of Judaism, then the interpretation has gotten more lost than the sheep, coin, or sons, and it cannot and should not be recovered.
If the interpretation does not raise for us more questions, if it does not open us up to more conversation, if it creates a neat and tidy picture, we need to go back and read it again.
Once we are open to the challenge, we can turn to other parables. Jesus tells us of a dishonest manager who makes others complicit in his crimes, and does so in such a way that his former employer can only commend him for his shrewdness (Luke 16.1–8). Poor Luke goes through numerous machinations to turn this story into a lesson about evangelism: “Make friends for yourself by means of dishonest wealth (unrighteous mammon)” (16.9). That may be what the manager did, but that’s not a great lesson for matters of reconciliation, justice, or compassion. Something else must be going on.
Jesus tells the story of the Five Wise and Five Foolish Virgins, also called the Ten Bridesmaids (Matt. 25.1–13). The parable might just as easily be called that of the “Woefully Delayed Groom,” but that would be too Christologically edgy for those who still anticipate a second coming. The reading “bridesmaids” is odd, given that the parable never mentions a bride (Matt. 25.1–13; I do worry about that missing bride, just as I worry about the absent mother of the prodigal and prudent).
All ten young women fall asleep, and thus they all fail to do what Jesus exhorts, “Keep awake” (e.g., Mark 13.37; Matt. 24.42). Five fail to share their oil, and they exhort their companions who have run out to go to the local 7-Eleven for more. If the only conclusion we draw from this is, “Be prepared” (turning the first five virgins into Boy Scouts—the type of gender-bending the organization is still not prepared to sanction), Jesus has wasted his time.
Domestication begins as soon as this bridegroom is seen as Jesus himself. With this move, conservative readers conclude that Jesus is being autobiographical. He is the bridegroom, we can be assured of the second coming, we will be prepared with our faith (and perhaps even our good deeds), and we, but not others, will enter the messianic banquet. There is no challenge here; there is at best either self-satisfaction or the development of neurosis as we try to stay awake. For liberals, the idea that Jesus is the bridegroom leads to the conclusion that the parable could not be by Jesus at all; rather, it must be a creation of the early church worried that people will lose heart at the delay of the Parousia, the Second Coming.
What if the parable is from Jesus, but is not autobiographical? What if the virgins are virgins, the bridegroom a delayed suitor, and the oil just oil and not “good deeds” or “sufficient faith”? With this nonallegorical reading, the right questions can be answered. When is selfishness appropriate and when not? Do we rejoice at the suitor’s coming or condemn him from showing up late? Do we want to go into the banquet with a delayed suitor who slams the door in the face of our friends (after all, it is a good party), or do we stay outside with the women just returned from the 7-Eleven with more oil? Might there be a third way, so that all can rejoice?
In the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Matt. 21.33–46; Mark 12.1–12; Luke 20.9–19), Jesus tells a story about a vineyard, and most hearers would conclude that the vineyard is Israel. We saw the same association with the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard: the connection to Isaiah 5.1–7 is unavoidable. But Jesus shifts the focus immediately, for the problem in this parable is not with the vineyard that does not yield grapes, but with the tenants. The vineyard according to Isaiah is not destroyed; in this parable it is.
Already we are challenged, because we do not know how far to push the association.
Once we move into allegory, we are challenged again. Is the landowner God or just a landowner? Is God an absentee landowner? If so, the parable can be taken as a critique of God, which would be much at home in a Jewish setting, where laments and complaints serve theological purposes. If we insist the tenants are the Jews, their leaders, or the Pharisees, what do we learn? What if they are instead the various nations who conquered Israel: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome? Matthew tells us that the heir is Jesus (21.42). Would first-century Jews get this point? Or would they first think, “This is a tragic story, and the horror does not end”?
What do we do with a landowner who finds his slaves abused, one after the other, and then decides to send his son, with the surety, “They will respect my son”? How foolish is this? Yes, we rush to allegory, but not so fast. We do the same thing today. We send battalion after battalion to the front, and we keep thinking, with “shock and awe,” that “they” will respect us. They do not. Yet we keep expending our resources even when we know there is no chance of recuperation. We keep at the quest for honor and power, even when the cause is lost. We insist that we were always right, because we are unable to realize our policies were misguided.
And what do we do with the ending? The tenants say to themselves, “This is the heir. Come let us kill him and get his inheritance.” Do we want them to succeed, as if they are representative of a peasant revolt? Do we want them to be punished, so that they suffer the same fate as they meted out to the messengers and then the heir? What is the resolution when violence escalates? The landowner will let the farm out to other tenants. Will the violence be repeated?
The parable of the Wedding Banquet or Great Dinner (Matt. 22.2–14; Luke 14.16–24) is similarly disturbing in its violence. It ends with dead slaves, a burned city, dinner guests who are compelled to attend the party, and an expelled guest doomed to torture because he lacked the right outfit. That any of this speaks to what the “kingdom of heaven” is like should come as a surprise. If the parable is about salvation, then it is about a type of salvation in which free will is obviated. If the parable is about the grace of the divine, then it is a grace that burns an entire city because of the sins of a few of its citizens. If the parable is about the messianic banquet, then it is a banquet that nobody eats. If the lord or king in the parable is God, then we should wonder if this is the type of God we want to worship.
The parable should disturb. If we hear it and are not disturbed, there is something seriously amiss with our moral compass. It would be better if we perhaps started by seeing the parable not as about heaven or hell or final judgment, but about kings, politics, violence, and the absence of justice. If we do, we might be getting closer to Jesus.
Jesus recounts the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. 25.31–46), in which people are judged not on whether they worshipped Jesus or not, but on whether they cared for the poor, fed the hungry, or visited people in prison. Otherwise put, Jesus asks, “Did you go the extra mile?” The parable still convicts, even while it is happily read in churches by people who have never set foot in a prison, never invited a homeless person to lunch, never held a shivering baby with AIDS, or sat by the bed of a childless widow with stage-four cancer. We might know, when that final judgment occurs, to get into the sheep line rather than the goat line, but then what? Do we rejoice at the condemnation of others, do we remain silent like Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, or do we finally conclude that perhaps God’s mercy is greater than what we think it to be?
One does not need to worship Jesus as Lord or Savior for the parables to have meaning. The people who first heard him did not, at first, worship him. Yet they paid attention, because for those with ears to hear and some patience to ponder, the parables spoke to their hearts. I do not worship Jesus as Lord and Savior, but I continue to return to these stories, because they are at the heart of my own Judaism. They challenge, they provoke, they convict, and at the same time they amuse. At each reading, when I think I’ve got all the details explained, something remains left over, and I have to start again. The parables have provided me countless hours of inspiration, and conversation. They are pearls of Jewish wisdom. If we hear them in their original contexts, and if we avoid the anti-Jewish interpretation that frequently deforms them, they gleam with a shine that cannot be hidden.