The Radical Stories of Jesus: Interpreting the Parables Today 1573127876, 9781573127875

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Regent’s Study Guides General Editor: Paul S. Fiddes

The Radical Stories of Jesus Interpreting the Parables Today

Regent’s Study Guides

The Radical Stories of Jesus Interpreting the Parables Today Michael Ball

Regent’s Park College, Oxford with Smyth & Helwys Publishing, Inc. Macon, Georgia

The Radical Stories of Jesus Interpreting the Parables of Jesus Michael Ball © 2000 Published by Regent’s Park College, Oxford OX1 2LB, UK in association with Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 6316 Peake Road, Macon, GA 31210, USA All rights reserved. ISBN (USA) 978-1-57312-787-5

Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................vii Introduction: The Radical Stories of Jesus ..............................................ix 1. The Parables and Jesus..........................................................................1 2. The Parables and the Old Testament ..................................................17 3. The Parables in the Gospels ................................................................31 4. The Parables and Gospel Structure ....................................................45 5. What is a Parable? ..............................................................................61 6. Reading the Parables Today ................................................................79 7. A Method of Approaching the Parables ..............................................97 8. The Method Illustrated ......................................................................113 9. The Bible, Story and God ................................................................129 10. Preaching the Parables ....................................................................145 Appendix: Literary Re-workings of Some Parables ............................169 Index ....................................................................................................175

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the Baptist Union of Great Britain, to Sutton Baptist Church and to Llanishen Baptist Church, who together made it possible for me to take a sabbatical during which much of the work for this book was done. Dr. Frank Trombley of Cardiff University read the first drafts of the earlier chapters, and gave me stimulating feedback, while Dr. George Beasley-Murray read the whole manuscript apart from chapter 10 and the appendix, and also gave me useful reactions and encouragement to continue the work and to seek a publisher. Neither bears any responsibility for the views expressed. I am grateful to the following publishers and authors for their permission to reproduce copyright material. Quotations from the Holy Bible, New International Version, Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society; used by permission of Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd. Quotations from The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version, Copyright© 1946, 1952 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America; used by kind permission. Quotations from The Good News Bible. Today’s English Version. New Testament Copyright ©American Bible Society, 1966, 1971, 1976; Old Testament Copyright© American Bible Society 1976; used by kind permission of The British & Foreign Bible Society. An excerpt from the poem ‘Getting It Across’, from Standing To by U. A. Fanthorpe, Copyright © 1982 The Peterloo Poets is reprinted by kind permission of The Peterloo Poets. The poem ‘Prodigal Preoccupied’ from Stuff and Nonsense by Gordon Bailey Copyright © 1989 Gordon Bailey is reprinted by kind permission of the publishers, Lion Books.

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An excerpt from For All God’s Worth by Tom Wright, Copyright © 1997 N. T. Wright is reprinted by kind permission of the publishers, SPCK (Triangle). Abbreviations of English Translations of the Bible GNB NIV RSV

Good News Bible. Today’s English Version New International Version Revised Standard Version

Introduction The Radical Stories of Jesus In his ‘biography’ of Jesus published in 1992, A. N. Wilson comments on the parable from Luke’s Gospel (18.10-14) usually known as ‘The Pharisee and the Publican’: It is a shocking, morally anarchic story. All that matters in the story appears to be God’s capacity to forgive. Since the Pharisee has no sin, he cannot get into touch with God. It is the sinner who goes home ‘justified’, because for him, the test of a good life is not virtue but a childlike dependence on the mercy of God. This is not a moral fable to put us on our guard against excessive self-righteousness. It is a nihilist’s charter.1

Now, while A. N. Wilson may not have fully or accurately understood this story, he has perceived just how subversive and shocking it is to conventional religious minds. It is very far removed from the simple ‘example story’ about prayer and humility it may at first sight seem to be, and has so been categorized by distinguished scholars. What he discerns of this specific parable is true of parables in general. One of P. G. Wodehouse’s characters remarks: A parable is one of those stories in the Bible which sounds at first like a pleasant yarn but keeps something up its sleeve which pops up and leaves you flat.2

The parables of Jesus are often taught to children, and have been so familiar for so long to most Christians, that they are frequently not heard accurately, and are consequently thought of as cosy, comfortable, romantic, moralistic tales. A few years ago, I was invited to write some daily Bible Study notes for one of the bodies which publishes these devotional aids. My allotted topic was parables from Matthew’s Gospel. I wrote several pilot days’ notes, but my work was rejected by the editor, on the grounds that I ‘had chosen unusual interpretations of the parables which would only upset people’. Of course, I may be biased in my opinion, but I believe that what I had done was to draw out their true character, which is often shocking and disturbing. Apparently, many Christians today cannot

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cope with this. Sometimes it seems that the process of ‘taming’ the parables even begins in the Gospels, where the evangelists themselves do not always seem to understand what Jesus was saying. Many of these stories are quite wild and unrealistic. Whoever heard of a woman who threw a party to celebrate the recovery of an insignificant lost silver coin? This parable is frequently tamed by interpreters, by the quite unwarranted assumption that the lost coin must have had sentimental value for the woman as part of a dowry, or part of a piece of jewellery. What wealthy man would invite the riff-raff from the streets into his party, when his respectable friends insulted him by refusing to come, for instance? Surely to end up with a party they would not have been seen dead in is even worse than no party at all! Other plots include mugging, murder, family quarrels and sudden death. They feature foreigners, tax collectors, crooks, spiteful peasants and lazy, dishonest and discontented employees. Clearly, they are not children’s bed-time stories, or moralistic example stories. They are not meant to sugar pills by making simple points of belief more palatable. They are subversive and explosive stories, designed to get under the guard of our minds and make us see new truths and new perspectives. They challenge our stereotypes and force us to re-examine cherished presuppositions. God and his Kingdom are so far from human ideas of commonsense and justice that only something outrageous will do to point us to the reality. Perhaps they are meant to puzzle. The Hebrew word meaning ‘parable’ can also mean ‘riddle’ or ‘enigma’. As Robert Farrar Capon suggests: We do not include the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, because we understand it, nor do we omit the parable of the Unjust Steward because we can’t make head or tail of it. Rather, we commit both to the Christian memory because that’s the way Jesus seems to want the inside of his believers’ heads decorated.3

We are meant to allow the parables to sink into our subconscious minds and to influence us indirectly as we live with them, allowing them to intrigue, to tease, to affect our thinking and our ways. We must not make our reception of them dependent on our understanding of them, or liking for them.

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The aim of this book is thus to examine the parables afresh, trying to clear away presuppositions of popular piety and dogmatic scholarship alike. We shall largely concern ourselves with the more developed stories, not the metaphors and figurative sayings. We shall ask where they originate, what they are, how they function, what Jesus intended by them, how they fit into his story, into the Gospels, into the life of the early Churches for which the Evangelists wrote, into the Bible and Christian theology. I shall also try to guide the reader into ways of reading them or preaching them with sympathy and understanding, so that the authentic voice of Jesus, man of Galilee and Risen Lord, may speak as clearly as possible. Notes to Introduction A.N. Wilson, Jesus (London: Flamingo, 1993 [1992]), pp. 30-1. Cit. In A.M. Hunter, Interpreting the Parables (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 14. 3 Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), p. 4. 1 2

1 The Parables and Jesus According to the New Testament, parables are absolutely typical of the teaching of Jesus. In the so-called Synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—they comprise something like a third of his recorded teaching, and there are about sixty of them in total. They are found in all the sources which many scholars think underlie the Synoptic Gospels as we now know them—not only in Mark, the earliest and foundational Gospel, but also in ‘Q’, the hypothetical common source of sayings drawn on by Matthew and Luke, and also in the sources unique to them. While John’s Gospel does not have any well-developed parables, and none at all which are narrative stories, the figurative sayings such as ‘I am the Good Shepherd’ are clearly closely related in style to parables such as the Lost Sheep. C. H. Dodd even claimed to find in the text of John ‘hidden’ or implicit parables such as that of ‘The Apprentice-Son’:1 The Son can do nothing on his own; he does only what he sees his Father doing. What the Father does, the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing (John 5.19-20. GNB).

In reading this, it is easy to conjure up a romantic picture of the boy Jesus with Joseph, learning the carpenter’s trade in the village home at Nazareth. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas which is generally believed to have independent authentic traditions going back to the historical Jesus, contains parables which parallel some of those found in Mark, Q and also Matthew and Luke’s unique sources, as well as a few parables without parallel in the synoptic Gospels. There is no evidence to suggest that the early Christian Church had any interest in teaching by way of parables other than those attributed to Jesus. Apart from those in the Gospels, the New Testament contains no parables at all. Paul, who wrote more of the New Testament than any other author but Luke, was not usually comfortable with metaphors, similes and other illustrations. For instance, in his letter to the Romans, (11.16-24) there is a very clumsy, strained, and horticulturally ludicrous illustration of grafting wild branches in and out of a cultivated olive tree, whose roots are dedicated to God, so making all the branches his too. The

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branches are exhorted not to quarrel among themselves. Not only is all of this profoundly unconvincing as a story or illustration, but it is not particularly helpful in clarifying the argument, even if Paul is deliberately describing a process contrary to nature to underline the divine grace in including the Gentiles! Occasionally he illustrates with pictures from the world of athletics (Phil 3.13-14) or the army (1 Cor 9.7). Writing to the Galatians, he attempts an allegorical interpretation of part of the story of Abraham and his children, (4.21-31) but never seems to compose allegorical stories of his own. The other epistles of the New Testament— Hebrews, James, Peter and John—whether they are genuine letters to a particular set of people at a particular time, or circular homilies, follow the same pattern. The only known story-teller in early Christianity, apart from Jesus, who was sufficiently gifted to have been responsible for the parables, is Luke. He (or the literary sources he drew on) could write in the manner of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, the widely used Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures of his time, as in the first chapter of his Gospel. He could write like Mark, when he tells stories from the life of Jesus—of healings, controversies, casual encounters, incidents with his disciples and so on. He could write in the style of cultured historians of his day, as in the dedication of his Gospel, and the speeches attributed to various Roman officials in Acts. (In the absence of shorthand and mechanical means of recording what was said, these were probably composed by Luke himself, following what were then current history-writing conventions.) Although we cannot check on his accuracy, since there are no other records of them, he can write convincing sermons based on Old Testament texts, which are put into the mouths of early Christians such as Peter, Stephen and Paul. He could write a highly readable personal journal, vividly chronicling travel in the first century world, which we read in the ‘we’ passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Some of Luke’s stories such as the Easter account of the road to Emmaus are of the highest literary quality. However, Luke can be eliminated as the originator of parables, because they also appear in Mark, Matthew and ‘Q’ (if it existed) which all pre-date his gospel. We shall have more to say later on the influence of the individual gospel writers on the parables as recorded.2 Significantly, Luke attributes no parables to Peter, Paul, Stephen, Philip, James or other

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early Christian leaders and preachers in his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles. Some scholars argue that Matthew and Luke composed parables themselves, thus adding to the genuine corpus coming from Jesus. However, in the case of a parable such as the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20.1-16) the parable hardly seems to fit the meaning Matthew seems to think it has! This parable does not illustrate ‘the last being first’ and ‘the first last’, since all the labourers get the same reward, and the order of payment is not of any significance in the meaning of the parable. This suggests that Matthew found the parable from some existing source, and tried to fit it into his Gospel. Some of the reasoning behind suggestions that the evangelists themselves composed parables seems to be flawed. For instance, it is suggested that the Wheat and the Tares (Matt 13. 24-30) is Matthew’s expansion of the Seed Growing Secretly (Mark 4.26-9), which he then naturally omits. Reference is made to a number of words which are common to both parables—‘sleep,’ ‘come up,’ ‘wheat,’ ‘harvest,’ ‘grain’. That anyone should deliberately seed a neighbour’s field with weeds is said to be highly unlikely and unrealistic, and it is further suggested that the Wheat and the Tares is so fully allegorical that it must have come from the early Church, not from Jesus. While the possibility that Matthew is the author can never be ruled out, the case against is very compelling, and worth setting out in detail. First, with regard to allegorization, it is notable that in other parables, such as the Sower and the Wicked Tenants, Matthew is very faithful to Mark; although willing to make minor adjustments, there is no evidence of wholesale resort to allegory. For instance, along with Luke, in this latter parable, the tenants murder the son outside the vineyard, rather than inside and then throw out his body. This improves the allegorical fit with the death of Jesus, who was killed on Golgotha, outside the city walls of Jerusalem, but it is hardly a substantive change to the essential narrative. Anyway, the assumption that Jesus himself did not use allegory is without any basis. Many of Jesus’ parables contain allegorical elements, and there is no good reason to question the likelihood that they should, or their authenticity on this count.

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Second, the overlap of vocabulary between the Seed Growing Secretly and the Wheat and the Tares could hardly be avoided in two parables which both feature growing crops of corn as a central element. Third, there is the accusation of unreal features in the story. In his collection of Arabic folk tales,3 Asher Barash recounts a tale, collected from a teller of Palestinian traditional stories. One peasant did another a bad turn, by denouncing him to a wealthy land-owner for grazing his cows in the land-owner’s field. The second man took his revenge, which he describes in his own words: That year, at midsummer, I walked down to the valley where Kassab, a weed of the very worst kind was growing as tall as a man. The seeds were just ripe and I picked as many of the ripe ears as I could pack into my shawl. I went home and thrashed the ears and threw the chaff into the wind. Then I walked over to Abu-Yassin’s vegetable patch. The field had been ploughed just the day before and the furrows lay open all ready to receive the seed. I walked up and down the furrows, sowing the seeds along the length and breadth of the whole field. I didn’t stint! That year the vegetable patch was covered with a dense growth of Kassab, beautiful to behold....Ever since then—and all this happened twenty years ago—it has been impossible to plough a single furrow in that field because of the Kassab weed.

This would seem to give the lie to the claimed lack of realism in the parable, though in any case, unreality is a feature of very many parables. We should add that, from a literary point of view, writing convincing and effective parables is extremely difficult, as anyone who tries readily discovers! Nevertheless, Michael Goulder similarly suggests that Luke has composed the parables unique to his Gospel. For instance, he claims that the Prodigal Son is Luke’s re-write of Matthew’s story of the Two Sons.4 A substantial part of his case is that Luke had no sources for his Gospel beyond Mark and Matthew, but so far as the parables are concerned, the idea that Luke composed them does not look at all convincing. Among Goulder’s arguments are two features claimed to be typical of Luke’s parables, and marking them out from those in Matthew and Mark. These are the greater amount of characterization and the lesser amount of allegory they contain.5 But in point of fact, both of these features are only

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matters of degree. There is allegory in Luke, and there is some characterization in Matthew and Mark. Further, as I indicate later in my comments on the Friend at Midnight,6 what counts as allegorical detail is very much a matter of judgement. Goulder also proposes that only Luke has ‘example stories,’ parables whose main point is to show us how to behave.7 However, the Lost Sheep in Matthew is very close to an example story, urging us to ‘go like the shepherd and search for your lost Christian brother’, as is the parable of the Two Debtors with its meaning ‘Forgive those who have debts against you, as you are forgiven.’ In any case, I shall try to show that parables such as the Pharisee and Publican and the Good Samaritan are real parables, and not simple example stories. Finally, there are several literary objections to Goulder’s proposal. Was Luke really so clever an author that he could reconstruct for his invented stories an accurate religious, cultural and geographical setting in the Holy Land in the early years of the first century, which presupposed the continued life and existence of the Jerusalem Temple? Was Luke so gifted an author that he has composed so many great stories, including two parables, the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, which are among the world’s masterpieces of short story? They are of sufficient quality to have inspired other great creative artists: among them are authors like Henry Fielding, who re-tells the Good Samaritan in his novel Joseph Andrews8 and painters like Rembrandt, whose picture ‘The Return of the Prodigal Son’ can be seen in the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), and Dürer, whose superb drawing of the Prodigal Son with the pigs is today in the British Museum. Among musicians, Benjamin Britten set both the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son to music, while in 1929 Diaghilev commissioned and staged a highly successful ballet, ‘The Prodigal Son’, with music by Prokofiev, choreography by Balanchine and designs by Rouault. Was Luke gifted with such deep spiritual insight that he outshone Jesus himself in producing stories which have captured the hearts and minds of Christian people, and which are widely seen to encapsulate the heart of the Christian gospel and lifestyle? To me, the answer ‘yes’ to these questions would be implausible. When we examine the parables of Jesus, they clearly come from someone who knew the culture and ethos of first century Holy Land.

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Taken together, they paint a vivid picture of life among poorer people in a small village or town. They are almost without exception not about religion or religious observance. Priests and Levites only make one appearance, and then in an everyday situation (the Good Samaritan). Only one parable pictures the after-life (the Rich Man and Lazarus). God only appears and acts directly in the Rich Fool, and is mentioned in two others (the Unjust Judge and the Prodigal Son), but only in the course of delineating human character. Only one parable describes prayer, the Pharisee and the Publican, with a setting in the Temple in Jerusalem. But even humble village folk had some experience of the life of the capital city when, like Mary and Joseph, they travelled to Jerusalem for the Passover or some other religious ceremony. The parable of the Good Samaritan is set on a journey, also involving Jerusalem, and it reveals accurate knowledge of the danger to isolated travellers from brigands on the lonely road between there and Jericho, and an awareness that the road was downhill. Jesus himself travelled around the Holy Land quite extensively, and would have been aware of such things from personal experience and observation. Although kings feature in a few parables, (the King going to War, the Wedding Feast and the Two Debtors) there is no detail which indicates any inside knowledge of court life. When businessmen take a journey abroad, or a merchant travels to find precious pearls, when tenants have to deal with an absentee landlord, or a scapegrace son wastes his fortune in Gentile territory in a distant land, there is nothing to indicate that the story-teller himself had ever been abroad. The predisposition of Gentiles to keep herds of pigs was well known to Jews in general, and particularly to Jews from the Galilaean region, where Gentiles lived close by in places like Gadara. (Mark 5.1-20) In Luke, as we shall see below, the parables tend to have a very middle-class setting. Where wealthy or influential people are shown, the sums of money mentioned might appear large to a peasant mind, but would not be very significant to genuinely wealthy people. The rich man in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus dresses only in the clothing commended in Proverbs 31.22 and lives in unspecified luxury. If the parable came from the early Christians of Rome or Corinth, descriptions of far greater decadent luxury and ostentatious displays of wealth could have been sup-

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plied! By contrast, Matthew’s parables tend to be about kings and wealthy businessmen who deal in enormous sums; yet these show no more evidence of personal experience of their ways than we find in the descriptions of kings and princes in European fairy tales. J. R. Donahue’s comment is apt: ‘The homes of the rich are seen only through the kitchen door.’9 There is little evidence of personal experience of social and economic life in the city, and this is in harmony with the Gospels which never show Jesus in even the larger towns of Galilee such as Sepphoris, the chief city, located only four miles from Nazareth, or the other regional centres of Gadara or Tarichaeae, or Herod Antipas’ new lake-side town of Tiberias. However, we do see many lively details of village life. Women mix yeast in with the flour to bake bread. They light their fires with the dried grass and flowers from the hillsides. They spring-clean their homes to find a lost coin. Children play their games of weddings and funerals in the market place, where labourers gather daily, hoping to find casual employment in the vineyards. Fishermen on the shore of Galilee sort through their catch, picking out the palatable and saleable fish from the useless. People build themselves houses, and sometimes become a laughing stock when a more grandiose building project does not come to completion. Farmers sow and reap, and in some years enjoy good harvests and need to build extra barns to accommodate their crops. The farming described is hillcountry farming, done in small patches surrounded by stone fences and troubled with briars (Mark 4.4-7). On occasion, people find themselves in deep financial trouble, with the threat of imprisonment for failure to repay debts. Vineyards and farms are sometimes family concerns, and there are disappointments and tensions between fathers and their sons, and between brothers. Widows are sometimes denied their legal rights, and have to turn to a judge for redress. Peasants play spiteful tricks on each other. Unscrupulous tenants resent working for absentee landlords, and try to find ways of seizing the assets for themselves, while lazy employees take advantage of their master’s absence to have an unofficial paid holiday. Shepherds look after mixed flocks of sheep and goats, and on occasion have to wander the hillsides hunting for stragglers. Sometimes there is a welcome change from the routine of life when the whole village turns out for a wedding, or is invited to a party to

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celebrate the return of a family member. A lucky farm labourer uncovers treasure buried in a field during unsettled times, as he is ploughing. From time to time, someone falls victim to a burglar. There is the sudden death of a village character, or an unexpected visitor arrives in the dead of night, causing a crisis in hospitality so that help has to be sought from a neighbouring family who are all safely tucked up in bed in their one-roomed house, the oil lamp on its prominent place extinguished for the night. It is true that there is an absence of any detailed pictures from crafts and trades such as pottery, and—most surprising, given the previous occupation of Jesus—from carpentry, though there are references to building. The sole exception is the reference to someone with a plank in his eye trying to remove a speck of sawdust from another’s eye—but this is exaggeration for comic and dramatic impact which needs no personal experience or technical knowledge of carpentry to invent. Perhaps Jesus was not a domestic or agricultural carpenter, but a boat builder and repairer. The Jewish historian Josephus in his book The Jewish War refers to the ‘abundance of wood and carpenters’ available locally at Magdala to the Roman general Vespasian when he wanted rafts in a hurry to take his army over the sea of Galilee.10 It might also seem to weigh against first-hand experience of country life that there are highly unrealistic things in the parables. A. N. Wilson in his ‘biography’ of Jesus points out that Jesus’ claim that the mustard seed grows into the biggest tree is simply untrue, and betrays either booklearning and lack of personal experience of this plant, or deliberate hyperbole.11 He also points out that with the exception of one German scholar, nobody has ever witnessed the agricultural method of scattering seed-corn on unploughed land, prior to ploughing, which seems to be supposed in the parable of the sower. But as we shall see, many of the parables describe things that are strange or unrealistic, ‘surrealistic’ is the adjective used by one scholar. The highly unlikely (and unprofitable!) event of a moneylender cancelling debts because his clients could not afford to pay is just one example. We shall be explaining that these departures from reality are not only a typical feature of the parables, but essential to a proper understanding of them. So for the present, we do not accept Wilson’s suggestion that the parables do not reflect first-hand knowledge of agriculture in first century Palestine in a fairly rural setting.

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In any case, scholars in their studies can sometimes be too pedantic over detail and see imagined difficulties which would not worry most people. That great countryman author Thomas Hardy, writing of country life in the first half of the nineteenth century, describes the first appearance of a sowing machine in the West Country town of Casterbridge, and makes direct appeal to the parable of Jesus: ‘It will revolutionise sowing Heerabout! No more sowers flinging their seed about broadcast, so that some falls by the wayside and some among thorns, and all that. Each grain will go straight to its intended place, and nowhere else whatever!’ ‘Then the romance of the sower is gone for good,’ observed Elizabeth-Jane...12

Whoever spoke these parables knew about the existence of Pharisees, and their animosity towards the hated tax collectors. These renegade Jews implemented taxation for the Roman political powers through a franchise system. They made themselves triply unpopular: firstly because no-one enjoys paying taxes; secondly because they were probably often dishonest men who pulled in as much revenue as they could for their own personal wealth, and thirdly because they were collaborators with the Romans, the occupying power who ruled the Jewish nation, and who provided the tax collectors with necessary protection. (Technically, the Jews were allies of Rome, not a conquered people at this time.) When the parables were told, the Temple in Jerusalem was still in operation, so they pre-suppose a situation before 70 CE when Jerusalem fell and the Temple was destroyed during the Jewish War of independence against the Romans. The teller also knows of Priests and Levites, and the hatred and dismissive attitudes which existed between Jews and Samaritans. There is even what is probably a reference to a piece of recent history in the parable of the Pounds, Luke 19.12-27. The sub-plot in this parable, which concerns an unpopular nobleman whose subjects try to avoid having him as their king, is very close to an event recorded by Josephus.13 He tells of how the Jews of Judaea unsuccessfully sent a delegation to Rome to try to avoid having Herod the Great’s son Archelaus as their king.

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We shall be considering the question of allegory within the parables in more detail later. Many mid-twentieth century scholars have asserted that Jesus did not use allegory, so that allegorical elements in parables are signs of the work of the early church. However, James Charlesworth has recently examined the parable of The Wicked Tenant Farmers (Mark 12.1-12/Matt 21.33-46/Lk 20.9-19; also Gospel of Thomas 65) in some detail.14 He concludes that in various ways, the allegory presupposes the conditions in the Holy Land during the lifetime of Jesus, which were radically different from the time the Gospels were written. Further, details of the allegory do not accurately reflect the way Jesus did in fact die, though they may well reflect the way he expected to die, based on what had happened to others. The parable is an allegory which is a development of the one in Isaiah 5. The vineyard stands for Israel, or perhaps for Jerusalem; the tenants for the Jewish authorities; the servants for the Old Testament prophets; the son and heir for Jesus. Although the language includes phrases like ‘beloved Son’ which are said to reflect Mark’s tendencies, Jesus’ personal consciousness of beloved sonship is very well attested in the New Testament. The experience of ‘sonship’ is shared with believers through the Holy Spirit (Romans 8.14-16), and they are taught to pray ‘Our Father...’ (Matt 6.9). The intimate loving relationship between Heavenly Father, and Jesus the Son is the very atmosphere of John’s Gospel. Joachim Jeremias points to this sense of sonship as stemming authentically from Jesus,15 so it is possible that Jesus may well have allegorized himself into the parable. If the parable were invented or developed by the early Church, then several difficulties arise. In the first place, the son in Mark’s version is killed within the vineyard, and his body ejected. Jesus was not killed within the city, and his body was not thrown out of it. We have already mentioned Matthew and Luke’s corrections of this. However, a few decades before Jesus, a Galilaean charismatic miracle worker called Honi Ha-Meaggel (Honi the Circle Drawer) was stoned to death outside Jerusalem, and Jesus may well have anticipated a comparable fate. Further, the parable implies that the son was subject to the final insult of no burial, following his violent death, whereas all the gospels attest to the burial of Jesus.

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The following features seem to reflect the authentic voice of Jesus in his time. Firstly, there is an eschatological element which is a feature of many parables—‘last of all’ he sent his son. Secondly, the threat in the parable is that the vineyard owner (God) will come to take his revenge, or exact his punishment. The early Christians looked for the return of Jesus himself in judgement, rather than God. Thirdly, the social and political details reflect the time of Jesus, not of any writer after 66 CE. During the Jewish Wars, which began then, vineyard owners would not have expected produce or rent because in wartime conditions, vineyards would have been unattended or burned. Charlesworth writes:16 The story assumes that the purchase of a vineyard would be a good financial venture, that vineyards were often run by tenant farmers, that a landlord would frequently be living somewhere else (perhaps for comfort or safety), that there were abundant reasons for misunderstanding between the landlord and the tenants, that the landlord rightly expected his share of the profits, that there would be profits, and that his messengers might well be mistreated.

Charlesworth concludes, then, that these assumptions in the story are a remarkably accurate portrayal of the economic and social situation in Galilee after the time of Herod, especially after his death in 4 BC. In particular, he argues that the parable shows an acquaintance with the agricultural reforms introduced by Herod, and which would have been operative during the lifetime of Jesus: Herod habitually confiscated farms from his numerous Jewish enemies and turned them into large royal estates, especially in the great fertile Plain of Esdraelon, just south of Nazareth. These tenant farms were owned by absentee landlords, usually Herod’s own wealthy friends, who may well have lived in the sumptuous rooms in Caesarea during the winter months, and in Jerusalem in the hot summer. Because of the unusual economic prosperity, they would have demanded high returns... In Jesus’ own time… Antipas, like Herod the Great, owned large tracts of land. The Parable of the Wicked Tenant Farmers reflects Galilee precisely as Jesus would have experienced it. Galilee before 30 CE was significantly different from Galilee after 66CE.

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Perhaps the strongest argument for the originality of the parable in the teaching of Jesus is that alternative explanations tend to be more unsatisfactory. Jülicher simply dismissed it as inauthentic (because it did not fit with his theories?).17 Dodd and Jeremias argue that the original as Jesus told it was a story based in real life, and they both make similar interpretations of it.18 Many landlords lived abroad, and the tenants wrongly assume that when the son arrives, his father is dead, and he has come to claim his inheritance. Thus, the vineyard will be ownerless if he dies, and they can claim it by being first on the scene, in accordance with property law at the time. However, they will not succeed, because the owner will retrieve it by force, and let it to others. According to Jeremias,19 this story in its original setting during the ministry of Jesus, vindicates the offer of the gospel to the poor: ‘You, it says, you tenants of the vineyard, you leaders of the people! you have opposed, have multiplied rebellion against God. Your cup is full! Therefore shall the vineyard of God be given to “others” (Mark 12.9)’. By analogy with related parables, Jeremias deduces the ‘others’ to be the poor. However, although Jeremias locates the parable in the actual teaching of Jesus, he finds that the murder of the son serves only to highlight the character of the tenants: ‘their depravity must be as starkly emphasized as possible.’ As Frank Kermode points out, this attempt to find an interpretation which removes the allegory results in ‘only a more rationalistic allegory’ and turns the parable ‘into a somewhat ridiculous fable about current affairs.’20 Given the fact that John the Baptist had been put to death, and the insistence of the Gospels that Jesus knew in advance of the desire and plans of the authorities to bring about his death too, it seems inconceivable that he could have told a story in which the figures representing Jewish leadership engineered a murder of God’s representative, without intending some personal reference! We have already indicated that apart from preserving and applying those coming from Jesus, or attributed to him, parables were not employed by the early Christian church in its preaching or teaching. If, as more radical scholars claim, some parables were composed by Matthew and Luke, or their sources, then this activity of parable composition among Christians must have rapidly come to an end after the Gospels were written. The Gospels themselves claim that Jesus taught in parables,

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as well as reproducing many of them; thus the simplest, most natural, and most likely explanation is that the parables do originate with Jesus, and do represent a chosen teaching and preaching method of his. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain parables. The chosen method of teaching and interpreting among these Jews, the Essenes, roughly contemporary with Jesus, was the ‘pesher’ commentary. As to whether or not Jesus alone developed the parable and its intensive use in teaching, we cannot be sure. However, the Gospels do insist that Jesus taught in a way quite different from the scribes of his time. Perhaps there was a social class/education issue: stories were thought to be more suitable for peasants and the uneducated, and a similar pressure led to the attribution of Aesop’s fables to a slave. Later Jewish traditions attribute parables to Rabbis who lived and taught as early as the latter years of the first century CE, but perhaps significantly, they all post-date Jesus. For instance, in later writings, the following parable is credited to Jochanan ben Zakkai (c. 90 CE). Its purpose is to make plain the wisdom of repenting at the earliest opportunity. Leaving it until nearer death is a risky strategy since no-one knows when death will come. In its subject matter, it shows obvious affinities with several Gospel parables: The matter is like a king who invited his servants to a feast, but without fixing a time for its commencement. The wise servants arrayed themselves and sat down before the door of the king’s house. The foolish servants went to their work and said: There is no feast which does not take a long time to prepare. Suddenly the king called for his servants. The wise ones entered as they were, already suitably clad. The foolish ones went in as they were—dirty. The king was pleased with the wise servants, but furious with the foolish ones. He said: Those who have dressed themselves for the feast may sit down and eat and drink; those who have not dressed themselves for the feast shall remain standing and watch.21

Whether Jesus learned from the Rabbis to use parables must remain an open question. Paul claims to have been a pupil of the leading Jewish teacher of his day, Gamaliel (Acts 22.3), and as we have seen, shows no inclination whatsoever to use parables in his own writings, and nor does he in the partial biography of him by Luke in Acts. We know that many

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Jews in the Holy Land became followers of Jesus while continuing to practise the Jewish religion. They were heavily involved in the so-called ‘Circumcision Party’ which was powerful in Jerusalem, and doubtless in other Jewish Churches in Judaea and Galilee. They sent their representatives to try to impose circumcision and Jewish food taboos and Sabbath observance on Christians in other Mediterranean countries, causing not a few problems for Paul and his churches. Luke tells us that ‘A great number of priests accepted the faith’ (Acts 6.7 GNB). The emergence of the strong Rabbinic tradition of teaching with parables after the time of Jesus, and the general similarities with the subject matter of Jesus’ parables in the early years of this tradition, would be explained if the Rabbis learned the habit of using parables from the example of Jesus during the decades before the fall of Jerusalem and the final breach with Christianity, rather than vice versa. Perhaps the popularity of the method with their flocks was so great, that they continued to use them, even though they originated with someone they objected to. There may be a comparison here with the use of hymns in worship in Britain in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Roman Catholics before Vatican Council II officially disapproved of Protestant Christianity. Nevertheless, the ecclesiastical powers had to give in to the popularity of the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, and include them in Catholic hymnbooks. They did not acknowledge their true authorship, instead attributing them to ‘Anon’! Notes to Chapter 1 C. H. Dodd, More New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), pp. 30-40. 2 See chapters 3 and 4 below. 3 Asher Barash, Arabic Folk Tales (Ramat Gan: Massada, 1969). 4 Michael D. Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm. Two Volumes. Vol. 2 (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1989), pp. 609-15. 5 Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm, Vol. 1, pp. 93-101. 6 See below, pp. 36-7 7 Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm, Vol. 1, pp. 101-7. 8 This example is included in the Appendix, below. 1

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J. R. Donahue, ‘The Parables’, The New Jerome Bible Commentary, ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, Roland E. Murphy, Second Edition (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990), p. 1366. 10 Josephus, Jewish War, III.10.9. Cit. John J. Rousseau and Rami Arav, Jesus and His World (London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 26. 11 Wilson, Jesus, pp. 121ff. 12 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Folio Society, 1968), Ch. XXIV, p. 176. 13 Josephus, Jewish War, II.1-3; Antiquities, 17.228-339. Cit. C.F. Evans, St. Luke (London: SCM Press, 1990), p. 668. 14 James H. Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 139-42. 15 Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology. Part One. The Proclamation of Jesus, transl. J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1971), pp. 36-7. 16 Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism, p. 145. 17 A. Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, II (Tübingen, Mohr, 1910), p. 406. 18 C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Collins/Fontana, 1961), pp. 94ff. Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, Revised Edition (London: SCM Press, 1963), pp. 70ff. 19 Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, p. 76. 20 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy. On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 26. 21 In Paul Fiebig, Die Gleischnisreden Jesu im Lichte der rabbinischen Gleichnisse des neutestamentlichen Zeitalters (Tübingen: Mohr, 1912), pp 17ff.. Cit. Geraint Vaughan Jones, The Art and Truth of the Parables. A Study in their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation (London: SPCK, 1964), p. 70. 9

2 The Parables and the Old Testament When we seek to answer the question of where Jesus discovered the method of teaching in parables, or the sources from which he developed it, then it is natural that we turn our attention to the Old Testament, the sacred scriptures of the Jews. There is ample evidence that Jesus knew the Old Testament very well. Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus was raised in a faithful Jewish family (Luke 2.21-40), so we would expect him to have been instructed in the faith by Mary and Joseph, and he would have heard scripture regularly read and expounded in the Synagogue. The Gospel accounts portray Jesus as answering Satan, during his temptations in the wilderness, with quotations from Deuteronomy (Luke 4.1-12). When he preached in the synagogue at Nazareth, he knew the prophet Isaiah’s writings well enough to choose the particular passage he wanted to read (Luke 4.17-19). During the period between his resurrection and ascension, he spent time explaining how the Old Testament, both the Law and the Prophets, applied to him (Luke 24.27, 44). There are innumerable instances in the Gospels which make it plain that Jesus knew his Jewish Bible very well, and one of them may well throw light on how he regarded himself as teacher and preacher. Luke records the following saying of Jesus: How evil are the people of this day! they ask for a miracle, but none will be given them except the miracle of Jonah. In the same way that the prophet Jonah was a sign for the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be a sign for the people of this day. On Judgement Day, the Queen of Sheba will stand up and accuse the people of today, because she travelled all the way from her country to listen to King Solomon’s wise teaching; and I tell you there is something here greater than Solomon. On Judgement Day the people of Nineveh will stand up and accuse you, because they turned from their sins when they heard Jonah preach, and I assure you that there is something here greater than Jonah! (Luke 11.29-32. GNB).

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In the version recorded in Matthew 12.38-42, Matthew takes the miracle of Jonah not to be the pagans’ response to the preaching of Jesus, but his return from the belly of the fish, seeing in it an allegory of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Here in Luke’s account, however, the focus is on Jesus as a teacher. Although claiming to be far greater than them, Jesus compares his teaching and preaching with that of Solomon and Jonah, a wise man and prophet respectively. In popular Jewish thought at the time, Solomon’s reputation went even further than the Old Testament would allow. Josephus1 cites as examples of his wisdom his skill in exorcising demons and healing the sick, as well as his ability to write poetry and compose parables. As we look at the Old Testament wisdom literature and the prophets, we discover that there are elements in both which Jesus continues and develops, and which may well underlie his use of parables. Solomon was popularly regarded as the author of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, which is headed: ‘The proverbs of Solomon, son of David and king of Israel’ (Prov 1.1. GNB). We should not, however, dismiss the possibility that people in a largely pre-literary age and culture would have understood this to mean that Solomon was the collector, compiler or patron of the sages responsible for the various wise sayings, rather than personally their originator. Interestingly, and probably significantly, we could call this book ‘The Book of Parables’, since the same word – mashal—is used in Hebrew for proverb and parable, and indeed, for many other ways of speaking and writing. There are many sayings in Proverbs which find echoes in the teaching of Jesus. There are, for instance, comparisons between nature or farming and human life, such as the neglected farm of Proverbs 24.30-3 (GNB): I walked through the fields and vineyards of a lazy, stupid man. They were full of thorn bushes and overgrown with weeds. The stone wall round them had fallen down. I looked at this, thought about it, and learned a lesson from it: Have a nap and sleep if you want to. Fold your hands and rest awhile, but while you are asleep, poverty will attack you like an armed robber.

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We are reminded of the Parable of the Sower, among other parables of Jesus. In a similar way, Jesus ben Sirach has a description of a rich man which greatly resembles Jesus’ parable of the Rich Fool: There is a man who is rich through his diligence and self-denial, and this is the reward allotted to him: when he says, ‘I have found rest, and now I shall enjoy my goods!’ he does not know how much time will pass until he leaves them to others and dies. (Ecclesiasticus 11.18-19. RSV )

In Proverbs, there are many short comparison sayings such as: Like snow in summer or rain in harvest, honour is not fitting for a fool’ (Prov 26.1. NIV).

These are similar in type to parabolic sayings of Jesus, such as ‘A city on a hill cannot be hidden’ (Matt 5.14. NIV), which could be re-phrased or paraphrased to bring out the comparison: Like a city which cannot be hidden because it is set on a hill, faithful disciples will set an example which will be publicly visible.

There are some sayings which could easily be expanded into a short story based on an everyday life incident. For instance: If a man loudly blesses his neighbour early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse. (Proverbs 27.14. NIV)

We can readily picture the comic scene as a rather foolish man hammers at his neighbour’s door very early in the morning. The victim is aroused from sleep, expecting to be told of some emergency—fire, illness or a burglar at large, perhaps—or at least of some important news, say tidings of the death of the king. Instead, his neighbour wishes him God’s richest blessing! This implied parable does not simply warn against the specific, and obviously unwelcome, behaviour of unintentionally alienating our neighbours by disturbing their sleep for no good reason; it also challenges its hearers to consider their lifestyle generally, and check that their good

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will, practical or verbal, is expressed in ways that the recipient finds acceptable and agreeable. If we respond imaginatively to this proverb/ parable, we shall examine our behaviour from a different perspective, and possibly modify it, so avoiding the sad judgement from our friends and neighbours ‘He meant well’—or worse! The situation portrayed in this proverb, though not its meaning, resembles that in the Parable of the Friend at Midnight (Lk 11.5-8). This process, of expanding a proverb into a story, also happens in reverse as stories can be contracted into proverbial sayings. Thus, for instance, the phrase ‘the lion’s share’ in contemporary English carries the meaning of ‘the bigger part’ or ‘nearly all’ without any necessary knowledge in speaker or hearer of Aesop’s fable in which a lion joins with several other beasts in a hunt; when the spoil is divided, the lion claims one quarter by right of his prerogative, a second for his superior courage, a third for his dam and cubs, and invites the other beasts to dispute with him for the fourth. Intimidated by his frown and power, the other animals silently withdraw. Other examples of such contraction include ‘crying wolf’, ‘sour grapes’, ‘Cinderella’ (as in ‘Religious Education is a Cinderella subject in the curriculum’), ‘ugly duckling’ and ‘in the doghouse’ (from Peter Pan?) Is it possible, then, that some of the short parabolic sayings of Jesus were originally stories which have contracted during the period of oral transmission? An example might be Mark 2.19-20, a saying about the rejoicing of the friends of the bridegroom in his company. It requires little imagination to expand this metaphor into a more complex narrative. The process in which a narrative shortens into a saying can happen in a short time; for instance, the phrase ‘Dunkirk spirit’ needs little explanation to British people, and came rapidly into use. Proverbs chapter 9 includes a more developed passage which is something like an allegorical parable: Wisdom has built her house and made seven pillars for it. She has had an animal killed for a feast, mixed spices in the wine and laid the table. She has sent her servant-girls to call out from the highest place in the town. ‘Come in, ignorant people!’ And to the foolish she says, ‘Come, eat my food and drink the wine that I have mixed. Leave the company of ignorant people, and live. Follow the way of knowledge.’

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Stupidity is like a loud, ignorant, shameless woman. She sits at the door of her house or on a seat in the highest part of the town, and calls out to people passing by, who are minding their own business: ‘Come in ignorant people!’ To the foolish man she says ‘Stolen water is sweeter. Stolen bread tastes better.’ Her victims do not know that the people die who go to her house, that those who have already entered are now deep in the world of the dead. (Proverbs 9.1-6, 13-18. GNB)

This is similar in many ways to the parables of Jesus. We are shown a choice: we may either live with wisdom or folly, represented by the figures of two women, both of whom open their houses to guests. We have here the ‘rule of two’ in operation,2 as for instance in the parable of the Two Housebuilders (Matt 7:24-7/Lk 6:47-9), or the saying about the Two Ways (Matt 7:13-14). There is an allegorical element. The women represent Wisdom and Folly, and the feast represents the satisfying life of the person who accepts wisdom’s invitation; but the allegory is not worked out in detail. We should not ask what the killed animal at the table or the spices in the wine represent, beyond indicating a sumptuous banquet, nor should we ask who the messenger servant-girls symbolize. When Folly attempts to commend moral failure by claiming that stolen food and drink are more enjoyable than those obtained legitimately, then all pretence of symbolism or allegory falls, and we hear the author’s unvarnished practical ethical teaching put directly into the mouth of one of the characters in negative form. Thus this passage does not fit into any simple literary category. It contains diverse elements, and is intended as a challenge to those who hear or read it. Is our life lived with Wisdom, or with Folly? If the latter, the consequences are serious, so why not change for something better, freely available? Perhaps this is the place to point out that the word ‘parable’ (from parabole in the Greek of the New Testament) corresponds to the Hebrew word mashal in the Old Testament. While parabole tends to have the narrow meaning of ‘similitude’ or ‘comparison’, mashal on the other hand is used for a wide range of expressions, including pithy sayings, figurative or not, proverbs, riddles, allegories, bywords, taunts, prophetic oracles and even whole poems. Since as we are attempting to show, the roots of Jesus’ parables are in the Old Testament rather than the Greek world, then

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we should not expect the parables of Jesus to fall into any simple or consistent literary category, and we should beware of scholars who seek to make them conform to any neat and tidy classification. The second part of Jesus’ self-comparison as a teacher/preacher is with the prophets, and significantly, with Jonah. The earliest prophets were men like Micaiah, Elijah and Elisha, whose stories are found in the history books of the Old Testament, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, but of whose messages we know very little. Later came the ‘writing prophets’ who have whole books named after them, substantial ones like Isaiah and Jeremiah or short ones like Micah and Joel. Although these books mostly consist of the spoken or written messages of the prophets, there is usually a greater or lesser admixture of narrative concerning their lives and doings. The book of Jonah, incidentally, is anomalous among the other books with which it is grouped in the Bible. In being almost all narrative with minimal message from Jonah (Jonah 3.4) plus Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish (Jonah 2), it resembles the stories of the early prophets rather than the books of the ‘writing prophets.’ Before considering Jonah in some detail, we will turn to consider the place of parables in the other prophets. 2 Samuel 11 and 12 tells the story of how David, by this time in his life King in Jerusalem, does not accompany his troops in their campaign against the Ammonites. David commits adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his mercenaries, who conceives a child. The soldier concerned, Uriah, is recalled to Jerusalem in the hope that he will have sex with his wife and so David’s misdemeanour will not be revealed. However, whether out of suspicion of David’s motives, or because of an honest soldier’s honour, Uriah refuses to behave as David wishes, even when David makes him drunk. (Here we may observe that life often takes the very form of the parable, in so far as we struggle to find the correct interpretation of what is going on. David struggles to understand Uriah; the narrator of the story gives us no clues as to his interpretation of Uriah’s true motives.) Uriah is sent back to the front, carrying a message from David to his commanding officer ordering him to arrange that Uriah should be killed in battle. This is implemented, and after the appropriate period of mourning, Bathsheba joins David in his palace as his wife, and bears his child. David may have hidden his wrong-doing from most people, apart

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from the commanding officer of his army, Joab, his accomplice in the appalling misdeed who is necessarily aware of his bad faith. However, God knows what has happened, and sends the prophet Nathan to confront David with God’s displeasure. Nathan chooses to do so with the following parable: There were two men in a certain town; one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb that he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup, and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. Now a traveller came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveller who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him. (2 Samuel 12.1-4. GNB)

Nathan cleverly enters into David’s self-assumptions as king. David saw himself as guardian, in God’s name, of the weak in society against the brutal power of the rich, so he assumes that he is being asked to act as judge in a case of rampant injustice in his kingdom, and angrily pronounces a penalty of four-fold restitution on the rich man, while exclaiming that he deserves the death sentence. Nathan then calmly opens up his parable to David with the words ‘You are the man’. We notice at once that Nathan’s parable is not primarily meant to clarify and explain a point or message. If anything, it is designed to disguise the circumstances of David’s crime sufficiently for him to see his behaviour in a different light, or from a different perspective. Nathan wants David to feel anger at his own cruel, unjust and selfish behaviour without making excuses for himself. So Nathan composes his story about a somewhat comparable situation, though one where the crime of the rich man is significantly less than that of David. Nathan cleverly portrays the tender affection of the poor man for his pet she-lamb in great detail, to heighten David’s (and our!) perception of the heinousness of the rich man’s heartless behaviour. In depending upon a parable, Nathan takes a risk. If David were particularly stupid or perverse, he might fail, or refuse, to

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understand the message. A contemporary family psychotherapist, Brian Cade, writes: Communication through metaphor or the use of parables can be extraordinarily effective in dealing with issues, the open discussion of which would result in denial or a massive increase in resistance. In this way, issues can be discussed and reframed and outcomes suggested, predicted or prevented in ways which are hard for a family or an individual to deny or resist because it is not their problem that is being talked about.3

It is interesting to note that in the wisdom tradition too, parables are by no means understood as ways of making plain, or clarifying. Thus Jesus ben Sirach writes of the wise man:He will preserve the discourse of notable men and penetrate the subtleties of parables; he will seek out the hidden meanings of proverbs and be at home with the obscurities of parables. (Ecclesiasticus 39.2-3. RSV)

We notice the way that ‘hidden meanings’ are placed in parallel with ‘obscurities’ in this verse inspired by Hebrew poetic form. Nathan’s parable is a comparison between two situations between people. We can understand it as a partial allegory: the poor man represents Uriah; the female pet lamb represents Bathsheba; the rich man represents David. However, it is not a complete allegory. In real life, Uriah was killed, not Bathsheba (the pet lamb). The poor man’s children in the parable only have the function of heightening the value of the lamb to the poor man, there being nothing in real life which they represent. I have dwelt on this parable at some length, because there are many features in it which we shall also find in the parables of Jesus. There must be at least one central point of comparison, but the parable is by no means necessarily designed to explain or simplify. Some detail serves to heighten the emotions engendered by the narrative. There are often allegorical elements, but not usually fully worked-out allegories. Jesus’

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parables also often invite their hearers to see their situation or behaviour from a different point of view, with the intention that they should repent. The writing prophets themselves make use of allegory and parable. Isaiah 5 begins with the story of a man who built a vineyard for himself, clearing and preparing the ground, planting good quality vines, constructing a watchtower and installing wine-making equipment. The crops he obtained were uniformly bad, so in his anger he abandoned it. Isaiah gives the meaning of his story: The vineyard of the LORD Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the garden of his delight. And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress. (Isa 5.5-7. NIV)

This is a partial allegory. The vineyard represents the Jewish nation, the owner symbolizes God, and the expected crop means a fair social structure and just community. However, the allegory breaks down under the pressure of the strength of Isaiah’s feelings, speaking on God’s behalf, when the owner threatens, ‘I will command the clouds not to rain on it’ (v.6b). No human vineyard owner has such power over the forces of nature, but God was believed to be able to command them! Other details of the allegory may or may not be significant. Does the watchtower symbolize God’s own protection of his chosen people? Or does it symbolize his gifts of the prophets to warn of danger? Or is it simply an example of details, along with the winepress, giving verisimilitude to the basic story? Jeremiah uses nature parallels, likening God’s waiting for the right time to fulfil his word to the almond tree waiting for the first sign of spring to burst into blossom. (Jer 1.11-12). He also discovers deeper meaning in incidents from everyday life, such as his visit to the potter (Jer 18) when the significance of the potter’s ability to re-use clay from a failed pot bursts into his spiritual consciousness as a metaphor for God’s ability to re-make and use his failed people. Ezekiel, writing later, composes a passage in his book in which he allows his imagination almost to run out of hand. It tells of a multi-coloured eagle which takes a cutting from a cedar tree, and raises a vine from seed and nurtures it in a riverside field within a mercantile city. The vine seeks protection from a second

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magnificent eagle (Ezek 17.3-8). Although an eagle, embodiment of strength and speed, is an appropriate symbol for a conquering king like Nebuchadnezzar, and although a tree as splendid as the cedar is a fine symbol for the house of David, or God’s kingdom, nevertheless the passage is a strange one. John Drury calls this mixture of parable, allegory and prophetic oracle, a ‘masterpiece’, and describes it in the following words: It is not naturalistic but surreal; its bizarre events are held together by an extremely strong theology of divine providence in history, and it is followed by an interpretation which is indispensably necessary to its explanatory function which would be quite lost without it.4

As we shall see, some of the parables of Jesus such as the Sower and the Wheat and the Tares, also have bizarre and surrealistic elements, and need an explanation to make sense of them. The prophet Hosea in chapters 1 and 3 uses his own personal experience of unhappiness in marriage to an unfaithful wife as a parable of the relation between God and his people, and this naturalistic and humanistic approach, opening a window into God’s feelings, is very much the style of some of the parables of Jesus, such as the Prodigal Son. We return now to Jonah, with whom Jesus made a direct self-comparison as teacher. As we have seen, Jonah is something of an anomalous book, and is perhaps best thought of as a parable. Indeed, one scholar has described it as ‘a version of the Prodigal Son in which the elder brother is sent in search of the missing younger’, while another has spoken of it as ‘the Bible laughing at itself.’ There are allegorical or symbolic elements. For us, ‘Jonah’ is just a name, which in twentieth century British culture holds no meaning in itself. However, the name ‘Jonah’ is the Hebrew word for ‘dove’, which bird is used as a symbol for Israel, as in Psalm 74.19, and could have been so understood by Hebrew listeners to the story: Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts, do not forget the lives of your afflicted people for ever. (NIV)

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Further, the Psalms sometimes speak of the effect of spiritual or other troubles as ‘being swallowed up’ or ‘sinking in the depths’. Psalm 124 combines both images: If the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us, when their anger flared against us, they would have swallowed us alive; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us. (Ps 124.1-4. NIV)

Jonah in the story is ‘swallowed alive’, and in the fish the torrent does sweep over him. He prays from within the fish (Jonah 2.5-6): ‘The water came over me and choked me; the sea covered me completely, and seaweed was wrapped round my head. I went down to the very roots of the mountains, into the land whose gates lock shut for ever’ (GNB).

The events described in the Jonah narrative should perhaps then be taken as giving story form to ideas such as those in the Psalms. Thus, some scholars suggest that the three days spent by Jonah inside the big fish symbolize the years when the Jewish nation seemed to disappear during its exile in Babylon, and Jonah’s liberation and second chance to be God’s messenger symbolize the new opportunity the restoration gave to the Jews to be God’s servant to the nations, symbolized by Nineveh. Though the story probably does contain these central symbolic elements, it is not a fully-worked allegory. The big fish may represent the Exile, but the pagan sailors in their ship do not have a symbolic meaning. Instead, the detail of pious, decent, caring, pagan sailors serves to heighten the portrayal of Jonah as careless, selfish and disobedient. When Jonah finally delivers his message, the people of Nineveh find no problem with a generous, forgiving God, but Jonah certainly does, and lets his complaints be known:

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‘I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity’ (Jonah 4.2. NIV).

This is supreme irony, since Jonah grumbles about God in words which are a direct allusion to—indeed, almost a quotation of—one of the great glories of the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s self- revelation to Moses in the words: ‘I am the LORD, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.’ (Exodus 34.6-7. NIV).

The narrative of the book of Jonah is a strange mix of elements naturalistic and humanistic, symbolic, and also bizarre and comic. The people of Nineveh are so repentant they even force their livestock to fast and dress their animals in sack-cloth (Jonah 3.7-8)! When Jonah in his prayer (Jonah 2) gets to the stage of criticising pagans for their idolatry and pietistically promises to worship God in the Temple in Jerusalem, instead of going to the pagans on a preaching mission which is what God actually requires of him, his prayer is rudely interrupted by the fish’s divinely inspired attack of vomiting! Among the more bizarre and surreal elements are the size of Nineveh (a three day’s journey across would have been 3040 miles and far larger than any ancient city), the big fish, and the miraculous plant. There is no way that we could mistake the book for a moral tale or example story; rather, Jonah is an anti-hero. Finally, we notice that the story ends with God’s question, addressed to Jonah, but intended for any reader with a narrow or exclusive view of God’s love and concern: ‘But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?’ (Jonah 4.11. NIV). Indeed, the question even points beyond the story to raise questions of God’s relationship with the animal kingdom. If we assume that this is a composed story, then it shows many of the features of the parables of Jesus. It speaks, like the later chapters of Isaiah, of God’s

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love for the peoples of the whole world, and of the way the message of that love is entrusted to Israel. Israel all too often allowed its own fear, prejudice, selfishness, ignorance, disobedience, and failure to enjoy God’s true nature, to get in the way of the message being heard by those who needed it. But the Book of Jonah delivers its point not in theological propositions, but in narrative, in a form in which the message is somewhat disguised, in which it requires thought, and in which it is capable of finding a way under theological defences and presuppositions by persuading God’s people to see ourselves in a new light or from a different perspective. The story presents a double reversal of expectation; a highly disobedient prophet complains about the character of God, while ultrapious, repentant pagans gladly and obediently take full advantage of God’s graciousness. In other words, the story functions just as do the parables of Jesus in which a ‘greater than Jonah’ is present. Notes to Chapter 2 Josephus, Antiquities, 8.42-9. See further below, pp. 35, 55. 3 Brian Cade, ‘The Use of Paradox in Therapy’ in Sue Walrond-Skinner (ed.), Family and Marital Psychotherapy—A Critical Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 102. 4 John Drury, ‘Parables’, in R. J. Coggins and J.L. Houlden (eds), Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (London/Philadelphia: SCM Press/Trinity Press, 1990), p. 509. 1 2

3 The Parables in the Gospels All the fully developed parables attributed to Jesus are found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and there alone. Some of them, the Sower for instance, occur in all three Gospels. Others are found only in two of them, as for instance, the Lost Sheep, (Matthew and Luke), while yet others are unique to one gospel, as for instance the Ten Bridesmaids (Matthew), and the Good Samaritan (Luke). Here we take time to consider the relation between whatever may have been the original words of Jesus in the context in which he spoke them, and the words written in our Gospels. I wish to establish the point that there is no way by which we can ever get behind the Gospels to be certain that we are making contact with the exact words of Jesus. It is probable that Jesus spoke Aramaic during his ministry, so the best the words in the Gospels can be is translations of what he said into Greek. (This does not exclude the possibility that Jesus may well have been able to understand and speak some Greek himself). Those who do not know New Testament Greek are even further away from the original words of Jesus, dependent as they are on the honesty and skill of the various translators of the Bible. It seems that the Gospels represent an important turning point in the transmission of the story of the life and teaching of Jesus. In the thirty or so years between the Resurrection and the likely date of Mark, probably the first Gospel, there is no hard evidence that any of the Gospel material was written down, apart from brief allusions in Christian letters and sermons—for instance reference to the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, or (probably) the experience of Jesus in Gethsemane in Hebrews 5.7. There are many hypotheses concerning prior written sources. Scholars have proposed ‘Q’ for instance (from the German Quelle, meaning ‘source’), mainly a collection of Jesus’ sayings; some have postulated a primitive version of the passion narrative expanded by Mark, and many have supposed an earlier edition of John which did not include Chapter 21. However, these remain hypotheses. They do not convince all scholars, and we do well to note Frank Kermode’s comment, which he thinks applicable to Shakespearean as well as Biblical scholarship:

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...it strikes me as testimony to the way our minds work when confronted by a problematical text; we find it easier to think about something behind it rather different from what we have in front of us.1

We may be fairly sure that the composition of Mark’s Gospel was the point at which the oral traditions began to give way to written form in any extended way. There are at least two reasons why this happened. Firstly, the eyewitnesses were diminishing in number as old age and martyrdom removed them from the scene. This loss of eyewitnesses was probably accelerated by the Jewish War with the Romans which began in 66 CE and culminated in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Most of the primitive Christian communities in Galilee, Judaea and Jerusalem would have been destroyed, and their members who were not killed were scattered in the Roman Empire as refugees and slaves. Secondly, it became plain to the Church that the Second Coming of Jesus might well not happen as soon as the first disciples had expected. There was to be a prolonged age of the Church, which would need access to the Master’s life and teaching, as recalled by the apostles and eyewitnesses. In the absence of any contemporary accounts of what Jesus said and did, and lacking any independent evidence of the life and thinking of the earliest Christian communities, even the most learned scholars can only hypothesize and try to deduce how the original words of Jesus may have been altered or developed down those hidden years. For the parables, the first three canonical gospels are our earliest witnesses, and there is simply no way of penetrating behind them reliably. All arguments which claim to do so are necessarily circular. We may decide, for instance, that all allegories in the parables come from the early Christian Church. We then dismiss all the allegorical elements in the parables as secondary, and lo and behold, we discover that what remains, what we classify as ‘authentic’, is totally non-allegorical! Such circular arguments are extremely common in Biblical studies, and when they are dressed up in much learning, with sophisticated linguistic and cultural detail, by scholars whose knowledge far exceeds ours, it is not easy to avoid being impressed by them. When attempts to recover the ‘real’ Jesus are also motivated by deep devotion and evangelical zeal, then it is very difficult indeed to keep our heads. Joachim Jeremias, who wrote a great and standard book on the

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parables in the middle of this century, believed passionately in the spiritual importance of his attempts to reconstruct the actual words of the original parables, in their original setting in the life of Jesus. He writes: ‘... the aim of the critical analysis [in] this book is nothing less than a return, as well grounded as possible, to the very words of Jesus himself. Only the Son of Man and his word can invest our message with full authority.’2 We cannot but agree with his aspiration when he urges that: Our task is to return to the actual living voice of Jesus. How great the gain if we succeed in re-discovering here and there behind the veil the features of the Son of Man! To meet with him alone can give power to our preaching.3

But Jeremias is over-confident that we can hear this voice sounding (even if only at times) with the ‘very words’ spoken. Perhaps we can; it may even be likely in some instances that we can; but we can never know for certain. It is not only scholars who indulge in such circular arguments. Preachers and others allow their own taste and temperament to influence their view of Jesus. If we want to see him as a simple, hippy, child of nature, then we may take the Seed Growing Secretly as a typical parable. If we want to see him as a challenging ethical teacher, then we may regard the Good Samaritan as our norm. If we see him as a first century hot gospeller, threatening people with the flames of hell if they refuse the salvation he offers, then the Wheat and the Tares may be our choice for what was typical of him. Even if we admit that he did tell the other stories, we make our own emphasis; we have our own chosen canon of what is important within the overall canon of Scripture. Of course, scholars always try carefully to deduce the case they are trying to make from the evidence available, both internal and external to the Biblical text. But the mathematics of probability is always against them, since few of the steps in their argument are matters of logical necessity. Each judgement depends on a personal assessment of a balance of probability—whether something seems more or less likely. If we could assign a numerical value, say the first step of our argument has a 50% chance of being right, then a subsequent step which also has only a 50%

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probability leaves us with only a 25% chance of coming to a true final conclusion. Although at each stage we may have been as careful, as balanced, as logical as possible, we cannot avoid the uncertainty, and the more links in our chain of argument, the further we move from any confident conclusion. Possible errors are cumulative. Even if deductions are likely to have more than 50% probability, they are never in such matters certainties. This explains one reason why scholars arrive at such differing theories and views. These words of caution are not meant to be totally negative. Careful study of the text of the parables, attempts to translate the Greek versions back into probable Aramaic originals, a comparison of scripture with scripture when the same parable occurs more than once, examination of the style, vocabulary and apparent interests of the Gospel writers – these are all legitimate spheres of scholarly activity, and can lead to fascinating and illuminating insights. Some single-step reconstructions of the likely original context may be highly probable. Moreover, underlying all this, it is my argument that on the available evidence, it seems very probable indeed that Jesus did teach in parables, and that the parables contained in the Gospels largely reflect a setting in lower-class life in the Palestine of his time. But our faith in Christ does not depend on provable ‘certainties’; it must live with historical probabilities and be enriched by them. Although we can never be totally confident which parables come from the historical Jesus, we can still hear the voice of Jesus through the whole collection of parables. We need to heed the warning given above, and recognize that few conclusions can be more than possibilities and probabilities, however intriguing they are. The parables in Mark Most of the parables in Mark are simple metaphors or nature-parables. For instance, in Mark 2.17-22, we find the Doctor and the Sick, the Wedding Guests, The Patch, and The Wineskin, while in Mark 4.26-32, we find the Seed Growing Secretly and the Mustard Seed. There are only two developed parables in Mark. One is the Sower (4.3-9) which is immediately followed by general comments on why Jesus used parables, and by a detailed explanation of it. The other is the Wicked Tenants (Mark

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12.1-9), the only one in this Gospel which has a full story-line involving a sequence of human actions. The other which features human action is the Strong Man Bound. These three parables also appear in Matthew and Luke. The parables common to Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark These parables are often attributed to the hypothetical document scholars name ‘Q’. It is thought that Matthew and Luke both depended on this document, along with Mark’s Gospel, as major literary sources for their work. Q apparently contains many further parables like those in Mark, whether nature-parables or simple metaphors. Examples include the Leaven (Matt 13.33; Luke 13.21), the Tree and Fruit (Matt 7.16-20; Lk 6.43-45) and the Burglar (Matt 24.43; Lk 12.39). We also find further more developed parables with the simple two-fold ‘compare and contrast’ structure, which we have already noticed in the book of Proverbs. Notable among them are the Two Builders (Matt. 7.24-7; Luke 6.47-9) and the Playing Children (Matt 11.16f; Lk 7.31f). Another parable with a developed plot occurs in both Gospels, namely the Great Feast (Lk 14.15-24) or the Wedding Feast (Matt 22.1-10). Although there are differences, the basic plot is identical and we regard them as two versions of one parable. The parables unique to Matthew Here we find some of the same types of parables as we have discovered previously. While there are no new nature parables, there is the simple metaphor of the City on the Hill (Matt 5.14), and the compare/contrast parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21.28-31). This ‘rule of two’ structure is also to be found in several other of Matthew’s own parables, the Wheat and the Tares, the Ten Bridesmaids, The Sheep and the Goats. We also discover the ‘rule of two’ on a larger scale, when two parables are grouped to throw light on each other, namely the Hidden Treasure and the Costly Pearl (Matt 13.44-45). Both Matthew and Luke immediately follow Mark’s parable of the Mustard Seed with that of the Leaven, to create a pair.

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Matthew’s parables include many new stories. Frequently, they are dramatic incidents in which human beings determine their fate in response to surprising opportunities or challenges. They are heavily ethical, concerned with human decisions and their consequences. They call for defence of the vulnerable, and warn against abuse of authority or gifts. Life is to be lived in the light of God’s ultimate purposes, to be implemented in judgement at the end of time and history when good and evil will be publicly revealed, discriminated and punished or rewarded. Though some reflect ordinary life, concerning shepherds, or a village wedding, others are about kings, or servants who take on unimaginably big debts. The talent spoken of in the parable of The Talents (Matt 25.1430) was worth 6,000 denarii, that is 20 years’ wages for the workers in the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt. 20.1-16)! Michael Goulder speaks of the difference in allegorical content between the unique parables of Matthew and Luke.4 He rightly comments:The black and white distinction between parables and allegories, of which so much has been written, is quite misleading. Parables are on a continuum, with greater or lesser allegory-content: with Matthew it is regularly greater, and with Luke regularly less.

He awards Matthew an ‘allegory count’ (the number of points in a story which have allegorical meaning, compared with those only present for narrative colour) of around 60%, whereas Luke receives only around 40%. As an example of this method, he takes the parable of the Friend at Midnight from Luke (11.5-8. GNB): ‘Suppose one of you should go to a friend’s house at midnight and say to him, “Friend, let me borrow three loaves of bread. A friend of mine who is on a journey has just come to my house, and I haven’t got any food for him!” And suppose your friend should answer from inside, “Don’t bother me! The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.” Well, what then? I tell you that even if he will not get up and give you the bread because you are his friend, yet he will get up and give you everything you need because you are not ashamed to keep on asking.’

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The friend with his petition corresponds with the Christian at prayer; his shamelessness with the Christian’s perseverance; the granting of his needs with God’s bounty, making a total of five allegorical points (God, the Christian, prayer, perseverance, response.) The other seven details are just colour—the specific number of loaves, the visiting friend, midnight, the door locked, the children, the bed, getting up, friendship. This parable then has an allegory count of 5/12, that is, roughly 40%. While Goulder is undoubtedly correct about the existence of allegorical details within parable, it is not as simple as he suggests to discriminate what is and what is not relevant. As I propose later,5 one way to enter into the meaning of parable is to explore how far the allegory can legitimately go. In the parable above, it may well be that the assumption of God’s friendship is an important part of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, indicating that we can take God’s friendship to us for granted. The hour of midnight and the locked door could well signify the apparent absence of God and the darkness of the supplicant’s circumstances. The request on behalf of a visiting friend could well indicate that this is about intercessory prayer, rather than personal petition. If any or all of these points is granted, then the ‘allegory count’ changes dramatically. Even more damaging to Goulder’s arithmetic, other interpretations of the parable are feasible. Whether or not because of his greater interest in allegory, the people in Matthew’s parables are usually little more than ciphers, and this shows up particularly when his parables are contrasted with those of Luke. As Goulder points out, ‘Luke is interested in the story where Matthew’s primary interest is in its meaning’.6 While I am not persuaded by Goulder’s suggestion7 that Luke’s parable of the Unjust Steward (Lk 16.1-8) is his expansion of Matthew’s the Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18.23-35), he nevertheless admirably highlights the stylistic differences between the parables of the two evangelists: The king in Matthew 18 is a figure for God, merciful in the forgiving of debt (sin), just in exacting it where there has been no reciprocity; the debtor is a figure of the unforgiving Christian, harsh, inexorable, bound for torment. Luke’s steward is in the same middleman position, with debtors and an account of his own to settle. But Luke has contrived to

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make both him and his master into real people. The steward is a rotten lot, helping himself out of the estate with which he has been entrusted, and falsifying the accounts to the end, but at least with the common sense to look after his future; his master is realistic enough to dismiss him, but emerges as a philosophical fellow, content to let his losses go with a quip on the sons of this world.

An equally dramatic comparison can be made between Matthew’s parable of the Two Sons (Matt 21.28-31) and Luke’s Prodigal Son (Lk 15.11-32). Matthew’s people are totally lacking in characterization, and no motivation for their behaviour is even hinted at. They are simply defined as wise or foolish, good or bad, obedient or disobedient. In line with the Jewish atmosphere of his Gospel, Matthew’s parables are close in feeling to those developed in the Rabbinic traditions. The parables unique to Luke Luke’s parables have a more varied cast of characters, and tend to have lower-class or outcast heroes, among them a Samaritan, an unjust steward, a destitute beggar, a widow, and a tax collector. The only comparable example in Matthew is the Thief in the Night (Matt 24.43). Their settings tend to assume middle-class or modest circumstances. Where Matthew, as we have seen, has servants taking on debts by the talent, the people in Luke’s Two Debtors owe 500 dinars and 50 respectively (Lk 7.41). The father in the Prodigal Son has hired workers, not slaves, and it is implied that the elder brother needs to work all day in the fields to keep the farm afloat (Lk 15.17,19,25,29), suggesting a very modest establishment. Building a tower is seen as a substantial enterprise and a considerable investment, needing careful thought in the Tower Builder (Lk 14.28-30). Yet any decent vineyard would need one for protection against thieves. (Mk 12.1). Luke is prepared to use lazy and unscrupulous characters in ‘how much more’ situations to draw out the nature of God. If a man is too lazy to get up, but will eventually help his friend with a loan of bread, how much more will God respond to our prayers! (Lk 11.5-8). If a judge is worn down by a widow’s continual petitions, how much more will God

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accede to our repeated requests (Lk 18.1-8). However, most parables – not just Luke’s – contain elements that are unlikely and surprising, and there is perhaps a wider iconoclastic aspect to the imagery we find in them. Leaven, which was a symbol of the putrid, unclean and infectious to the Jews, is perhaps an unlikely sign of God’s kingdom (Mk 8.15 and especially 1 Cor 5.6-8) while the Dragnet would be sure to trawl up unclean marine life (Leviticus 11.9-12). As we have already seen, Luke’s characterization is highly acute, and his parables display the same kind of humane realism to be found in Old Testament narrative, such as the stories of Joseph and David, and indeed, also to be found elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel. As we shall see,8 this is not surprising since there are many echoes of the Joseph story in the Prodigal Son, and echoes of an incident in 2 Chronicles (28.5-15) in the Good Samaritan, not to mention the reminiscences of Old Testament narrative and psalms in Luke 1-2. We are often allowed to enter into a character’s inner thoughts and motivations by the device of soliloquy, as for instance in the Rich Fool and the Prodigal Son. Perhaps because the players in Luke’s stories are so lifelike, there is a considerable tendency for his parables to be taken as example stories. Indeed, Rudolph Bultmann makes ‘exemplary tales’ one of the five categories according to which he divides parabolic material,9 and other scholars have also made similar divisions. We learn how to love our neighbour from the Samaritan, and how to say our prayers from the Tax Collector, while we learn how not to ignore or despise the poor from the Rich Man, and how not to be self-satisfied from the Pharisee. While we intend to show that these apparent example stories are more than that, and are also really parables, it is easy to see how they can be so regarded. In Luke’s parables, as John Donahue has said, Real people make real decisions and it is their actions which determine their fate... Disciples who are introduced into the pedagogy of the parables are forced to ask, ‘What shall we do?’ The answer they give in their ordinary and daily lives determines whether they will be faithful witnesses to the Gospel in parable.10

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Another feature of Luke’s parables is their open-endedness. Often when they finish, they leave us with one or more unanswered questions, like the book of Jonah; indeed, this is a similar effect to Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, where we are not told the outcome of the trial of Paul in Rome. Just how much does his benevolence finally cost the Samaritan, and does the wounded traveller survive and recover? Will he be pleased to see his Samaritan saviour when he returns to the inn? Who does inherit the Rich Fool’s property? Does the Barren Figtree produce a crop in the end? Does the elder brother join in the party for the Prodigal Son? Is the Unjust Steward’s strategy successful in winning him friends after his dismissal? What happens to the Rich Man’s five brothers, since Lazarus is not allowed to warn them? Do the people come in from the highways and byways to the Great Supper? Does the Unjust Judge keep to his resolution to look after the widow’s interests? It really is not sufficient for Bultmann to say that some parables ‘do not have a conclusion, if… it is self-evident or not relevant’: We are not told that the rich fool actually died the same night, any more than we learn what success the steward’s deceit had. What happened to the barren fig tree? Did it bear fruit that year? It really doesn’t matter. Did the man the Good Samaritan helped recover quickly, or did he have to spend more money on him? We do not need to know.11

For Bultmann, the sequel does not matter once the point has been made. But this assumes that there is only one point, and that the question hanging in the air is not part of it. Both assumptions would seem to be both arbitrary and wrong. The subject matter and contents of Luke’s parables reflect interests shown elsewhere in his Gospel and in Acts. He is very concerned for the correct use of riches and the well-being of the poor. He is sympathetic to the position of women, particularly widows, and other under-regarded groups, such as Samaritans and tax collectors. He sees the Gospel as very much concerned with repentance. But none of this is unique to Luke. Although he alone records the story of the woman searching for her lost coin (15.8-10), Matthew (13.33) also has the Leaven, where the kingdom is likened to a woman mixing yeast into flour. Although Luke alone has

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the Rich Man and Lazarus (16.19-31), Matthew has the Two Debtors, or Unmerciful Servant (18.23-35) where the villain is condemned for not behaving in a generous way to a poor colleague. The development of the parables in the Gospels To sum up, there are clear developments in the trends of the parables between their appearance in Mark, and their character in Matthew and Luke. In some measure, these differences reflect the interests, style and theology of Matthew and Luke. We cannot confidently make any judgement about earlier developments in Mark, assuming that his Gospel was the first to be written, because we do not know what materials he had at his disposal. For Matthew and Luke, we can assess how they have treated their Marcan source, and less surely, ‘Q’. However, there is nothing totally distinctive about the parables in any of the Gospels. For example, Mark may have only one parable which is a fully developed human story, the Wicked Tenants (Mark 12.1-9), but it is there. It has allegorical elements, and it includes soliloquy, both by the vineyard owner and by the tenants. It ends with a question about the outcome of the story, even though Jesus provides the answer himself. So we may well discover that stories about people are typical of Matthew; that allegorical elements are frequent in Matthew and Luke, and that characterization, soliloquy and questions at the end are characteristic of Luke; but we must also recognise that these features are only differences in emphasis and degree, and not novel elements. Robert Farrar Capon raises the possibility that Jesus’ gifts as a story teller developed during the course of his ministry, in the light of his experience as a preacher and teacher with his disciples, the crowds and his opponents.12 He also suggests that the emphasis of the subject matter gradually changed from Kingdom, to Grace, to Judgement. The credence we give to this depends on our view of whether or not the Gospels contain any useful information of the chronology of Jesus’ ministry. Certainly all three Gospels agree in placing the more developed parables later in his ministry. While it seems likely that the evangelists did add something to the stories in the telling, essentially they were very conservative. Matthew tells the story of the Lost Sheep in a context of church discipline, which

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very probably reflects the situation at the time Matthew wrote. But this is only a re-application of the likely original meaning: Matthew uses it to motivate attempts to bring back the lost sheep of the Christian community, whereas Luke is probably correct in telling us that Jesus told it about the lost sheep of the Jewish faith (compare Matthew 18.14-20 with Luke 15.1-4). Luke (6.48-9), compared with Matthew (7.24-7) may well have added a few details to the story of the Two Builders, enlivening it with a description of the wise builder beavering away to construct extra-secure foundations by laying them on the rock. He may also have made the cause of the downfall of the insecure house more realistic by blaming it on a flood alone, rather than a combination of wind, rain and flood. But neither evangelist makes any substantial change. Even Luke, generally thought by most critical scholars to be the latest Synoptic Gospel, and the most sophisticated author, makes no attempt to apply even his greatest and most typical parables to the Gentile situation for which he wrote. They all presuppose and feature a Jewish setting in the Holy Land in the time of Jesus. As Geraint Vaughan Jones judges: The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican show no observable signs of having been adapted to any later Church situation, and may be supposed to have changed little, if at all, during their transmission.13

Indeed, there is perhaps an illogicality at the heart of any attempt to show a major re-working of Gospel traditions. The evangelists and their first audiences must have regarded the teaching of Jesus and about Jesus as normative and authoritative for their life and beliefs, otherwise there would have been no point in ‘writing back’ their own thoughts or experience, or their introduction of Spirit-inspired messages from the Risen Lord through preachers or prophets into his earthly ministry. But if they so regarded the life and teaching of Jesus as normative and authoritative for them, would they have been willing to accept any major additions or changes to the tradition? New applications of parables like the Sower and the Lost Sheep to their own situation, and minor alterations in detail, such as contemporary congregations get when preachers imaginatively re-tell Bible stories from the pulpit would be acceptable, but surely little beyond

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that. As the Book of Revelation shows, many sayings of the Glorified Lord given ‘in the Spirit’ were received by the Churches in their own right (for example, Revelation 1.10; 1.17; 3.20 ), and did not need to be projected back to Galilee to make them welcome. As I have already proposed, we can know nothing definite about the transmission and use of the parables between the time Jesus spoke them —assuming that he did—and their commission to a final form in writing by the evangelists. However, by analogy with Rabbinic methods and the behaviour of people in a largely oral culture, we may speculate that some of them were deliberately committed to memory by the disciples, probably according to Jesus’ instructions. Parables such as the Two Builders in Matthew with its poetic form, and parallel repetition would readily lend themselves to such memorization. Others told in situations of controversy would have been remembered by the disciples, but perhaps not verbatim. Étienne Trocmé speculates that some of the parables were remembered and transmitted by those ‘outside’ the group of Jesus, finding their way into the Church only in the second and third generations. He writes: The form of the parables does not show the marks of any attempt at systematic memorisation.... Those who heard Jesus must have noted or learnt by heart the main features of the parables without having become on this account his disciples or having entered the Christian Church.14

Trocmé further suggests that they were part of Jesus’ ‘table talk’. Luke more than once shows Jesus telling parables during a meal (Luke 7.36ff and Lk 14.1ff): This unusual prophet was also a brilliant conversationalist, who knew how to seize an opportunity to recount an anecdote or evoke situations familiar to his hearers. He.... had an unequalled power of drawing an unexpected lesson from what seemed no more than an everyday fact, or of portraying in a telling fashion behaviour which was so strange, against the familiar setting, that it made people think. In short, we believe that most of the parables were part of the conversation at meals in the houses where Jesus had been invited. They may sometimes seem very severe or even aggressive for statements made at table, but that is what they were. Rather mysterious epigrams ... were uttered side by side

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with fluent or picturesque narratives in which an attentive hearer would be aware that a surprising point was being made, while many would see it only as an odd or tragic story.

Of course, in the last resort, we cannot know if this is their provenance or not. But there seems to be no compelling reason why the parables as we have them in the Gospels should be thought not to reflect faithfully the mind and teaching of Jesus. Their originality, and the compatibility of their message with the non-parabolic teaching of Jesus, especially concerning the kingdom of God, lead us to think that in them we have the authentic voice of Jesus. Notes to Chapter 3 Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, p. 79. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, p. 9. 3 Ibid., p. 114. 4 Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm, p. 100. 5 See below, p. 68-71, 148-150 6 Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm, p. 100. 7 Ibid., p. 94. 8 See below, pp. 104-105 9 Rudolph Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, transl. John Marsh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), pp. 177-9. 10 John Donahue, The Gospel in Parable. Metaphor, Narrative, and Theology in the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 210. 11 Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, p. 190. 12 Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 64. 13 Vaughan Jones, The Art and Truth of the Parables, p. 52. 14 Étienne Trocmé, Jesus and His Contemporaries (London: SCM Press, 1973), pp. 89ff. 1 2

4 The Parables and Gospel Structure The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are not simply accumulations of material about Jesus. They each tell their story of the life and teaching, and the death and resurrection of Jesus according to their individual theologies and insights. Luke specifically claims to have produced ‘an orderly account’ (1.3), and no doubt Matthew and Mark had similar intentions, even if they do not self-consciously address us as authors and reveal them. Now, the parables can certainly stand as self-contained units with their own logic, since they are carefully organized, self-contained, coherent literary compositions. Of this, we shall say more in the next chapter. However, they also stand within the larger unit of the Gospel, and indeed, of the whole Bible, and we cannot ignore the context. As both the stone and the setting together comprise a piece of jewellery, so the parable must be considered in its specific location to see its whole meaning. To press our analogy further, if a woman is wearing various items of jewellery, then each individual piece also makes its contribution to the overall effect. The parables are placed within the Evangelists’ overall accounts for particular reasons, and may play a significant part in the overall shape and message of the total Gospel. Obviously, the location given to the parables is the choice of the Evangelists, but we should not rule out on principle the possibility that they make those choices on the basis of genuine recollections of the historical ministry of Jesus. So we turn first to examine the ‘fine structure’ of the settings of the parables, or their immediate contexts in the teaching of Jesus. Mark shows us Jesus choosing to use parables to teach large crowds in Galilee (4.1-2; 33-34), but giving further explanations in private to his disciples. Some parabolic sayings are also spoken to them alone, for instance, the metaphor of the yeast (8.15) on the occasion when they are alone together in a boat and Jesus warns them of the influence of the Pharisees. Mark also tells us that Jesus responded to his critics with parables. When called to account by the Pharisees for mixing with tax collectors and sinners, he justified himself with the metaphor of the doctor visiting the sick (2.15-17). At the end of his ministry, Mark again shows us Jesus publicly addressing the crowds in Jerusalem, aware of the

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presence of his enemies among the crowd, and again using a parable (11.27; 12.1,12). There seems no reason to doubt that Jesus would have spoken parables to different groups of people, with different motives. Matthew shows us a very similar pattern to Mark, setting parables such as the Treasure in the Field and the Dragnet in the context of private teaching for the disciples (Matt.13.36-52), and other developed parables such as the Two Sons and the Wedding Feast in situations of controversy. Luke shows the same variety of immediate settings for the parables as in Matthew and Mark, adding also the ‘table talk’ parables such as the Two Debtors to which I have already drawn attention in the previous chapter, and parables told to individuals in response to questions (for example, the Good Samaritan). All such settings seem inherently plausible for the kind of ministry Jesus exercised, and the content of the parables’ teaching does seem to apply to different audiences. Further ‘fine structure’ settings are discernible for the sayings that are sometimes attached to parables, both at the beginning and at the end. For example, following the Ten Bridesmaids, Matthew records the saying ‘Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour’ (Matt 25.13. RSV). This does not seem directly applicable to the parable in which all the maidens, even the wise ones, nodded off! Possibly Matthew has appended a ‘floating’ saying of Jesus in what seems to us an inappropriate place, but which perhaps seemed to Matthew to be on a similar topic; perhaps an exhortation from an early Christian teacher or evangelist has become attached to the parable during the period of oral transmission (there are no quotation marks for speech in Greek). Similarly, Luke sometimes begins a parable with an explanation of its purpose. For instance, he introduces the Importunate Widow with the words ‘Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up’ (Luke 18.1. NIV). On a few occasions, a parable is embedded in a longer conversation or incident, and forms a part of a larger context. The Two Debtors is told as part of the contrast between the warmth of welcome shown to Jesus by Simon the Pharisee and the woman of the town (Luke 7), while the Good Samaritan is part of an extended conversation between Jesus and an enquiring lawyer (Luke 10).

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Much more important, however, than the ‘fine structure’ is the part played by the various parables in the overall structure of the Gospels, and we begin by examining this in Mark. Parables in the Structure of Mark Mark has by far the lowest proportion of parables in the teaching of Jesus of the three Gospels—16% as opposed to 43% in Matthew and 52% in Luke. Although he asserts that Jesus told many parables (Mk 4.33) he himself only gives two substantial ones, the Sower in chapter 4 and the Wicked Tenants in chapter 12. Scholars and commentators often assume that Mark told all he knew. But perhaps the modest representation of parables results from his concision and the tone of urgency which characterize his Gospel, rather than from a lack of knowledge of them. It may very well be that he has chosen very carefully indeed from much more material available to him. Before telling the first fully-developed parable in Mark, the Sower, Jesus has encouraged messianic expectation by his preaching that ‘The time has come. The kingdom of God is near’ (Mk 1.15. NIV). Not only in his message, but in other ways he has pointed to himself as significant in what God is doing. For instance, when he calls the first disciples, it is with the promise that ‘I will make you fishers of men’ (1.17). He demonstrates messianic power in healings and exorcisms, and even seems to exercise divine power by forgiving sins and claiming to be in control of the Sabbath. Yet he behaves in unlikely ways for a messianic candidate according to any likely contemporary Jewish expectations. He calls a tax collector as a disciple, and parties with low-life people; he defends and justifies his disciples’ irreligious behaviour in not fasting and in violating expected Sabbath observance. He himself does not observe the Sabbath as scrupulously as the Pharisees expected. It is therefore not surprising that they not only reject him, but argue that he is an anti-Messiah, devil inspired or possessed (3.21-2). In brief, Mark sets out for us Jesus as a Messiah who fits no messianic mould known at the time. At this very moment, out of the blue, Jesus tells the parable of the Sower. If we try to imagine ourselves into the situation of the crowds, or even the disciples, at this point in time, and forget the interpretation of

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this parable about which most of us have had some idea almost for our whole lifetime, we will readily see that it is no wonder that the disciples are baffled. Jesus explains that the second subject of this parable is not agriculture, whether normal or extraordinary, but the kingdom of God. He then gives a hard saying (4.11-12), which might be paraphrased. ‘If you grasp that the kingdom works in a mystery, then that understanding will give you more and more insight. If you don’t, then everything will become increasingly meaningless.’ Jesus follows this pronouncement with his interpretation, and we presume it relates to him and his ministry. By the time he tells this parable, Jesus has already begun to declare himself both in word and in deed. I suggest that the ‘word’ which is sown according to the interpretation given (4.14) should be understood more widely than the preaching and teaching of Jesus, and include his acts. This goes some way towards the suggestion of Robert Farrar Capon that the ‘word’ is Jesus himself.1 Interpreters of this parable tend to major on four different elements as the central comparison, namely the sower, the seed, the different soils (or more accurately, environments for the seed, because external circumstances are largely involved in the failure of much of the seed), and the ultimate harvest. There seems to be no reason to choose four features in particular: all the elements can relate to the situation of Jesus’ ministry at the point it is told. The sowing is happening; something important has started in the ministry of Jesus, which will lead ultimately to a splendid harvest, however disappointing and insignificant some of his activity seems to be at present. Old Testament passages such as Joel 3.13 mean that this image would readily be understood by Jewish hearers as referring to God’s ultimate triumph and reign. The sower can be either God or Jesus—many of Jesus’ sayings and actions presuppose that God is speaking and acting through him. This activity brings great opportunity, but because of the great diversity of possible human responses, is also open to misunderstanding and hostility. The image of the seed is central to this parable, as indeed it is to the whole cluster of shorter parables in Mark 4, which includes the Mustard Seed and the Seed Growing Secretly. It is central, also, to the parable of the Wheat and the Tares in Matthew. Seed is disproportionately small compared with what it produces. If it is to be effective, it has to be hidden

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(the difference between the seed on the path and all the rest). As the parable of the Seed growing Secretly (4.26-9) also indicates, it has a life and power and timetable of its own, quite apart from human agency. If it is to be fruitful, then it must die and disappear, and this symbolism is also found in the Fourth Gospel: ‘I tell you the truth, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ (John 12.24. NIV)

Such symbolism would have been clear and obvious to all Jewish peasants, who would have understood the essential continuity between seed and harvest. They knew well that specific seeds produce specific plants, so that the harvest obtained is defined by the kind of seed planted (see 1 Cor 15.36-38). If Jesus’ ministry is to lead ultimately to God’s harvest, then it must be God’s seed that is being planted. Peasants would also have attributed the mystery of growth and fruitfulness in what we call the ‘natural’ world to God’s direct creative and providential power. It is therefore not even an analogy when they see God at work in the spiritual realm, rather an instance in a different realm of the same activity of the one God. There is a mystery and a hiddenness about Jesus and what he is and what he does, that needs interpreting. He is almost a parable himself, and those who cannot or will not look deeper into what they see and hear will never perceive and understand. They are like the seed along the path (Mk 4.15). A fruitful response to Jesus can also be aborted by worldliness or refusal to accept the consequences of hostility (Mk 4:16-19). Understanding the Sower is a pre-requisite for understanding all parables. Shallow minds, hard hearts, preoccupation with worldly matters and dislike of persecution are negative factors for spiritual growth in any age, including that of Jesus’ active ministry. Scholars who suggest this interpretation springs from the life of the early Church seem to forget this! Parables need space and time to germinate, take root, grow and produce their effect in any human life. In the structure of the Gospel, this parable of the Sower not only sums up the ministry of Jesus thus far, but also points forward to the rest of his mission. Peter, unconsciously playing the part of Satan, tries to take away

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the word of Jesus about the suffering which lay ahead (8.27-33, cf. 4.15). A rich young ruler’s incipient faith was choked at birth by worldly cares (10.17-22). All the disciples fall away when persecution arrives (14.5052). Nevertheless, the harvest is sure, and miraculous, though as in the parable, it needs time to arrive. It begins with the Centurion at the cross making his declaration of faith (15.39). As the seed dies, as all fruitful seed must, the first-fruits of a harvest are reaped. Mark and his readers, both then and today, know the final harvest of a world-wide community of believers is out of all proportion to the small beginnings and failures of the years of Jesus in the Holy Land. Mark’s second fully developed parable, the Wicked Tenants (12.1-12) similarly plays a critical role in the structure and meaning of his Gospel. Just as the story of Jesus inexorably moves towards his death, the parable offers us perspectives on it, and ways of understanding it. It appears close by the cursing of the fig tree, the cleansing of the Temple and plans of the Jewish officials to do violence to Jesus. As the death of the son in the parable is the final atrocity in a series of hostile acts, so the death of Jesus is a continuing part of the rejection of God and his purposes through antagonism to his prophets, which has characterized Jewish history. The sending of the owner’s son, in the light of his experience with his servants, is crazily unrealistic in human terms. He would have been far more likely to send an armed posse to evict them! So why does God behave in such a way? The parable draws us in to think of possible motives—a final appeal of love, a longing to be reconciled with those estranged. Finally, the parable points us beyond the end of Mark’s story, to the ultimate futility of persisting in enmity towards God. In the last resort, his ownership is incontestable. If frustrated by the existing tenants, his vineyard will be given to ‘others’, the Christian Church. Parables in the Structure of Matthew In Matthew, as in Mark, parables play a central role in the structure of the Gospel, and in this case, one which is literally central too. Charles Lohr2 has shown the following symmetry in this Gospel:

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1-4 5-7 8-9 10 11-12 13 14-17 18 19-22 23-25 26-28

Narrative Sermon Narrative Sermon Narrative Sermon Narrative Sermon Narrative Sermon Narrative

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Birth and Beginnings Blessings, Entering the Kingdom Authority and Invitation Mission Discourse Rejection by this Generation Parables of the Kingdom Acknowledgement by Disciples Community Discourse Authority and Invitation Woes, Coming of the Kingdom Death and Rebirth (Resurrection)

Thus Matthew 13, consisting of seven parables of the kingdom, is seen to be the middle section of alternating blocks of discourse and story, and could be said to be a hybrid, since parable inherently combines teaching and narrative. An inspection of the table will show how the blocks are arranged symmetrically about the central one, with comparable or contrasting themes as their subject matter. Matthew also shows a tendency to group parables in triads, according to related topics. Thus, for instance, Jesus’ final discourse is about the need for watchfulness and vigilance from the disciple community, watchfulness in Matthew’s understanding including active and laborious service . These themes are illustrated by the parabolic triad of the Faithful and Wise Servant (24.45-51), the Ten Bridesmaids (25.1-13) and the Talents (25.14-30). Parables are to be found in all the other sermon blocks except the mission discourse, and also in the narrative sections. Matthew follows Mark in making the Sower the first extended parable he records, and we notice also a similar location for the Wicked Tenants (Luke too accepts its appropriateness just before the passion). However, because it is flanked by two other parables, the Two Sons and the Wedding Feast, the parable of the Wicked Tenants does not hold the same pivotal significance in the overall structure as it does in Mark. The central section, Matthew 13, shows Jesus first addressing the crowds, but later the disciples only, in seven parables. The disciples also benefit from explanations of some of them, not only the Sower as in Mark, but the Wheat and Tares too. Within the overall group of seven

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parables, Matthew also has pairs of parables with similar meaning. The Leaven complements the Mustard Seed: in both parables growth and remarkable ends result from small beginnings. The Pearl of Great Price and the Hidden Treasure have similar themes of a surpassingly valuable discovery, sacrifice and risk to possess it, and great joy in possession. However, there are also contrasting elements. The man who finds the treasure is by implication poor, while the merchant would have been wellto-do. The poor man stumbles across his discovery by accident, while the trader is deliberately engaged in the quest for fine stock. Taken together, the parables of Matthew 13 paint a broad picture of the kingdom – its hiddenness, its surprising nature, its growth, its certainty, its co-existence with evil, its capacity to deliver results in fruitfulness and harvest, the necessity it brings for human response, corporate and individual. In the passage which follows these parables, we find more of the evangelist’s understanding of the function and purpose of parables themselves: Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.’ (Matthew 13.34-5. )

Matthew uses a text from Psalm 78.2 to prove that Jesus told his parables in fulfilment of prophecy, and that in doing so, he was revealing the secret of the kingdom, hidden, like the yeast in the parable, in creation and history from the very beginning. He concludes by portraying Jesus as checking that the disciples understand parables, both the method, and the meaning of this particular set of seven. ‘Have you understood all these things?’ Jesus asked. ‘Yes,’ they replied. He said to them ‘Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.’ (Matt 13.51-2. NIV)

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The meaning of the new and old treasure is not clear in this mini-parable which closes this section. Many take it to mean Jewish teaching (the old) and Christian teaching (the new). But is it possible that the parables of Jesus are the old, and people who have properly understood the kingdom will themselves think and teach by further parables—the new? Here Bernard Harrison aptly comments: Wittgenstein says that we show that we have understood the principle of a series by continuing the series. What we have in the parables ... is precisely a series of narratives bound to one another by a single principle ... How can we show our understanding but by continuing, in other narratives or in our own lives, the series of which we have been given, as it were, the first few integers?3

The parable of the Sheep and the Goats, which ends Matthew 25, can be seen as transitional to the narrative of the Passion. The nations are to be judged on their response or lack of it, to the least of Jesus’ brothers, with whom he is totally identified. After the parable, Matthew will show us a Jesus who becomes one of the least; one who is imprisoned (26.50), sick (27.26), naked (27.35), thirsty (26.29; 27.48); who like a stranger, is friendless (26.56). How are we going to respond to such a Christ in himself, before we respond to such of the least of his brothers? Parables in the Structure of Luke Unlike Matthew and Mark, Luke does not give any of the parables a critical part in his overall schema. Rather, he uses them in artistic and literary ways. For instance, his two-volume work Luke-Acts has a theological/ geographical basis. In the Gospel, Jesus makes three journeys to Jerusalem and its Temple: as a baby for presentation; as a twelve-year old boy for his first Passover; and as an adult for his death and resurrection. Much of the material unique to Luke, including all the Lucan parables except the Two Debtors, is contained in the journey of Jesus and his disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem which begins as early as 9.51, and which seems to portray discipleship symbolically as ‘heading for Jerusalem, following in the company of Jesus.’ Acts goes on to show how the Christian Gospel

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spreads in extending geographical zones from Jerusalem in waves in fulfilment of the prophetic command of the Risen Jesus: ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ (Acts 1.8. NIV). Now, this theological geography is reflected allegorically in the parable of the Great Feast (Lk 14.16-24. GNB): ‘There was once a man who was giving a great feast to which he invited many people. When it was time for the feast, he sent his servant to tell his guests, “Come, everything is ready!” But they all began, one after the other, to make excuses. The first one told the servant “I have bought a field and must go and look at it; please accept my apologies.” Another one said, “I have bought five pairs of oxen and am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies.” Another one said, “I have just got married, and for that reason I cannot come.” The servant went back and told all this to his master. The master was furious and said to his servant, “Hurry out to the streets and alleys of the town, and bring back the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.” Soon the servant said, “Your order has been carried out, sir, but there is room for more.” So the master said to the servant, “Go out to the country roads and lanes and make people come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you all that none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner!” ’

The feast represents the kingdom of heaven; the man who gave it, God. The invited guests, those who would have regarded themselves as the man’s natural friends and acquaintances, represent religious Jews such as the Pharisees, and the servant with the invitation, Jesus. The expected guests do not respond, so the invitation is extended to ‘the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame’, residents of the same village as the party-giver, even if not among his natural acquaintance, who symbolize the tax collectors, the harlots, the rejected and outcast of Jewish society. The third wave of invitations is to people from completely outside the community, the tramps, vagabonds, aliens and travellers, symbolizing the Gentiles. The parable leaves open whether or not they come in to the feast. At the point in history at which it is told, the Gentile mission whose initiation will be the subject of Acts, is not even started.

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Like Matthew, Luke follows the ‘rule of two’, which we saw in the Two Women of Proverbs 9 and the parable of the Two Housebuilders, and applies it on a bigger scale to comparing or contrasting pairs of parables. Thus, we have the stories of the Tower Builder and the King Going to War (Luke 14.28ff). There are comparisons to be made: ruined builders and defeated kings are not attractive situations to be in. Building a tower was a substantial undertaking for a peasant farmer, waging war similarly for any king. There is also a contrast: we need to count the cost, on the one hand, of setting out in discipleship, and on the other, of defying God by refusing to come to terms with him. Jesus also makes use of the ‘rule of three’, a three-fold repetition of similar events or characters. This is a frequent device of storytellers and is found in many folk tales such as the children’s story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We find it in parables like the Good Samaritan, where three travellers come upon the wounded man. Closely allied to this principle is that of ‘end stress’, where it is the final one of a series which is most important. Baby bear loses his porridge, has his chair broken, and discovers Goldilocks in his bed! We saw the rule of three in the Parable of the Great Feast, above, and so would it be correct to see end stress on the final wave of invitations—the Gentiles? In Luke chapter 15, we find the rule of two, the rule of three and end stress on a larger scale, not within one parable, but in the grouping of the three parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Prodigal Son, (or as we might call the last, the ‘Two Lost Brothers’, to bring out this structure). There are clear elements of comparison and contrast between the first two. Something valuable is lost; there is a search and a celebration including others not personally involved with the loss. In comparing the two Gospel versions of the Lost Sheep, we see that Luke has a threefold structure of ‘lost-found-social consequence’ in place of Matthew’s simpler twofold ‘lost-found.’ The contrasts include that between male/female in the central figure, and in this Luke goes beyond the Parable of the Leaven, which also figures a woman, because here it is her joy which symbolizes that of ‘God’s angels’, a circumlocution for God himself . There is also a well-to-do shepherd/ poor woman contrast. In addition, some of the detail points up different aspects. The tender care for the recovered sheep is suggested by the picture of its being carried on the

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shepherd’s shoulders, while the woman’s diligent search is sketched in by the account of her activity, lighting a lamp, sweeping the house, looking carefully everywhere. We also see a rule of three, with end stress, in the addition of the next Parable as part of a group. It obviously continues the theme of ‘lostfound-social consequence’, which is expressed in a party for the prodigal son who returns home. Clearly, there is end stress, because this third parable is infinitely more subtle and sophisticated than the previous two. No longer is the symbol of the lost human being an unintelligent animal or an inanimate object; it is now a lost human being, who himself has a decisive part to play in returning to his true place. And the symbol for God, the one who celebrates the restoration, is now a father, one with a deep loving and caring relationship with the lost one, way beyond a shepherd’s concern for his wealth, or a woman’s for her dowry. It would be sufficient to end the parable here, if this were all Luke were attempting to do. Many people feel that the parable would be more satisfying if it did end with the Prodigal’s return. When the young Arthur Sullivan composed a new sacred piece for the Worcester Festival of 1869, he chose the Prodigal Son for his libretto. He speaks for many readers when in his ‘Preface’ he wrote: It is a remarkable fact that the Parable of the Prodigal Son should never before have been chosen as the text of a sacred musical composition. The story is so natural and pathetic, and forms so complete a whole; its lesson is so thoroughly Christian; the characters, though few, are so perfectly contrasted, and the opportunity for the employment of ‘local colour’ is so obvious, that it is indeed astonishing to find the subject so long overlooked. .... The episode with which the parable concludes has no dramatic connection with the former and principal portion, and has therefore not been treated.4

However, Jesus did not tell a parable beginning ‘A certain man had one son ....’ If, as we obviously should, we apply the ‘rule of two’ and rule of end stress within this third parable, then we should find elements of ‘compare and contrast’ between the two brothers. Neither shows much concern for his father’s feelings; both distance themselves from their father’s

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concerns and activities in different ways; both seem to resent their father’s control of the farm and the limits they perceive it sets on their lives; both at some stage seem to prefer parties with their friends than meals with their father. The parable ends with a second lost brother, lost because of his principles, his envy, his judgmental attitudes, his resentment of his father’s generosity. Surely, this son represents the Pharisees during the ministry of Jesus (Lk 15.1-2), and many self-righteous, decent, dull people since. It ends with the father, the symbol for God, searching for his second son, who is separated from him just as truly as the younger had been, if in a different way. Will the elder swallow his pride, admit his selfish mean-mindedness and join the party? The climax to all three stories is the invitation to the elder brother, as Jesus appeals to the Pharisees to give life a happy ending by accepting that God is a God of prodigious love, compassion and generosity, and to join in the celebration which Jesus has started. Thus we see that the placing of these three parables together allows them to illuminate each other, and points to subtleties and also to what is important in each parable and in the group. Most commentators agree that Luke groups parables on the basis of common theme, but I suggest that a ‘rule of two’ also operates in Luke 16, so that the two parables of the Unjust Steward and the Rich Man and Lazarus, separated by various sayings mostly about wealth, should be interpreted in parallel, comparing and contrasting them, so that they illuminate each other. John Donahue also argues for a larger scale ‘rule of two’ in Luke.5 He sees the story of Mary and Martha (10.38-42) parabolically as part of a contrasting pair with the Good Samaritan (10.29-37). They not only contrast in having male/female central figures, but also in drawing out the fullness of Luke’s understanding of discipleship. Mary symbolizes the true disciple, loving God by ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus’ while the Samaritan symbolizes the true disciple in action loving his fellow human beings. The two stories taken together illustrate the one great commandment (Luke 10.27). The true family of Jesus are those who combine the actions of Mary and of the Samaritan, who ‘hear the word of God and do it’ (Luke 8.21; contrast Mk 3.35 and Matt. 12.50). The Unjust Steward (Lk 16.1-8) is one of the most difficult parables to interpret. The reasons are well known. First, is verse 8—‘The Master

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praised the unjust steward’—the last line of the story, or the first line of comment by Jesus? Second, the details of the action are obscure. What were the steward’s misdemeanours, and did he compound them by reducing down the debts? Was he acting within his legitimate role as steward, or dishonestly winning friends by acting before the debtors heard he was no longer steward? Irrespective of the answers, the central situation is very simple, and the precise nature of the transactions and their legality makes no difference to it. The steward is handling wealth which does not belong to him. Very soon, with dismissal looming, he will lose contact with it totally and face poverty. So during the limited time available, he uses it to win friends in low places, among the borrowers of his world, so that when the crisis overtakes him, there will be people grateful to him who will ‘welcome him into their houses’ (v. 4) because they have benefited from reductions in their bills. He will look to them for hospitality, not his master or any influential person. Either Jesus or the master in the parable could praise him for resourcefulness, quick-wittedness and common sense, though the master in the parable would probably have done so with wry or rueful appreciation of his business acumen. Luke 16.8b, ‘For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light’ (NIV), makes it plain that Jesus/ Luke is applauding the shrewdness of the steward, not the morality or legitimacy of his actions. Applying the ‘rule of two’, at the heart of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk 16.19-30) we find behaviour the precise opposite of that of the steward. The rich man conspicuously does not use his wealth to win friends in low places. Indeed, he behaves meanly towards Lazarus, the beggar at his gate, even denying him food from the floor-sweepings. Sadly, the rich man’s failure to use his wealth to make a friend of Lazarus, means that when he has lost it all in his crisis, death, there is a great gulf between him and the poor man which cannot be bridged by either party so he has no friend to welcome him into eternal dwellings, or even to relieve his sufferings in hell. Thus both parables, one negatively, one positively, point to the message of Luke 16.9: ‘Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings’ (NIV). We note especially the part played by friends, won by the proper use of

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our wealth, in getting us a welcome. If God alone were involved, the saying could equally well have been: ‘Use your wealth to do good to others, so that....’ or ‘Use your wealth in giving alms, so that....’ Such an interpretation of these parables is compatible with the other sayings on wealth in Luke 16.10-15, and is consistent with Luke 14.12-14 (NIV): ‘When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbours; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, [literally, beggars] the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’

If Luke were grouping these parables only on the basis of the common theme of wealth and its use, rather than on the rule of two, then we might have expected him to include with them the parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12.13-21), since there are similarities of theme, including the death of an ill-prepared rich man. The rule of end stress means that the major thrust of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus concerns his five brothers. Can they be persuaded to make friends for themselves among the poor and so avoid their brother’s fate and be welcomed into eternal joy? The question remains unanswered. They have the law of Moses, (passages such as Deuteronomy 15.7-14); they have the passionate denunciations of the uncaring rich by prophets like Amos (5.7-15; 8.4-7). But will they take notice? Will they even listen if somebody called Lazarus comes back from the dead? In John’s Gospel, somebody called Lazarus does come back from the dead (John 11.38-44), an event which produces unbelief and opposition in some, and faith in others (John 12.9-11). Did Luke have some knowledge of this incident? If so, it might explain why this parable, and this alone, has a named character, while the other principal protagonist, the rich man, is nameless. And so the open-ended parable draws us in. We too have the Law and the prophets. We also have these parables as part of our Scriptures. We have one greater than Lazarus who has come back from the dead, and who has opened to his disciples the meaning of Moses and the prophets.

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Have we seen the truth, and shall we act upon it by winning friends for ourselves in heaven by using our money to make friends among the poor on earth? Notes to Chapter 4 Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 65. Charles H. Lohr, ‘Oral Techniques in the Gospel of Matthew’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 23 (1961), p. 427. 3 Bernard Harrison, ‘Parable and Transcendence’ in Michael Wadsworth (ed.), Ways of Reading the Bible (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 203-7. 4 Arthur S. Sullivan, Preface to the vocal score, The Prodigal Son. An Oratorio; published Boosey & Co., London and New York, n. d. 5 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, pp. 129ff. 1 2

5 What is a Parable? The parables of Jesus clearly reflect a provincial and peasant outlook and experience in first century Palestine. As such, they are historically unusual in documenting the lives and feelings of people whose views and lifestyle are usually not recorded. However, it would be a gross misunderstanding to think of them as everyday stories of country folk, or the romantic musings of a naïve nature mystic. Nor are they primarily stories which help weak or uneducated minds to grasp what they otherwise might not, as Tennyson seemed to think: ...truth embodied in a tale Shall enter in at lowly doors1 Parables are not a spoonful of sugar designed to make palatable a moral, religious or doctrinal point which could equally well be expressed in a more intellectual form. Albert Schweitzer, when he wrote in his famous Quest of the Historical Jesus that the meaning of the parables is ‘as clear as day’2 could not have got it more wrong. Both Mark and Matthew realise that parables are difficult. Mark even records Jesus as saying that his motive in using them was deliberately to exclude people from understanding and benefiting from the message of the kingdom (Mark 4.11-12) while Matthew seems to think the problem lies in the perversity and stupidity of the hearers (Matt 13.13ff). The Gospels all show that even the ‘insiders’, the disciples, found parables difficult. In Mark, they failed to understand the parable of the Leaven (Mark 8.14ff) and in Matthew, have to seek an explanation of the Wheat and the Tares (Matt. 13.36). The modern poet U. A. Fanthorpe puts the following words into the mouth of Jesus, struggling with his uncomprehending followers:3 They know my unknowable parables as well As each other’s shaggy dog stories. I say! I say! I say! There was this Samaritan, This Philistine and this Roman… or What did the High Priest say To the belly dancer? All they need

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Is the cue for laughs. My sheep and goats, Virgins, pigs, figtrees, loaves and lepers Confuse them. Fishing, whether for fish or men, Has unfitted them for analogy. Yet these are my mouths. Through them only Can I speak with Augustine, Aquinas, Martin, Paul, Regius Professors of Divinity, And you, and you. How can I cram the sense of Heaven’s kingdom Into our pidgin-Aramaic quayside jargon?

While John’s Gospel does not contain fully developed parables, it is full of metaphors and similes, and there is a very revealing conversation in the Gospel when Jesus promises direct instead of figurative speaking; the disciples are clearly very relieved about it, though whether they have understood as well as they think is doubtful: ‘I have said this to you in figures; the hour is coming when I shall no longer speak to you in figures but tell you plainly of the Father.....’ His disciples said, ‘Ah, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure! Now we know that you know all things, and need none to question you; by this we believe that you came from God.’ (John 16.25, 29-30. RSV)

John seems to hold the theological view that Jesus spoke to the disciples in ‘figures’ (John’s chosen translation for mashal) such as the Good Shepherd (John 10.11-18), the Vine (15.1-11) and the Woman in Childbirth (John 16.21f) because during the ministry, the nature of God had yet to be clearly revealed in the Cross, and because the Holy Spirit, the guide into truth (16.13), had yet to be given. However, since the time of Jesus, Christians even though they are living after the cross and in the age of the Spirit continue to struggle with the figurative language and stories of Jesus. Parables are sophisticated and intriguing works of art. Like riddles, they puzzle and demand a response from their hearers for their own completion. As A.M. Hunter discerns:

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‘The Gospel parable is designed to make people think. It appeals to the intelligence through the imagination.... the parable is not so much a crutch for the limping intellect .. as a spur to spiritual perception.4

As I have already commented in the introduction, these stories are very radical, surprising and challenging in their content. They are a strange admixture of the ordinary and down-to-earth, with elements which are unpredictable and puzzling. With one exception, they are emphatically not overtly about religion and religious behaviour, yet they are about the nature of God and of his interaction with this world and its people, the Kingdom of God. We now need to ask just what kind of stories they are. Robert Alter, the distinguished literary critic, who has turned his attention to the Bible in recent years and published a number of important books about it, writes the following splendid passage in one of his articles. He is referring particularly, but not exclusively, to Old Testament narrative. The ... powerful peculiarity of the Bible is that it is a literature steeped in the quirkiness and imperfection of the human that is ultimately oriented toward a horizon beyond the human..... The Hebrew Bible is animated by an untiring shrewdly perceptive fascination with the theatre of human behaviour in the textual foreground, seen against a background of forces that can be neither grasped nor controlled by humankind....The Bible has invited endless exegesis not only because of the drastic economy of its means of expression but also because it conceives of the world as a place full of things to understand in which the things of ultimate importance defy human understanding.... It seems more than ever not an antiquarian book or a historical document but a literature that speaks to us urgently, with the power to ‘draw us out’ of ourselves. It is able to do this.... by the boldness with which it represents human figures confronted, challenged, confounded by a reality beyond human ken.5

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This passage applies admirably to parables, and helps to make it clear what parables are, how they should be approached, and why they are at home in the context of the Gospels and whole Bible. Along the same lines, Alter also writes: The Bible is obviously not a book, or set of books, intended to be read for entertainment with an admixture of insight and information....Rather it wants to ‘draw me out of myself,’ using the medium of narrative to transform my sense of the world, urgently alert me to spiritual realities and moral imperatives I might have misconceived, or not conceived at all.6

For stories to achieve what Alter describes—draw us out ourselves, transform our sense of reality, adjust our view of the moral demands life, or God, makes on us, confound us with spiritual realities we can never possess, and which we might easily miss or misunderstand—then clearly they need to have profound depths. We could do far worse than begin with the very simple definition of a parable as ‘an earthly story with a heavenly meaning’. This immediately alerts us to the need to relate to the story on more than one level simultaneously. We enter into the surface world of the narrative, and hear of the events it describes. But at the same time, we look for and try to remain aware of deeper, or more complex, levels of meaning. What John Crossan says about allegory applies to parables, whether allegorical or plain: Allegory... is not an apricot with a stone set in its centre and we in search of that stone, but an onion whose manifold layers constitute its totality and whose multiplicity is its message. We have been taught, of course, to prefer apricots to onions.7

However, our well-known definition of parables gives no clue as to how we might accurately and reliably find any deeper level of meaning, so we turn to examine some of the methods available to Jesus and used by him. More than one of these can be at work in any single parable. First of all, a parable can function as an example story, and convey something new to us purely by putting into our heads an idea that would never have occurred to us unaided. For instance, the Good Samaritan

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portrays very generous help given in need across cultural and racial barriers of suspicion and hostility. The parable invites a change of mind and behaviour in us by illustrating a lifestyle far more demanding than the one we have taken for granted. The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18.9-14) challenges us to see that prayer in which we catalogue our own piety and achievements, and compare ourselves favourably with other people, is not acceptable to God. Second, a parable can be a teaching device, by means of which the familiar and well-known is harnessed to clarify or reveal the less familiar. Every Galilaean peasant knew the way in which light from the oil-lamp penetrated the darkness in his home at night, and how it was most effective if placed on a prominent ledge or shelf. This is the familiar and the well-known. In the same way, the disciple is meant to penetrate the darkness of ignorance and evil which surrounds him by deeds of loving service performed in God’s name and for his glory (Matt 5.15-16). What follows ‘in the same way’ represents the new and unfamiliar. This technique is standard among teachers in most cultures, and I have already drawn attention to its use in the Old Testament (Chapter 2). The comparison may be in the area of human feelings. Every human being knows the anxiety of searching for a lost object or animal of especial value, and the joyful experience of finding it. This is the familiar. Such human experiences open a window into the heart of God, as he goes out after his alienated children, and explain the motivation and actions of Jesus in spending so much time and effort on the sinners of his day. This is the unfamiliar. Third, the parable can offer a distancing, or an alternative perspective, on our behaviour or thinking, enabling us to see ourselves in a new light, and perhaps change our thinking or action. The parable can actually be a subversive medium. We have already explored Nathan’s parable of the pet lamb in some detail,8 and this is a fine example of the method at work. Jesus (Luke 7.36-50) uses the same technique with Simon the Pharisee, who has been a very grudging host in his welcome to Jesus and very judgmental of both Jesus and the woman who washed his feet. Jesus tells him the parable of the Two Debtors. Two people are both in debt to a moneylender, and both have their debts cancelled. One had owed ten times as much as the other, and Simon admits that this one would be the more

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likely to have greater love for the generous moneylender. In the light of the parable, Jesus clearly intends Simon to see the woman’s embarrassing behaviour as a sign of her great love, produced by the forgiveness of her many sins. There is both a sting and a promise in the tail of the parable. If Simon recognizes himself as the other debtor, then he will need to reassess himself as a sinner like the woman, if not on so spectacular a scale, and thus like her also in need of the generosity of the moneylender, the mercy of God in forgiveness. In spite of Jesus’ rebuke of him, the willingness of the moneylender to forgive both debtors stands as an offer of forgiveness for Simon too. This method of subversive ‘distancing’ can be seen in more recent folk-tales from the Middle East. The comic exploits of Mulla Nasrudin can highlight areas of wisdom, or social and political comment. For instance, the following story subtly points up the very slight moral difference between the wealthy and powerful who manipulate the system to stay within the law, and the poor who break it: Every Friday morning, Nasrudin arrived in a market town with an excellent donkey, which he sold. The price which he asked was always very small; far below the value of the animal. One day a rich donkeymerchant approached him. ‘I cannot understand how you do it, Nasrudin. I sell donkeys at the lowest possible price. My servants force farmers to give me fodder free. My slaves look after my donkeys without wages. And yet I cannot match your prices.’ ‘Quite simple,’ said Nasrudin. ‘You steal fodder and labour. I merely steal donkeys.’9

To achieve any of the three effects described above, there has to be at the heart of every parable at least one area of comparison. For many years, under the influence of the two German scholars, A. Jülicher in the nineteenth century and J. Jeremias in the twentieth century, it was usually said that parables only had a single point of comparison. There is no valid reason why this should be so, and this idea was largely propagated as a reaction against any method of parable interpretation which expected a meaning in every detail of every story. While every narrative necessarily contains more detail than is strictly necessary to make its ‘point’, it is obvious that developed parables like the Prodigal Son or the Good

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Samaritan contain far too much narrative and detail to carry only one point. What are we meant to do with it all when the point is taken? As A.T. Cadoux rightly points out: A parable is the work of a poor artist if the picture or story is a collection of items out of which we have to pick one and discard the rest... A good parable is an organic whole in which each point is vital to the rest.10

The reader or interpreter should look for the central comparison, and in its light, explore sensitively how many more parallel ideas there may be. I shall say more about this in the next chapter. Although understanding the parable as a way of comparing the familiar (A) with the unfamiliar (B) is a simple idea, it is by no means necessarily simple to apply. For instance, the comparison may not be straightforward. The parable of the Unjust Judge is most often understood as an encouragement to prayer. In the parable, a widow nags an indolent judge into agreeing to take action on her behalf. So: Widow asking judge and finally winning agreement (A) =Christian praying to God and finally obtaining vindication (B). However, the parable is not asking us to think that God resembles a dishonest and indolent judge! We need to insert a ‘How much more’ into the comparison. If even an inefficient judge will help one of life’s losers for the sake of peace and quiet, how much more will God listen to his beloved children and help them. Nor, it should be said, is the widow’s behaviour a model for prayer. Her tongue and her persistence are weapons she must use to fight for her rights in a hostile world. Christians by contrast pray to a Heavenly Father who already knows their needs before they ask. In other cases, neither the familiar (A) nor the unfamiliar (B) in the central comparison may be very clear. Take as an example the parable of the Treasure in the Field:

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‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.’ (Matt 13.44. NIV)

What is the central point of this story? Is it the very existence of the hidden treasure, or its sudden impinging on the life of the man who found it, bringing tremendous new potential for his life? Is it the joy of the man which precipitates his decision to sell all? Or again, is it the risk and sacrifice involved in selling everything else to possess the treasure? Are we meant to take notice of the sharp practice of hiding the treasure’s existence, so buying a field at a false valuation? How do any or all of these, the familiar (A), help us to understand the unfamiliar or misunderstood, the kingdom of heaven, (B)? What is the kingdom of heaven anyway? One particular technique for making a comparison is allegory. In total allegory, a message is encoded, and there is a one-to-one correlation between each element in the message and in the story-code. Only the message needs to be logical and coherent; what happens in the story need make no kind of sense in the real world at all. Thus, for instance, in the early part of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the hero carries a burden on his back, which ultimately rolls down a hill into an empty sepulchre, to his very great relief.11 It is difficult to think of circumstances in real life where such an event might happen! But the encoded message, that the burden of sin and guilt, which even Christians sometimes continue to carry, can be removed because of the resurrection of Jesus, makes perfectly good theological and psycho-spiritual sense. However, allegories are not generally consistent and totally worked out. In the folk story of Snow White we see an allegory of the human soul, put into a living death by the step-mother, the Evil One, out of jealousy. The poisoned apple she uses alludes to the story of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, the forbidden fruit being traditionally identified as an apple. The maiden (soul) is re-awakened to new life in a loving relationship by the kiss of the prince, representing the Christ. Clearly such allegorical allusions to already existent and known stories are part of the appeal of such folk stories. However, the seven dwarves form no part of the allegory, even though they are good value in the story and a necessary part of its plot! In C. S. Lewis’s children’s book The Lion, the Witch and

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the Wardrobe, there is a central allegory, whereby Aslan, the Lion hero (the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah’) symbolizes Christ in his sacrificial death brought about by his love for treacherous friends. Inconsistently, the event takes place in Narnia, a land where – until Aslan’s death releases a malevolent spell—it is ‘always winter but never Christmas’12: How can there be Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, when Jesus is a lion in the allegory? The principle of allegory, of encoding ideas in a story, sounds rather studied and mechanical. But great allegories like The Pilgrim’s Progress give us delight because the story takes on a life of its own. We do not perceive Pilgrim as just a cipher for a Christian, but rather he strikes us a lively human being in his own right. If we read sympathetically, we resonate to some of Bunyan’s own experience. All the villains who make life difficult for Pilgrim are from the aristocracy, the gentry and establishment classes: this was very much a fact of life for Dissenters in seventeenth century England. Good allegory can perhaps be both realistic and symbolic. When the Prodigal Son ends ups feeding pigs in a foreign country, this could well be the literal fate of a down-on-his-luck diaspora Jew. Equally, it could describe—allegorically and dismissively—a loyalist attitude to the lifestyle of the Jewish tax collector in the Holy Land, earning his bread doing a degrading job for a Gentile employer. Allegory has been given a bad name in parable interpretation because for long periods in history, the parables were misunderstood as total allegories. The Rabbinic idea that the Holy Spirit would not inspire writings in which there was detail purely for aesthetic effect, or to delineate human character, but that every detail must have spiritual significance, was taken for granted. Thus, for instance, Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, who lived from 185-254 CE, was a virtuoso at finding allegorical meanings in the parables. Consider his exegesis of the Good Samaritan. The man who fell among thieves is Adam. Jerusalem signifies heaven, Jericho is the world. The thieves are humankind’s enemies, the devil and his minions. The priest stands for the Old Testament Law, the Levite represents the Prophets. The Good Samaritan is Christ, while the donkey on which he carries the wounded traveller is his body. The inn is the Church; the two pence the Father and the Son, and the Samaritan’s promise to return is the Second Advent of Christ.13 St. Augustine (354-430) continued in a

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similar style, even identifying the inn-keeper as the Apostle Paul. To take another example, following the Reformation period one interpreter14 identified the Pearl of Great Price as a prophecy of Calvin’s Church in Geneva. Such flights of fancy, which continued until the nineteenth century, tell us more about human ingenuity than the meaning of parables. Because of the excesses of this method of interpretation, the whole idea of allegory in interpreting the parables fell into disfavour. However, there is no inherent reason why the parables of Jesus should not contain allegorical elements and allusions, like Snow White. Indeed, G. B. Caird argues very persuasively that the words ‘parable’ and ‘allegory’ are partial synonyms15 and writes: ....it is less important to distinguish between them than it is to distinguish between allegory, which the author intended, and allegorical embellishment or interpretation which he did not.16

The prophet Isaiah, among others in the Old Testament, speaks of the Jewish nation as God’s vine, or God’s vineyard, developing an allegory: My friend had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug the soil and cleared it of stones; he planted the finest vines. He built a tower to guard them, dug a pit for treading the grapes. He waited for the grapes to ripen, but every grape was sour. So now my friend says, ‘You people who live in Jerusalem and Judah, judge between my vineyard and me. Is there anything I failed to do for it? Why then did it produce sour grapes and not the good grapes I expected?….. Israel is the vineyard of the Lord Almighty; the people of Judah are the vines he planted. (Isaiah 5.1-4, 7. GNB)

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When Jesus chose to tell the story of tenants in a vineyard in rebellion against its owner (Mark 12.1-12), it seems virtually certain that he deliberately intended to build on Isaiah’s allegory, and it is hardly surprising that the Jewish leaders should have picked up the allegorical implications and realised that Jesus was speaking against them, symbolized as the tenants! When we consider the meaning of the Labourers in the Vineyard, we should be sensitive to the possibility that the owner is symbolic of God, a possibility which would readily have occurred to a Jewish audience listening to Jesus in the first century. Parable is very likely indeed to contain allegorical elements. One technique for a second tier of meaning in a story is the fable. This works by transposing human behaviour to plants or animals, and is well known from the work of Aesop. A fable is in point of fact a particular type of allegory, in which human beings are represented by animals or plants. For instance, in one familiar example, a fox flatters a crow which is holding a piece of meat in its beak, about the beauty of its shape and complexion, and begs to hear its singing voice, expressing the hope that it will match the crow’s beauty. The crow responds with a song, drops the meat, and the fox enjoys a free meal, which was its aim all along.17 Such a story has some little reality in the animal world in which it is set. Foxes are regarded as cunning beasts, while crows make a notably harsh and unattractive noise. However, foxes and crows cannot communicate sophisticated ideas to each other; crows are not vulnerable to flattery and foxes are not as clever as the one in the story. Although set in the animal kingdom, the story functions entirely as an account of human deviousness and folly, and is intended to deepen our self-knowledge. It is worth adding that not all the collection attributed to Aesop consist of fables; there are also example stories, such as ‘The Thief and his Mother’18 which are entirely about human beings. This apparent ‘inconsistency’ in a body of stories from the seventh century BC should warn us against trying to impose too much consistency on the parables of Jesus. The Old Testament contains only one fable, which expresses a strongly negative view of kingship. All the useful trees of the forest refuse the invitation to be king because they are too busy producing their olives, figs and grapes. Only the thornbush, which produces no crop and is instrumental in spreading forest fires through its brushwood, will agree to

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accept the position of king (Judges 9.8ff). By implication, the only people who want to be kings are worthless troublemakers! Perhaps this is still an apposite warning fable concerning the kind of people who become professional politicians and want to exercise power over others. It is interesting to note that Jesus never uses fables, (though the figure of ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ in Matthew 7.15 could easily be a shorthand reference to a more extended fable which is well-known in Aesop.19) This may simply reflect their scarcity in the Old Testament, but it may also be because he preferred to keep his parables firmly rooted in everyday reality. One fable widely current in the time of Jesus concerns an unfruitful tree.20 There was a tree which was barren of fruit, even though it was growing near to water, so its owner decided to cut it down. The tree spoke to him, saying ‘Please do not cut me down. Transplant me and give me another chance, and then if I do not bear fruit, cut me down.’ However, its owner replied, ‘When you stood by the water, you bore no fruit; why should you bear it if you stand anywhere else?’ This story was used by a father to censure his good-for-nothing son. If Jesus knew this story, and developed it into his parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Luke 13.6-9), it is very significant that he changes it from fable to real life. Although the parable usually includes some measure of comparison, it is much more than that. C. H. Dodd has given one of the best and most influential definitions of a New Testament parable: At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.21

Here Dodd singles out the ‘strangeness’ of the parables, and it is an undoubted fact that many of them have bizarre, comic, fantastic or shocking elements. These disturb the mind, and signal that the comparison implicit in the parable is not going to be easy to accept or understand, but may demand a major change in thinking or behaviour. In a way, all parables are telling us ‘Things are not necessarily what they seem—you must always be open to have your tidy images of reality shattered by God.’

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There are a number of ways in which the parables may have shocked their original hearers, and may still shock us. First of all, the subject of the parable may be an unlikely comparison. For Jesus to compare the kingdom of God with a woman mixing yeast in flour (Matt 13.33) is doubly arresting for a first century Jewish audience. Women were widely regarded as inferior and subservient to men, and yeast was generally seen as a symbol of corruption, or evil power and influence (Mark 8.15; Luke 12.1; esp. 1 Cor 5.6-8), so ‘a woman in action with yeast’ is quite an iconoclastic image for speaking of God’s rule! Unleavened usually means holy; leavened means secular (Exodus 12.1720). A further surprising element is the scale of the operation. Because of the quantity of flour specified, the woman is either a professional baker, or is preparing bread for a major party. Or perhaps there is an allusion to Old Testament epiphany stories, particularly Genesis 18.6, when a woman, Sara, also prepares bread from three measures of flour so that her husband, Abraham, can provide lavish hospitality for his three angelic visitors (who sometimes seem to be God himself). Second, the story may contain bizarre elements. The Unmerciful Servant (Matt 18.23ff) shows us a man with an impossible debt of 10,000 talents. John Donahue asserts that the annual income of Herod the Great only amounted to about 900 talents!22 That a servant should have accumulated such a debt defies reality; that he should plead for time in which to re-pay it is ludicrous; that a king should reverse his decision to enslave the servant and all his family and totally remit the debt is extremely unlikely. That this same servant should be such a monstrous villain that he immediately physically attacks a fellow servant who owes him the very modest sum of 100 denarii (100 days’ pay for the workers in Matthew’s vineyard), refuses the realistic request for time to repay, and has him committed to debtors’ gaol, is highly implausible. The ‘unreal’ elements underline the extent of mercy which the first servant has experienced and benefited from, and thus his inconsistency in continuing to function in a world defined by crude justice, a world which ironically he himself experiences at the end of the story when he is committed to prison until he has repaid his original debt. These exaggerated elements also combine to shift our perspective during the hearing of the story. Our initial sympathies with the first servant, faced by an impossible debt and an unsympathetic

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despot, are evaporated or re-directed to the second servant when we are faced with the first’s brutal and uncaring behaviour. Third, the narrative itself may take an unexpected turn and surprise or disappoint our expectations. This may relate to the general drift of the whole story. Members of a Jewish audience, well versed in their Scriptures, might expect that a story about two brothers, one of whom departs for a distant country, would end up with him making good and returning in triumph to his family. Jacob and Joseph are very notable examples. The story of the Prodigal Son would therefore be particularly disturbing. In the Good Samaritan, the original hearers would almost certainly have expected a Jewish layman to follow the Priest and the Levite down the Jericho road. Instead, they are presented with a representative of a hated enemy and rival tribe as hero of the story. In the Labourers in the Vineyard, the workers are surprisingly paid in reverse order, so building up the tension of our expectation (and theirs) that the ones who worked the whole day will receive some special favour from an employer who has shown himself extremely generous to the men who only worked one hour. In parables there may often be an unexpected reversal of roles, with the weak becoming strong, and the winners ending up as the losers. Fourth, the parables are often so told that they include more than one perspective on a situation and invite their hearers to identify with different viewpoints as the parable proceeds, as in the Two Debtors already mentioned. We are first shown the labourers in the Wheat and the Tares who are very concerned when they discover the weeds, and want to take instant action. Next, we are presented with the owner of the field who takes a longer term view of the situation, and leaves any remedial action until harvest-time to avoid damage to the good plants (Matt 13:24-30). The elder brother in the Prodigal Son freely expresses his sense of grievance and injustice, and most hearers sympathize with him. As the story develops, the father’s perspective on his lost son’s return, and also on his elder son, is portrayed too, and our sympathies change. The surrounding narrative in the Good Samaritan expressly demands a change of perspective. A lawyer asks ‘Who is my neighbour?’ and his question presupposes that he will be the one giving help. He wants to define the cut-off point for his benevolence. Jesus responds to his question with a story of a man who is in desperate straits. He is unconscious, wounded and without any

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resources. Exposed to the heat of the sun, and threatened with the cold of night and attack by wild animals, unless someone shows him love he will die. He has already been failed by two people from whom he had the right to expect aid. When Jesus in his final question asks the lawyer who was neighbour to this particular man, the lawyer is invited to think about ‘neighbour’ from the perspective of the desperate receiver, rather than that of the comfortable giver. This willingness to change perspective is still needed today. It is said that when studying this parable, most Christians in the Western World tend to identify themselves with the Samaritan, while most Third World Christians more often empathize with the victim. The parable as told by Jesus is, along with his deeds and other teaching, one part of the way that God addresses us, interacts with us and changes us. It is in this light that we can begin to appreciate the kind of claims made for parables by writers like Norman Perrin, who stresses that ‘the parables of Jesus were much more than illustrations explaining a difficult point, or than telling weapons in a controversy: they were bearers of the reality with which they were concerned’.23 Perrin’s point is that the parables actually mediate to the hearer ‘an experience of the Kingdom of God.’ So, he concludes: They challenge the hearer to explore the manifold possibilities of the experience of God as king, and they do so in ways which constantly remind the hearer that, on the one hand, God is to be experienced in the historicality of the world of everyday, while, on the other hand, they claim that God is to be experienced precisely in the shattering of that everyday world. Moreover, they do this in ways which constantly leave the hearer naked and alone before the possibility and challenge of the experience of God as king.24

The parables do not present us with tidy theories or theologies. They do not encourage us to speculate about abstract or abstruse truth. If we are to relate to them, we must look below their surface and allow them to speak. They challenge us to repentance, and to the possibility of experiencing grace and being children of God within ordinary everyday life. They challenge us to live generously as neighbours, without the need to compare ourselves with, or compete with, or judge, our fellow human

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beings. The parable is a subtle way of communicating truth about God and his ways with human beings, while still maintaining his hiddenness and mystery. Properly understood, it communicates truth about God in a way that invites us to continue looking for his presence within our own story. ‘The parable is an oblique invitation on the part of Jesus to follow him’ (Robert Funk).25 Notes to Chapter 5 Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Word had Breath’ from In Memoriam. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, 3rd edition (London: A. & C. Black, 1968), p. 263. 3 U. A. Fanthorpe, ‘Getting it Across (for Caroline)’, in U.A. Fanthorpe, Standing To (Calstock: Peterloo Poets, 1982). 4 Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 13f. 5 Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature (London: SPCK, 1992), pp. 20-3. 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 John D. Crossan, ‘Parable, Allegory and Paradox’ in Daniel Patte (ed.), Semiology and Parables. Exploration of the Possibilities offered by Structuralism for Exegesis (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1976), p. 277. 8 See above, pp. 22-23. 9 Idries Shah, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (London: Cape, 1968), p. 63. 10 Arthur T. Cadoux, The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use (London: J. Clarke, 1930), cit. Crossan, ‘Parable, Allegory and Paradox’, p. 364. 11 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 69-70. 12 C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1974), p. 23. 13 Origen, Homily on Luke, 34. Origen, however, claims he received this interpretation from the ‘Elders’ in the faith who preceded him. 14 Campegius Vitringa (1659-1722), cit. Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 35. 15 G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980), pp. 160ff. 16 Ibid., p. 167. 1 2

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The Fables of Aesop (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), p. 45. Ibid., p. 41. 19 Ibid., p. 18. 20 ‘The Story of Ahikar’ 8.30 (Arabic version), repr. in R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 775. 21 Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom, p. 5. 22 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, p. 74. 23 Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 1976), p. 55. 24 Ibid., p. 199. 25 Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God. The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 154. 17 18

6 Reading the Parables Today However else we may categorize the parables, as Holy Scripture for instance, they and the Gospels in which they are found are also literature. They are a means by which their original narrator and those who repeated the stories communicated with groups of people in the past, and communicate with us today. While attention is often focused on the narrator and the narrative, we need to remember that listening or reading is not a passive activity. Readers bring their presuppositions, interests, limitations of intellect and imagination, and needs to any text. We can express this interrelationship as what is sometimes called the interpretative triangle: Narrator

Narrative

Audience

This formula reminds us as we read a parable that its narrator had intentions, conscious or not, in telling it. He or she spoke from a particular context, a particular mind-set, a specific culture. The narrative reflects some of this, and is the primary medium through which the narrator communicates. The audience bring its own expectations and experience to what it hears or reads to produce an understanding of the narrative and response to it.1 The extreme case in which audience response is critical is, of course, the riddle. Samson speaks: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat. Out of the strong came something sweet’.

and his saying is incomplete until the Philistine men of Timnah are able to give the answer (Judges 14). We recollect that the same word serves for ‘riddle’ and ‘parable’ in Hebrew. A riddle to which no sensible response is possible is a disconcerting contradiction, as Alice discovers in Lewis Carroll’s anarchic fantasy Alice in Wonderland, when not only can she

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find no answer to ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’, nor can the Mad Hatter who posed the riddle nor his friend the March Hare.2 When a parable is told, the relationship between the narrator and audience will usually be much wider than that created by the parable alone. For instance, Jesus and his audience may have an on-going history of controversy, of which a particular parable may only be a part. Or a parable may be told to disciples who already recognize the narrator as their Master and are committed to following him. For ease of typography, we shall refer in the rest of this chapter of an interpretative relationship pictured like this: Narrator

Narrative

Audience (Readers)

but with the understanding that the triangle is a more adequate expression. For nearly two millennia, Christians interpreted the parables in ways that almost ignored the first two elements of this relationship. They approached them almost entirely in the light of their own theories and needs. The intentions of Jesus and the nature of the parables were largely ignored. Readers and interpreters assumed that the parables were allegories within which spiritual truths and the dogmas of the Church were hidden in code. In an unselfconscious way, they were not aware that they were bringing their own audience concerns and presuppositions to the texts without proper checks as to the intentions of the teller, and the type of narrative with which they were dealing. I have already given examples of the kind of exposition this produced.3 In the last century, the great German scholar A. Jülicher began to correct this faulty approach. He believed that the very word ‘parable’ (from the Greek word parabole—a comparison) meant that these stories were explicatory in intent, and were used by Jesus to teach simple religious and moral truths, one to each story. He saw the necessity of taking seriously aspects of the first two parts of the interpretative relationship, namely the intention of the narrator and the nature of the narrative. However, he brought his own personal agenda to the parables without being very aware of it. Retrospectively, it is easy to criticise him for taking a Greek rather than Hebrew view of the nature of a parable, and also for assuming that his own religious interests and sensibilities must be identical with those of

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Jesus. In the century that followed, scientific historical study of the New Testament world and ethos enabled a truer picture to emerge of Jesus and his concerns. C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias in their exegesis of the parables both saw the centrality of the kingdom of God (or kingdom of heaven) in the concerns of Jesus, including the parables. However, critical study of the Gospels had shown that they cannot be assumed without question to give us the verbatim words of Jesus; what he said had been used by the early Church in its preaching, teaching and discipline for decades before being committed to writing, and at some stage translated into Greek. As a result, the settings and meanings given to parables in the Gospels might well not be original in the life of Jesus, and even the details of the stories could reflect later Christian interests. In consequence, much modern work on the parables could be called the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ approach. Though motivated by a love for the truth and a concern to allow Jesus to speak directly, it has unintentionally made interpretation of the parables very difficult. Before we can apply our interpretative formula, we need to refine all its elements. The Narrative must first be stripped of its later accretions and applications by the Gospel-writer in order to arrive at the original words of Jesus (or something as close as possible to them!). The Narrator must also be reconstructed, a first century Jewish Jesus untarnished by later doctrinal beliefs about him. And the original Audience, too, must be re-discovered, not necessarily the crowds, disciples, or opponents of which the Gospels tell us. We may then – it is said—hope to obtain the modified interpretative connection:

Jesus (as he really was)

Parable (in its original form)

Audience (people who really first heard it)

We are urged to try to work with this scheme to obtain the original meaning of the parable, and then to apply it to ourselves. It is perhaps not surprising that some more radical Biblical scholars like Rudolph Bultmann, have despaired of being able ever to ‘recover’ what they would

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regard as the ‘original’ form of some parables such as the Unjust Steward. I have already considered, in a previous chapter, the difficulties inherent in such a process. The evidence for reconstructions is limited, and arguments are necessarily circular, since virtually all we know about Jesus, about the Evangelists, the sources they used, their own particular interests, and the communities for which they wrote, is contained in the Gospels, and is only extracted by deduction from them. But even if we were able to accomplish the process, and accurately retrieve Jesus’ original words in the original setting in which he told them, there would still remain a problem for us, which is nicely expressed by David Buttrick: ....frequently, Biblical preaching has told a biblical story replete with oodles of biblical background, a ‘holy history,’ but has not permitted God to step out of the biblical world into human history. The God of biblical preaching has been a past-tense God of past-tense God-events whose past-tense truth (‘original meaning’) may be applied to the world, while God remains hidden within a gilt-edged book.4

In seeking to apply the interpretative relationship to the parables of Jesus, we not only have to try to come to terms with his intentions in any particular parable narrative, but also ask the general question of why he sometimes adopted this particular method of communicating. In using parables, Jesus chose a medium in which listener-response is of the essence. John Donahue draws attention to this characteristic: Parables are open-ended invitations waiting for a response. The parable is not effective until it is freely appropriated. The response of the reader completes the meaning of the parable. Parable is a form of religious discourse that appeals not only to the imagination or the joyous perception of paradox or surprise, but also to the most basic of human qualities, freedom. In couching his message in parable Jesus challenged people to a free response and risked rejection.5

The Gospel writers often show us the parables as part of a dialogue. They are told by Jesus in response to a question or a criticism. He invites people’s opinion at the beginning or at the end. Even when they are not

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specifically set into such a situation, they clearly invite a response from the audience. As Eta Linneman has written, Jesus, by compelling his listeners to a decision through telling a parable gives them the possibility of making a change of existence, of understanding themselves anew from the depths up, of achieving a ‘new life.’6

The parable is therefore not merely a coded message delivered by Jesus 2000 years ago to people in the first century Middle East. It is a story he released into the world to interact and continue to interact with anyone who has ears to hear: Their teaching may be fruitfully applied and re-applied to all sorts of new situations which were never contemplated at the time when they were spoken ... They are works of art, and any serious work of art has significance beyond its original intention. .... (C. H. Dodd).7

Perhaps Jesus’ original intention, then, was to deliver something openended! This was certainly the aim of another Eastern teacher, as recorded by Idries Shah: Someone complained to a Sufi sage that the stories which he gave out were interpreted in one way by some people, and in other ways by others. ‘That is precisely their value,’ he said; ‘surely you would not think much of even a cup out of which you could drink milk but not water, or a plate from which you could eat meat but not fruit? A cup and a plate are limited containers. How much more capable should language be to provide nutrition? The question is not ‘How many ways can I understand this, and why can I not see it in only one way?’ The question is rather, ‘Can this individual profit from what he is finding in the tales?’8

This characteristic of parables is sometimes called their ‘hermeneutic potential’. They have the inherent capacity to interact with different hearers in different times with different results, which can never be predicted or limited. The present writer can testify to the power of the parable of the Prodigal Son in his thinking and action when in the thick of family problems. Who is to say that so powerful a story about family relation-

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ships was not intended by its teller so to be used? This obvious truth about parables was very well understood by Matthew, Mark and Luke when they handed on these stories in the common language of the ancient world a generation or so after Jesus. They did not do this out of antiquarian interest, but because they believed the parables continued to be relevant. They provided contexts, original or invented, for the parables, in accordance with the way they understood the parable’s meaning and application. Indeed, Luke more than once explains Jesus’ intentions to make the relevance plain. For instance, the parable of the Unjust Judge is introduced by the words ‘Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up’ (Luke 18.1. NIV). When we take into account the fact that the parables are mediated to us by the Evangelists, we are brought to a second, more complex version of the interpretative connection. Now, the Evangelist is the Narrator; the Narrative consists of the whole story of how Jesus told a certain company of people a particular parable; the audience is the early Christian Church, or that part of it for which the particular evangelist wrote. Expressing this diagrammatically, we have: Narrator (evangelist)

Narrative (Jesus—parable—disciples, crowd)

Audience (early Church community)

Our whole original interpretative connection now forms the central portion of this complex version of the relationship between Narrator, Narrative and Audience! It may be helpful here to draw an analogy with visual arts. The most famous painting of the Last Supper is almost certainly that by Leonardo da Vinci. It seems to tell the historical story of Jesus eating the final meal with his disciples in the upper room on the night he was betrayed, and is so well known that it is almost normative in many people’s visualizing that event. More specifically, it catches the precise moment when he predicts that one of them will betray him, and each disciple is caught at the instant of asking ‘Is it I?’ Of course, the painting is not a historical

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reconstruction; it is an interpretation by the artist. The figures are clothed in renaissance costume in a classical building, most unlikely for a house in first century Jerusalem. They are sitting at table, not reclining, as was the Jewish custom. The only men present are the Twelve; the women disciples are missing—both highly unlikely interpretations of what really happened. When we look at the picture, we can admire da Vinci’s skill in colour, characterization, composition, and even analyse to some extent why the painting works as powerfully as it does. All the perspective lines of the picture come to a point at the right eye of Jesus, the geometry serving to make Jesus central in power and spiritual impact. To understand the picture fully, we also need to take account of its original location. It was commissioned for the end wall of the refectory in the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. As the monks ate their meals, they by implication occupied the long empty side of the table in da Vinci’s life-size mural. The painter reminds them that they are eating and drinking in the presence of Christ, and like the first followers, they too are called to discipleship and are prone to betrayal. Thus, we need to take a multi-faceted approach to the picture. There is at its heart an event in the life of Jesus, which is told with the skill and presumptions of the artist. But the artist, too, is making his own points in addressing the first intended viewers of the painting. Whatever its historical basis, whatever it meant to the artist and to those who commissioned it, we in our day must make our own response and allow the picture to speak to us. We need to bring a comparable multi-faceted approach to Gospel accounts of the parables. In trying to make use of the complex version of the interpretative relationship, we are on somewhat more secure ground than in the attempt to reconstruct Jesus’ original words in their original context, since at least the central portion (Narrative) is the text of the Gospel before us as it stands. However, reconstructing the Evangelists’ intentions and the situation of their first readers/hearers, to fill in accurately the Narrator and the Audience, can only be a matter of probability or possibility, and never of certainty. ‘Redaction criticism’, that is, discerning the theology of the Gospel-writers and their motivations from the way they use and present the material in their Gospels, is not a precise science. It depends on personal judgements concerning things such as vocabulary, linguistic matters and stylistic questions. It also depends crit-

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ically on hypotheses and theories about the sources of the Gospels. For instance, our judgement of Luke’s standards and practice as an author must vary greatly according to our beliefs about his sources. The standard theory holds that Luke wrote from at least three sources, each with roots in authentic tradition about Jesus, namely Mark’s Gospel, a now lost written work largely consisting of collected teaching of Jesus (‘Q’, which was also used by Matthew), and his own individual source (‘L’). If this theory is true, then we would probably assess Luke as a careful and relatively faithful writer. Michael Goulder, however, holds that there was no ‘Q’ and no ‘L’ and that Luke was totally dependent on Mark and Matthew.9 If this is so, it follows that all ‘L’ material, including the birth and infancy narratives, parables such as the Good Samaritan and Prodigal Son, and the resurrection narrative of the road to Emmaus, was composed by Luke, by imaginatively expanding hints in Matthew and Mark. If this theory is true, then much of Luke’s Gospel is by our standards fiction composed to illustrate or elaborate theological truth as Luke saw it. Our assessment of Luke as an author and theologian would be vastly different in this case from what it would be if we hold the standard theory. Goulder’s views may be extreme, his case is not proven, and he has convinced very few other scholars of the truth of his position. Nevertheless, his proposal shows the impossibility of confident conclusions about the methods and motives of the Gospel writers. In trying to discover the original communities for which the Gospels were written, we are again in danger of circular arguments. Luke’s Gospel contains much about the correct use of riches. From this we deduce that he was writing for a Christian community with a substantial number of rich people in it. So he wrote a Gospel with much material about the proper use of riches! Maybe it was so, but maybe Luke had a personal interest in riches, or maybe Jesus had a great deal to say on this topic, and Luke faithfully reports it. Even the assumption that the Gospels were intended for a limited circulation in a single church or area, and not offered by intention to the whole Church from the time of their composition, seems questionable. They are ‘Gospels’, expressions of the good news, which Matthew clearly understood was for all people in all times and places (Matt 28.18-20) and doubtless saw his book as part of the process of world proclamation. Luke too, believed that the disciples were

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witnesses to Jesus, and no doubt believed that by writing he was helping to spread their testimony to the ends of the earth (Acts 1.8; Luke 1.1-3), in accordance with divine intentions. When John opens his gospel with deliberate echoes of Genesis 1, it seems at least plausible that he saw his book as in the succession of Holy Scripture and intended others to concur. It may be that the other Gospel writers would have shared similar beliefs or hopes about their work. Thus, there are uncertainties about two of the parts of our interpretative connection, and as in our first application of it, we are wise to sit loose to over-confident judgements on the parables’ meanings to those who first read the Gospels. In case the reader thinks that what we have said so far is too negative and pessimistic, it is instructive to see the different conclusions which different scholars come to about the meaning of a single relatively straightforward parable, the Seed Growing Secretly. They all conscientiously try to reconstruct the original meaning of the parable, and/or its meaning for the Evangelist and his first readers. Most of these are abstracted from Herman Hendrickx’s study, The Parables of Jesus.10 • A. Jülicher: the progressive and irresistible growth of the kingdom in the world; • A. Schweitzer: the expectation of God’s final intervention in history; • C. H. Dodd: God’s final harvest is already happening in Jesus; • J. Jeremias: the contrast between the patient waiting of the farmer, and his final reward at harvest, is a lesson for disciples who are disturbed by Jesus’ unimpressive activity; • N. Dahl: as Jeremias, but adding that the sowing and growing represents Jesus’ ministry, while the harvest signifies the Church; • R. Schnackenburg: the passivity of the farmer highlights his lack of contribution, so God alone brings his kingdom which is not discernible in history, and cannot be hastened by human activity; • J. Gnilka: the harvest is the outstanding feature, but human beings occupy the central stage; • E. Fuchs: the core message is the freedom of those who accept and share Jesus’ certainty that the future belongs to God;

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• H. Kahlefeld: the sower of God’s word is freed from care for the growth of the seed, because the intrinsic power of God’s word is irresistible; • A. Ambrozic: the coming of the Kingdom is irresistible and totally independent of human effort; the parable is an appeal to submit to the only way in which God is setting up his kingdom, that is, through Jesus; • W. G. Kümmel: the central point of the parable is the lack of interference from the farmer, so its point is the certainty of the harvest; • J. Dupont: the parable focuses on the sower, and the contrast between his long inactivity and intense activity. He symbolizes God in the period of apparent inactivity between John the Baptist’s message of judgement and harvest, and its arrival; • J. Crossan: the parable expresses the personal religious experience of Jesus; • H. Hendrickx: originally, the farmer represents God, and so the parable is addressed to people during the ministry of Jesus who were disappointed that he was not doing more. In Mark, it is applied to the time of the church, awaiting God’s final judgement. From other writers and commentators, we can add: • A. M. Hunter: the parable is a call to share the faith of Jesus, have patience, and leave the final issue to God. Seed has been sown, and there is a new energy in the world;11 • J. D. Donahue: Jesus calls people to be aware that when God’s time (harvest) interlocks with their everyday world, then is the moment for action!12 • D. Wenham: the parable answers the question why Jesus does not do more, why he seems so unsuccessful. Jesus inaugurates the kingdom (sowing) and will bring the process to completion (harvest); he does not have total control, in the intervening time, as things must be left alone according to God’s plans.13 The ordinary reader or preacher does not have the time, the expertise or personal access to all the wealth of material necessary for the first two applications of the interpretative connection, but perhaps need not worry too much, given the impossibility of definite conclusions and consequent

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lack of scholarly agreement. I am not seeking to dismiss scholarly work on the New Testament as an irrelevant waste of time. Since the parables originate in a time, culture and language foreign to us, historical criticism of language and cultural and religious context is never-ending and always likely to be fruitful. By reading the specialist books and commentaries by those who have worked hard at understanding the original words and setting of Jesus’ ministry, and the characteristics of the individual evangelists, the discerning reader is able to pick up ideas, background, possibilities, hints, clues, as to the meaning of the parables and their application. Some boundaries of incorrect interpretation for a given parable may well be mapped out. We may even come to the conclusion that there is a strong probability about some aspects of a parable’s place in the ministry of Jesus, or its effect on the audience of a Gospel writer. But in all this, each reader must take personal responsibility for the interpretative connection in the following form: Narrator (Jesus and/or Evangelist)

Narrative (Gospel text(s))

Audience (Self/Christian community now)

In line with this process, Norman Perrin speaks of the necessity for a post-critical or ‘second’ naivety. He rightly urges that ‘There is a sense in which after we have learned all that we can about a text with the aid of our critical tools, we have to allow that text to address us once more as a text.’14 So we now turn to provide some guidelines on how to allow the parable texts to address us, how to read them intelligently and sympathetically, how to try to be ‘ideal readers’. Our aim must be to take each element of the interpretative relationship very seriously. We try to be aware of the outlook, culture, interests, presuppositions and problems of the narrator, whether Jesus or the Evangelists, openly recognising that we only hear Jesus through them, and cannot in the last resort separate them. For whatever reason, Jesus unlike Mohammed, did not write or dictate a book personally. He entrusted his message to human witnesses, and this mediated message we must use. Here we must be guided by the commentators and experts, as also in trying to be sensitive to the characteristics of

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the original audience, again both the contemporaries of Jesus, and the Christian Church later in the first century. We also need to try to be aware of ourselves as audience. There is no way that the parables can be written on us, as though we were a blank sheet of paper. We have our presuppositions, our perceptions, the unconscious limits we set on meaning, because we are children of our time and our culture. However, we can continually endeavour to correct and improve and make allowances for the defects and myopia in our vision, and the colouring of the view caused by the tinting of the spectacles of our culture. Most of all, we can take the narratives themselves very seriously, and respond to them in all their subtlety, nuances and detail. We can try to pick up the hints and signals about motive and characterization, try to be aware of allusions and symbolism and cross-references to the Old Testament, try to attune our ears to echoes of themes from other parts of the Gospels. We can endeavour to test out sensitively how far a particular parable functions as an allegory. It is wise to devote our primary attention to the narratives, looking within them for evidence concerning the intention or multiple intentions of their teller. Sometimes, the narrator himself appears in the narrative, incognito. When he explains the motivation of a character by revealing to us his inner thoughts in soliloquy, for instance, he helps us to reach his understanding of the meaning of the story. I have emphasized how damaging is the common assumption that there is only one comparison point in each parable. Such an assumption, which seems to be totally without good justification, over-simplifies the interpretative relationship to looking for one simple meaning, and making one simple application during Jesus’ ministry. In concentrating on the narrative, the insights and techniques of literary critics are immensely revealing and stimulating. By considering the parable, and perhaps also its Gospel setting, as a work of art, an aesthetic object, we can hear God speaking to us the more clearly. In the early years of Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens was deeply concerned at the appalling poverty of many in England. He contemplated writing a pamphlet with a direct message ‘An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.’ Fortunately for the world, and probably for many poor men’s children, he wrote instead his tale A Christmas Carol. It would be crass to try to reduce this story to a simple ethical point. It is an aesthetic object, a work

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of art, which has influenced attitudes to charity and to the way Christmas is celebrated, probably beyond anything Dickens could have contemplated, while giving great delight and lingering in the minds of all who have heard it or read it, or seen it performed. Taking parables in a comparable way, with a wide-ranging and open approach, seems to be more helpful than attempting to lay down a fixed ‘meaning’ for examples of an art form whose essence perhaps lies in its ‘elasticity’ or ‘polyvalency’. While being as honest and faithful as we can to where the parable comes from, as we read it, we nevertheless seek to enter into present creative dialogue with a subtle story. Jesus was perfectly capable of expressing truth directly, simply and propositionally, for instance, in his ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (Matthew 22.21). We are therefore being perverse if we reject his chosen medium of the parable, and replace it with a ‘message’ we have extracted, and to which we respond. In his stories, he appeals to our imagination and our creativity, and leaves us with the responsibility for interpretation and application. Michael Walker writes of the parables, particularly as guides to Christian behaviour: The parables tell us just how much is left to our creativity…. The parables remind us that the teaching of Christ has to be earthed in the untidy world of human affairs. They are stories that illustrate ways in which the commandments of Jesus are to become a part of our own story. To be faithful to Jesus, our obedience must be stimulated by our imagination; it is a matter of moral and spiritual artistry as much as conformity….. Living the Christian life is far more than doing what we are told. It is envisaging the kingdom of God in the world and taking risks in making its coming possible..... The parable is a story, a drama in which we have to learn to cast our own lives. It provides a key to our own story, and a way of placing ourselves in the unfolding story of Christ’s work within the world. It reminds us that obedience is creative and risky.15

In spite of all the exciting insights into the parables which have been and are being developed by a more open and wide-ranging approach, there are still writers who try to reduce them to a simple ethical or doctrinal proposition. For instance, David Wenham writes:

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The view that the parables are works of art which have a life of their own and which can be understood in any number of ways independent of their original meaning must be rejected. The authority of the parables lies for the Christian in the fact that they are parables deriving from Jesus, not in their value as works of art, and the Christian interpreter must start from Jesus’ intended meaning.16

With Wenham, I do not believe that parables can be ‘isolated’ and given ‘any meaning’; nor, I suspect, do many commentators on them. They must be understood in the interpretative relation, taking full account of the fact that Jesus and the Evangelists were their narrators. They must also be treated seriously as narratives. They have their own consistency and internal logic. These two factors immediately set limits upon how they can legitimately be received by any audience. But the twofold assumption that there is just one ‘original meaning’ which we can recover, and that this is also ‘Jesus’ intended meaning’ is very questionable. In addition, by his false dichotomy between ‘parables deriving from Jesus’ and ‘their value as works of art’, Wenham seems to show an unnecessary fear of aesthetics and a distrust of creativity and freedom in the mind of the reader. The parables are both ‘from Jesus’ and ‘works of art’, and need to be received as such. Any attempt to limit the parables to Jesus’ intended original meaning ignores something very important about art. Creative writers do not always perceive the full significance of what they have written; they not infrequently say more than they know. J. M. Barrie, for example, wrote his masterpiece Peter Pan about the lost boy who would not grow up. As we read it or watch a performance with a knowledge of Barrie’s life and of psychology, we can see him wrestling with elements of his own history and psyche. At one level, the story was inspired by his friendships with the family of five Llewellyn Davies brothers, one of whom was called Peter. He met them originally, befriended them and played with them in Kensington Gardens, making up adventure stories for them. The younger brothers he actually adopted when both their parents tragically died with cancer. But his own childhood experience of competing unsuccessfully for his mother’s affections against the memory of an older brother who died at the age of thirteen in a skating accident provides some of the

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emotional energy of the creation. In consequence of his childhood problems, he himself in many ways never managed to grow up emotionally and mentally, but remained a boy. His marriage was unhappy and he was never able to father the son he longed for.17 Was Peter Pan an amalgam of the Llewellyn Davies boys, Barrie himself, his dead older brother, or the son he never begot? Perhaps this probable hidden emotional agenda explains why Peter Pan, like much other classic children’s literature, intrigues adults while being disturbing. And why does Pan, the half-goat god of pastures, forests, flocks and herds, lustful symbol of fertility and of universal deity, come to donate Peter’s surname? On the other hand, some would see it simply as a delightful fantasy for the amusement of children, as interpreted in the animated film by Walt Disney. But as the years passed, Barrie himself came to understand more deeply what he had created. He wrote in 1908: Of Peter you must make what you will. Perhaps he was a little boy who died young, and this is how the author conceived his subsequent adventures. Perhaps he was a boy who was never born at all—a boy whom some people wished for, but who never came. It may be that those people hear him at the window more clearly than children do. He is very elusive. As he says of himself, ‘I am youth, I am joy, I am the little bird that has broken out of the egg.’ And that is what he means to be for ever and ever; the one thing he is afraid of is to grow up, and learn solemn things, and be a man.18

I certainly do not mean, of course, to make any comparisons between Barrie and Jesus beyond one single point, that they were both creative story tellers. Since Jesus, the Son of God, was also fully human, with a human mind, subject to the limits of a human brain, there is no reason why his parables too should not have meanings deeper than he knew consciously. Whatever else they may be, they are the creations of a consummate artist, and it is well for us to leave mental space for the possibility that they go beyond Jesus of Nazareth’s deliberate intentions. Not only was he gifted with artistic creativity, which brings great potential for communication, but he was speaking and ministering in the power of the Holy Spirit (Luke 4.14) when he told his stories. We know that they

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spoke powerfully to at least some of those who first heard them. They remembered them, re-told them, looked for meaning and guidance in them in new situations and contexts. There seems to be no reason why the Spirit should not continue to use these same parables in new ways. Part of the Spirit’s ministry is to take what belongs to Jesus and make it known to his disciples and so to lead them into further truth than they could receive during the earthly life of Jesus (John 16.14). There will not be any contradiction with their teller’s original intentions, of course, but in living interaction with new generations in different cultures and circumstances, the Spirit speaks afresh to those who have ears to hear. Notes to Chapter 6 [Ed. So-called ‘reader-response theory’ has been developed in a moderate way by, for example, Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Robert Funk, Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God, has applied similar insights to the parables of Jesus.] 2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), ch. 7. 3 See above, p. 69. 4 David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (London: SCM Press, 1987), p. 18. 5 John D. Donahue, ‘New Testament Thought’ in New Jerome Bible Commentary, pp. 1364ff. 6 Eta Linneman, Jesus of the Parables (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 30-33. 7 C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 195. 8 Idries Shah, Thinkers of the East (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 53. 9 Goulder, Luke. A New Paradigm, Vol. 1, pp. 22-71 (see esp. pp. 22-26, 6971). 10 Herman Hendrickx, The Parables of Jesus, Revised Edition (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), pp. 20ff. 11 Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 45. 12 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, pp. 35-6. 13 David Wenham, The Parables of Jesus. Pictures of Revolution (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), pp. 50-3. 1

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Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom, p. 155ff. Michael Walker, The God of our Journey (London: Marshall Pickering, 1989), pp. 68ff. 16 Wenham, The Parables of Jesus, pp. 235ff. 17 The full story can be read in Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (London: Constable, 1979). 18 J.M. Barrie, Programme Note for an English Production of Peter Pan in Paris, 1908. Cit. Andrew Birkin, Introduction to Peter Pan (London: Folio Society, 1992), p. xxvii. 14

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7 A Method of Approaching the Parables My aim in this chapter is to try to systematize some of what I have already written about interpreting the parables, particularly in chapter 6, into a procedure for reading them, and I shall express this as a set of rules. I am not intending to set up a rigid system. The parables are so diverse that this would not be possible, even if it did not go against the nature of parables anyway, and so by ‘rules’ I mean guidelines, rather than something hard and fast. 1. Remove presuppositions The first rule in coming to the parables is to seek to remove our presuppositions about them. Many of us assume, wrongly, that we already know them perfectly well. In truth, we may well have overlooked some aspects of the texts, or allowed our perceptions unconsciously to be formed by memories of sermons, hymns and re-telling of the stories by parents, teachers, preachers and books down the years. For instance, Luke’s parable of the Lost Sheep is very short and simple. H.W. Baker alludes to it in a stanza of one of the best loved and best known Christian hymns, ‘The King of Love my shepherd is’: Perverse and foolish, oft I strayed, But yet in love he sought me And on his shoulder gently laid And home rejoicing brought me.

The author accurately picks up the picture of the sheep on the shepherd’s shoulder, and the theme of rejoicing at its recovery. However, in interpreting the parable, we need to be wary. The hymn makes a definite identification between the shepherd of the parable and Jesus, the Good Shepherd (John 10.11), and blames the sheep for getting lost, categorizing it as ‘perverse and foolish’. Luke 15.4 actually says: ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them’ (GNB). In the scripture, as in the companion parable of the Lost Coin, the owner seems to be responsi-

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ble for the loss, and this is not easy for us to hear if we assume that the shepherd is Jesus. Luke’s way of expressing it puts the emphasis on the shepherd and his ownership, and makes no mention of any blame to the sheep for its folly or wrongdoing in getting lost, in contradistinction to the hymn. Further, in the hymn, the shepherd’s rejoicing is extended throughout the journey home. In the Bible, the shepherd rejoices twice, once when he finds his sheep, and again in the company of his friends and neighbours when he has completed the arduous work of rescuing it. It is not only the content of the parables which we assume we know, but also their meaning or interpretation. When planning this book, I was speaking about it to an ordinary Christian couple in South London, who took for granted the allegorical interpretation of the Prodigal Son which dates back at least as far as Tertullian (160-220 CE), namely that the younger son represents the Christian, while the elder brother represents the Jew.1 Such a presupposition distances the parable from any immediate relevance to today’s readers. Similarly, we may have been given explanations of the parables as example stories for religious or moral behaviour, which miss their dynamic completely. There is a story for whose truth I cannot vouch, that a Sunday School teacher was explaining the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican to her class. She took it as an example story, and emphasized that it taught us how to pray without pride, and to be humble in God’s presence. However, she missed all its deeper meanings concerning grace, lack of judgementalism or even the wish to compare ourselves with others. At the end of her lesson, she invited the children to close their eyes, and led them in prayer thus: ‘Lord, we thank you that we are not like the Pharisee....’! One hidden way in which presuppositions are imported into the parables lies in their traditional titles. As Robert Farrar Capon says: ‘Despite our illusions of understanding him better than his first hearers did, we vindicate his chosen method by misnaming—and thus misunderstanding—even the most beloved and familiar parables. The Prodigal Son, for example, is not about a boy’s vices, it is about a father’s forgiveness. The Labourers in the Vineyard are by no means the central characters in the story; they are hardly more than stick-figures used by Jesus to rub his hearers’ noses in the outrageous grace of a vineyard owner who gives equal pay for unequal work.2

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For the sake of convenience, we have used traditional titles throughout this book. But, taking up Capon’s example of the Prodigal Son, our expectations of its meaning would be quite different if we called it ‘The Prodigal Father’ or ‘The Two Lost Sons’, both of which focus attention on different characters. Use of different possible titles indicates how the traditional title conveys a bias towards one character and one part of the story which can be quite arbitrary. 2. Read the text carefully The second rule is to read the text carefully, thinking about all that it says and does not say, trying to hear it as if for the first time. It may sound obvious, but it is vital to pay attention to what is written before attempting to discern ‘that which is written about’, the ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ of the passage, which we have been taught to assume is more important. For instance, when we read the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11-32), it is important to notice that the father divides his property between the two sons (v. 12), so that after his younger brother’s departure, the elder brother owns everything, as the father reminds him (v. 31). His complaint about not receiving a kid for a party (v. 29) is therefore unjust, since the whole flock belongs to him. In yearning for parties with his friends rather than with his family, he is shown as hankering after the lifestyle his younger brother actually took up! If we recollect this, and bear it in mind, then we may well empathize with him rather less, and see his character in a different light. 3. Analyse the plot and characters The third rule is to analyse the plot into scenes, and look for parallels, or contrasts, or reversals of fortune or expectations in the action. At the same time, we should examine the characters. Who are the principal movers in the plot, whose actions or decisions are pivotal in the progress of the story? Are the subsidiary characters important (the Priest and Levite in the Good Samaritan) or peripheral to the narrative (the thieves and the innkeeper)? Look for evidence of the ‘rule of two’ in elements, characters, or events which can be compared or contrasted, and for the ‘rule of three’ with three characters, or action repeated three times. Be aware of ‘end

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stress’ where the emphasis falls on the final character or event. Be particularly alert for the points where the parable loses touch with reality by the outrageous behaviour of a character or an unlikely twist in the plot. 4. Find the main comparison In the light of a careful reading of the main outline of the story, and assessment of the leading characters, we try to discern the central comparison, or cluster of comparisons. A.M. Hunter3 aptly quotes the advice of John Chrysostom (347-407 CE): Interpret the elements in the parables that are urgent and essential ... do not waste time on all the details ... seek out the scope for which the parable was designed ... and be not overbusy with the rest.

Following this guidance is not always straightforward! For instance, consider the parable of the Unjust Judge or the Persistent (Importunate) Widow (Luke 18.1-7). The very use of two different titles immediately alerts us to alternative central comparisons, and these are both found in Luke’s Gospel. Luke introduces the parable as an encouragement to continual prayer—the widow is an example to us not to give up. However, the words of Jesus following the parable seem to point to the judge as the central comparison. If even an unjust judge can decide to act in favour of a helpless widow, how much more will God himself bring justice for his people? If even the judge cannot afford to let a widow besmirch his reputation by having the woman spread around his failure to right her wrong, how much more must God guard his ‘name’ or his reputation?4 It is not always easy to decide how significant are some of the less central elements of the story. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero uses oil and wine to treat the injured man’s wounds. The inclusion of such detail may be for the sake of realism, though in that case, they are mentioned in reverse order. Medical practice at the time would have used wine to clean the wounds, followed by oil to soothe (and not an impractical mixture, like a kind of vinaigrette!) Their mention may be to heighten our perception of the Samaritan’s compassion and the costliness of his neighbourly action in rescuing the man. On the other hand, since Jeru-

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salem and the two Temple officiants have already been mentioned, these details may be a symbolic reference to two regular elements of the Temple sacrificial cult. Oil and wine were both offered in sacrifice, so the Samaritan is offering true worship by pouring his libations on the wounds of an injured traveller. By contrast, the religious worship of the Priest and Levite is empty and hypocritical. Perhaps there is an allusion to the triennial tithe demanded by the Law for the benefit of ‘the Levites .... and the aliens...’ (Deuteronomy 14.28ff) of which oil and wine form two of the three components. Perhaps again the oil and wine, together with other details like naked victim, Samaritan, donkey and Jericho, serve to signal links with the story of the ultimately repentant and compassionate Samaritans in 2 Chronicles 28.5-15 (especially v15). Probably we should not try to choose between these possibilities, but live with them all. 5. Be alert for the unexpected In looking for the main comparison, we should pay particular attention to the unlikely aspects of a parable. As Étienne Trocmé has written: If the behaviour of the persons in the parables sometimes takes an unexpected or even a bizarre turn, the reason is that God has begun to enter the world. His action amongst men can be perceived wherever abnormal behaviour is inspired by a single-minded passion: in a merchant who sells all for one pearl, in the gardener who lavishes toil upon the fruitless fig tree, in the father who loses his head at the return of the prodigal, in the king who remits enormous debts to his debtors….5

More briefly, Dan Via has put it like this: ‘The element of the surprising and the extraordinary within them suggests the divine dimension.’6 It is not always easy to see, however, when behaviour is extraordinary. For instance, the parables which concern monstrous debts and generous remission by lenders may not be as unrealistic in first century CE Jewish culture as they seem to us in twentieth century Britain. Herod the Great had reduced many Galilaean peasants to virtual slavery by his social and economic policies. He had crippled people with excessive taxes, and expropriated their property in lieu. To avoid this, peasants

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would borrow from the usurer (who often cooperated closely with the King’s representative or the tax collector), offering their land as security. However, this only delayed the evil day, and the land soon came into the possession of the usurer, and the peasant became a sharecropper or servant. His unpaid debts continued to pile up to astronomic levels, and at some point, the sharecropper would be sold together with his family and all his possessions in order to recoup the debts. The amount of the debts represented the effect of monstrous compound interest rates, rather than any money really lost. Although total remission of debts may seem unlikely behaviour to us, the Old Testament idea of the Year of Jubilee does call for just this, and a Jubilee Year remission of a sharecroppers’ ‘theoretical’ debt may lie behind the parable of the two debtors (Matthew 18.23ff). In many cases, these iniquitous economic arrangements were administered by stewards for absentee landlords. Perhaps the parable of the Unjust Steward reflects such a situation—a man guilty not only of extortion from the sharecroppers, but also defrauding his master. His only course of action is to declare a Jubilee for his poor clients, probably losing his own profit, but hopefully winning friends among his own fellow-countrymen and class. 6. Notice the details We should be observant for the details in the telling of the story. See how a flurry of verbs describes the Good Samaritan—‘He saw… he took pity… he went... he bandaged… he poured... he put him on his own donkey… he brought him... he took care—(Luke 10.35ff. NIV) and see how this conveys a dramatic sense of compassionate effort. Notice how the Pharisee’s prayer, though directed to God, is totally egocentric with its succession of ‘I..’ following an ‘I thank you...’ (Luke 18:11). We should try to decide whether detail is just designed to make the parable more vivid, to heighten emotion, to make a character’s personality more clear, or is necessary to further the narrative. Alternatively, the details may be symbolic, and would have been understood to be so by Jesus, the Gospel writers and the first hearers, or they may point to a secondary theme or meaning within the larger story. 7. Be aware of the cultural setting

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We should be as sensitive as possible to the cultural setting of the parables. Unlike the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, elderly oriental gentlemen do not lose their public dignity by running: ‘You can tell a man by his looks and recognize good sense at first sight. A man’s clothes, and the way he laughs, and his gait, reveal his character’ (Ecclesiasticus 19.29-30. GNB). Similarly, when the elder brother refuses to enter the feast, he is thereby publicly insulting and quarrelling with his father (cf. Esther 1.12). However, beware of importing information which changes the drift of a parable. For instance, William Barclay, following Jeremias, suggests that the lost coin may have been especially important to the woman either to keep her and her family from starvation, or because it formed part of a head-dress worn by married women, consisting of ten coins on a silver chain, and almost with the same sentimental value as a wedding ring.7 Neither suggestion is needed or implied in any way by the text. The first suggestion is anyway illogical. She still had nine coins between herself and destitution without finding the lost one. The second suggestion detracts from the parable’s central paradoxical element, namely so much effort and so much joy for so insignificant an object—an indicator of God’s love and Jesus’ effort for God’s ‘worthless’ (in the eyes of the Pharisees) lost children. Similarly, the parable of the Unjust Steward is very often interpreted in ways which depend on more knowledge of the steward’s transactions and their legality than the parable gives, arguing that Jesus and his original hearers would have taken matters concerning stewards and their powers for granted. Sometimes, cultural presuppositions can radically alter the potential meaning of a parable. For instance, consider the Lost Sheep. As the text stands, the shepherd was taking a mighty risk in ‘abandoning’ or ‘leaving behind’ the vast majority of his flock on the mountains, or in the desert, to look for one lost animal. If Jesus and his hearers on cultural grounds assumed that the shepherd made arrangements for the safety of the ninety nine first, (as did Ira Sankey in his hymn ‘There were ninety and nine that safely lay in the shelter of the fold’) or assumed that he was only one of an extended family team caring for the flock, so that others would look after them in his absence, then the element of risk disappears. Different

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experts come to different conclusions, but it is safest to stay with the text as it stands. The parables will sometimes speak more freshly to us if we re-tell them with a setting in our modern world, where we are directly familiar with the culture. J.D. Crossan8 brings home tellingly both the story of the Good Samaritan, and the shock to its first audience when told by Jesus to a company of Jews, by re-locating it in contemporary Ulster. A Roman Catholic priest there one Sunday tells his flock of how a Catholic man from the Falls Road lies wounded after a fight. A Roman Catholic priest passes by without stopping, and so does a member of the I.R.A. Finally, a Protestant U.V.F. member stops and takes him to hospital.9 In such a setting, the congregation would not hear the parable saying to them ‘Help those in need’ or even ‘Love your enemy’. The first message is too weak for such a dramatic and shocking story. The second message could have been delivered effectively by a story which put the enemy in the position of needing help, not of giving it. Such a re-telling helps us to see the Good Samaritan for what it is, a true parable, with a reversal of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stereotyping and a radical shift in the ideas of enemy and neighbour, and not merely a tame example story. 8. Look for Old Testament references We should notice allusions to the Old Testament and aspects from an Old Testament background. These may be allegorical, as in the several parables concerning vineyards signifying God’s people; symbolical, as in the use of harvest as a sign of God’s final judgement; or allusive, as for instance with the reference to the story of Joseph and his Brothers (Genesis 37-48) which lies behind the Prodigal Son. In the last case there are many details in common—a younger brother in a distant country, a famine, unsubstantiated accusation of sexual immorality, a robe and ring (Gen 41.42) being just a few. But at a narrative level, a major theme of the Joseph saga concerns sibling rivalry. Judah is perhaps the true hero, because of the far more significant future of his tribe within the history of God’s people than the tribes of Joseph—an ironic theme within a narrative where Joseph seems to end with the power and glory! During the course of the story, Judah overcomes his jealousy of Joseph and

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Benjamin. At the beginning, this led him to join with his brothers in murderous hostility to Joseph. By the end of the narrative, he understands and accepts his father Jacob’s weakness in loving the younger brothers unfairly, and even offers himself as a hostage slave to protect his aged indulgent father’s feelings (Gen 44.18ff), or further, even to save his life. The elder brother in the parable of Jesus has not reached such big-hearted maturity, and we do not know whether like Judah, Joseph’s elder brother, he will in the end set aside his own feelings out of love and concern for his father. It can happen that there is tension between the possible Old Testament allusions, and the current cultural allusions. For instance, the figure of the shepherd has limited but significant Old Testament background. David, the king after God’s heart (1 Samuel 13.14), began life as a shepherd. The metaphor is used rather rarely of God, though this tends to be overlooked because it does occur in well-known passages such as Psalm 23 and Ezekiel 34. However, by the time of Jesus, Jews generally were no longer nomadic people but lived in cities or engaged in settled agriculture or viniculture, and shepherds were disdained as marginal, their occupation being forbidden to pious Jews, and virtually equated with thieves: A man should not teach his son to be an ass-driver or a camel-driver, or a barber or a sailor, or a herdsman or a shopkeeper, for their craft is the craft of robbers (Mishnah Qidd 4.14).

The Rabbis solved the problem of how so despised a person as a shepherd could be a figure for God in places like Psalm 23 by deferring to the wisdom of people like David in previous ages. Because of the much-loved figure of Jesus as Good Shepherd, Christian interpreters tend to assume that the shepherd in the Lost Sheep is a figure of God or his representative. But is that how Jesus and his hearers would have intended and heard it? Or is the shepherd deliberately intended as an ambiguous image? 9. Listen for echoes from elsewhere in the Gospels We should try to be aware of echoes and overtones of themes in other parts of the Gospels. For instance, why are there five wise women (not virgins!) in Matthew’s parable (25.1-12)? Is this perhaps a reference to the

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five women who behaved resourcefully, if questionably and as a result played a critical part in the genealogy, and very existence, of Jesus— namely Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary (Matthew 1.1-16)? It does not hurt to let our imaginations run riot, even if at the end we conclude that perhaps we are being too clever or fanciful by half. For instance, it is very easy to see similarities between the younger brother in the Prodigal Son, and Jesus himself. Luke alone tells this parable, and also the story of how Jesus as a twelve-year old boy is lost, and found ‘in his Father’s house’ (Lk 2.49). Jesus travels a long way from his Father’s house in heaven, and in the opinion of the Pharisees, ‘wastes his living’ (his own and the father’s) in riotous parties with sinners. He, too, ends up friendless and alone; for him it is on the cross, before arising again. The extravagant language of the father in the parable about a son ‘who was dead, but is now alive’ is literally true of Jesus, and could be imagined on the lips of God the Father. The symbol of the banquet in the Father’s house with the Son as principal guest, a great celebration of forgiveness and new life, seems to point to the Lord’s Supper as anticipation of the Feast in the Kingdom. A contemporary Easter hymn, by David Turner, has a third verse about the younger brother: Come, sing of the son who struck out on his own, but came to his senses when lost and alone; and sing of the father’s delight to forgive, for he who was dead is back home and alive.9

Although clearly about the Prodigal Son, I found myself wanting to sing the second two lines of the stanza as applying to Jesus! And yet, there are obvious difficulties in making any such identification between Jesus and the Prodigal Son. The Elder Brother does not fit in, and Jesus seeks forgiveness for his friends and enemies (Luke 23.34), and not for himself. I struggled with the problem for a considerable time, unable to see a way through, yet unwilling to dismiss it totally. I was both excited and relieved to come across the following passage in The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen:

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... Jesus became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to His Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God..... Jesus is the prodigal son of the prodigal Father who gave away everything the Father had entrusted to him so that I could become like him and return with him to his Father’s house.11

Nouwen also suggests that Jesus is the true Elder brother, not resentful in his obedience, and only too ready to acknowledge and identify with his brothers who wish to return to the Father, and to rejoice with the Father when they do. In his treatment of the same parable, Robert Farrar Capon comes up with a very provocative idea: Indeed, as far as I am concerned, the fatted calf is actually the Christfigure in this parable. Consider. What does a fatted calf do? It stands around in its stall with one purpose in life: to drop dead at a moment’s notice in order that people can have a party. If that doesn’t sound like the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world—who dies in Jesus and in all our deaths and who comes finally to the Supper of the Lamb as the pièce de resistance of his own wedding party—I don’t know what does. The fatted calf proclaims that the party is what the father’s house is all about, just as Jesus the dead and risen Bridegroom proclaims that an eternal bash is what the universe is all about. Creation is not ultimately about religion, or spirituality, or morality, or reconciliation, or any other solemn subject; it’s about God having a good time and just itching to share it.12

Capon may be writing ‘tongue-in-cheek’. Perhaps he is playing the ‘Holy Fool’ and mocking all the solemn, unsmiling exegesis that goes on in commentaries and pulpits. Certainly, flights of fancy such as his, and on a less playful level, the comparisons between Jesus and the younger brother which I and others have detected, cannot be set forth as ‘the meaning’ of the parable. If we allowed them, we would find ourselves making a rapid reversion to the kind of undisciplined allegorical interpretations so beloved of Origen and Augustine, which are so stultifying and out of

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touch with the reality of the parables. Perhaps though, we need to avoid the opposite danger, of keeping everything under the control of our minds and of our scrupulous historical reconstructions. Like riddles, parables need our inventiveness, our playfulness, our sense of humour as well as our minds, our emotions and our passions, if we are to do them full justice. 10. Try to discern the intentions of the narrator Having tried to come to an honest understanding of the text, the ideal reader next attempts to consider the first part of the interpretative relation (as described in the previous chapter), namely, the intentions of the narrator. For the Christian, this is of course both Jesus and the Gospel writer. We take note of the intentions and understanding of the Evangelists, which are disclosed not only in direct statements of the purpose of the parable, but also by where it comes in their presentation of the story of Jesus, and why. For instance, most of Luke’s material on discipleship is set in the context of the long journey to Jerusalem, via Jericho, taken by Jesus and his followers. For Luke, who in the Book of Acts calls Christianity ‘The Way’, this journey seems to be symbolical of Christian faith. So when we find within this larger unit of material a parable, the Good Samaritan, also about a journey, also involving Jerusalem and Jericho, then we need to be alert to possible symbolic meaning. When we note that no other parable has a specific location (except the Pharisee and the Publican) and that the meaning of the parable as usually understood would work just as well on an unspecified journey, then we should look even more carefully. The language about the movement of the three potential helpers is varied. The Priest is ‘going down’ the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, that is, symbolically, he is travelling in the opposite way to Jesus. The Levite is doing likewise. However, the Samaritan is ‘journeying’. The word used here by Luke is unique to this verse, and is from the same root as the word translated ‘The Way’ (meaning Christianity) in Acts. Perhaps the Samaritan is travelling from Jericho to Jerusalem, the same direction as Jesus, and so Luke means us to see him as illustrating to us true discipleship? This parable is paired with the story of Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha

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in which, typically in Luke, Mary represents a quieter norm of discipleship. Mary loves the Lord with all her heart, her soul and her mind, while the Samaritan loves his neighbour as himself. The precise location of this parable is often taken simply to indicate realism. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notoriously dangerous, and travellers were liable to be under threat from thieves until very recent times. I have heard preachers follow William Barclay in suggesting that the traveller was foolhardy to travel alone, and draw a ‘spiritual’ lesson, that God helps us even if it is our own fault that we are in trouble.13 However, if this is so, there are four foolhardy characters in the story, perhaps providing motivation for the reluctance of the Priest and Levite to stop and help. However, a foolhardy Samaritan hero seems unlikely, unless he is a figure of Christ, risking everything to be Saviour. On the whole, given Luke’s regular theological use of geography, reference to the ‘way’ of discipleship seems the more likely reason for a location being given. Behind and through the words of Matthew, Mark or Luke, the Christian also tries to hear the voice of Jesus: this will be not only the voice of Jesus in the Holy Land to disciples, to crowds, to individuals, to enemies, in argument, persuasion or rebuke, but also the voice of the Risen Lord, the head of the Church, today, as he continues to address us. Sometimes, we hear Christ by experimenting with placing him or God the Father as one, or more than one, character in the parable. When I am the battered, helpless and hopeless wounded traveller, then Christ comes to me with all the compassion of the Samaritan. When I meet one of the poor, the maimed, the blind or the lame, during my travelling, I see Christ making mute appeal to me as the wounded traveller lying at the roadside. 11. Use empathy Finally, we come to the last aspect of the interpretative relation: me as the hearer, or perhaps, the Christian Church of which I am part. One helpful approach is to empathize with the principal characters. Feel the disappointed expectations and resentments of the vineyard workers who did a hard day’s work (Matt 20:1-16); share the delight and joy and relief of those who only worked an hour yet went home to their families with a

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day’s pay; think about the owner’s pain on being the subject of criticism because of his compassion. Through these stories, Jesus continues to enter into dialogue with us. He will question our understanding of God and the limits we put on his compassion, his forgiveness, his expectations of us. He will question our understanding of how and where he is at work in our world and our history as Creator, law-giver and judge. He will question the reality or depth of our faith in him and his methods and ways. He will question our fearful approach to life and love, and our selfish, judgmental attitudes to other people. He will challenge our sense of values, our attitudes to wealth, the safe limits we place on compassion and service. Even if the Good Samaritan were only an example story, it is so extreme that it is a very frightening example. The Samaritan put his own life at risk; he has lost at least a day’s work, spending it instead on a hot and uncomfortable journey (by implication, he plays the role of the servant, leading the donkey on which the wounded man rides); he has paid out a sum equal to a casual labourer’s pay for two days and then ‘written a blank cheque’ against future costs to protect the injured traveller against possible imprisonment as a debtor by the innkeeper; and all this is to help a total stranger who may not even have survived his injuries for long, or may not even have been grateful. Some Jews of the time would have probably preferred death to being indebted to a hated Samaritan. This parable is not about cosy charity from a comfortable surplus! As a final fascinating detail, the Samaritan refers to his return at some future unspecified time when he will accept responsibility for what else needs to be paid to ensure the man’s total recovery. Some have seen here a reference to the second coming of Christ, whom the Samaritan represents, when the salvation, the healing, of wounded humanity will be completed. In the parables, with their settings in very ordinary life, Jesus challenges us to see that faith is not about religion; it is about life. He challenges us to trust that in everyday life, God is at work and is ever present. And because God is present and active, that everyday world is always being surprised, being shattered, being broken open, being changed, being contradicted—and us with it.

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Notes to Chapter 7 Tertullian, On Modesty, 8-9. Capon, Parables of the Kingdom, p. 9. 3 Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 27. 4 The association of the good reputation of God with his ‘name’ is clear in Ezekiel 36.16-32. 5 Trocmé, Jesus and his Contemporaries, p. 95. 6 Dan O. Via, Jnr., The Parables. Their Literary and Existential Dimensions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), p. 93. 7 William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke. The Daily Study Bible, Revised Edition (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1975), p. 209. 8 J.D. Crossan, ‘Parable, Allegory and Paradox’, p. 258. 9 For readers outside the UK: I.R.A. stands for ‘Irish Republican Army’, a terrorist group whose members belong to the Roman Catholic population of Northern Ireland; U.V.F. stands for ‘Ulster Volunteer Force’, a terrorist group whose members come from the Protestant population. 10 David Turner, hymn: ‘Come, sing of the springtime, God’s pledge of new birth’, repr. Baptist Praise and Worship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 247. Copyright D. Turner. 11 Henri J. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son. A Story of Homecoming (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), p. 55. Karl Barth had already used this image for Christ by treating the doctrine of atonement under the heading, ‘The Way of the Son of God into the Far Country’: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, English Translation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936-77), IV/1, pp. 157-210. 12 Capon, Parables of Grace, p. 141. Barclay, The Gospel of Luke, p. 141. 1 2

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8 The Method Illustrated In this chapter, I intend to consider three parables in the ways I have suggested they should be approached. To illustrate the method, I have chosen the Mustard Seed, a parable from Mark which is also found in Matthew and Luke; the Labourers in the Vineyard which is unique to Matthew, and the Unjust Judge which only Luke tells. The Mustard Seed (Mark 4.30-32) First of all, examining presuppositions, we must question the usual title for this parable. On another occasion, Jesus used the image of the mustard seed when speaking about faith (Matt 17.20; cf. Luke 17.6): For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move hence to yonder place,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. (RSV)

Here, the comparison is simply with size. A mustard seed is very tiny, but so powerful is faith, that even a tiny amount can produce a gigantic effect. Jesus could equally well have said ‘If you have faith as a grain of sand...’ without in any way altering his meaning. In the parable, however, the comparison is not with the mustard seed in itself, but in what happens to the mustard seed in its growth to a plant, and the consequences of that plant’s existence. As we read the story carefully, we see that there is a contrast between the mustard seed at the beginning of its life history, when it is ‘the smallest of all the seeds on earth’ and at the end when it ‘becomes the greatest of all shrubs’. It is not easy to think of a snappy alternative title to do justice to the parable, but the ‘Mustard Seed’s Growth’ might be a more accurate option. In reading the text carefully, it is a help to compare Mark with the versions in Matthew 13.31-2 and Luke 13.18-9. (Although, in doing so, do not use the NIV version which ‘corrects’ sayings of Jesus about the size of the mustard seed and the mustard shrub, which the translators obviously thought to be inaccurate! On this feature of apparent ‘unreality’ in the parable, see further below.) The other two Evangelists both change

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the parable from a natural comparison to an embryo story, by introducing a man who sows the seed in his field (Matthew) or in his garden (Luke). However, the emphasis remains on the seed and what happens to it. Though a man is involved, he plays no significant part in the comparison. Matthew adds a further stage to the narrative of the mustard seed and plant. He tells us surprisingly that after growing from the smallest seed when planted, to be the greatest of shrubs, it then goes on to become a tree! Luke omits the comparison between the size of the seed and the fullgrown plant, and has the mustard seed grow directly into a tree. We notice that while Mark tells us that birds make nests in the mustard shrub’s shade, Matthew and Luke both refer more naturalistically to nests in its branches. Thus, in Mark the central comparison is one from nature. A very small seed becomes the largest shrub, with branches big enough to provide shade for birds to nest under. The birds are not central to the image of the growth of the plant, so we need to ask whether the detail concerning them simply sharpens the picture of the amazing size of the mustard plant, or whether the arrival of the birds to take advantage of the plant is the final stage of the story. In other words, is the plot of the parable: Seed sown

Growth

Developed Shrub

Or is it: Seed sown

Growth

Developed Shrub

Birds sheltering?

The cultural setting here does not seem especially relevant or important. Experts think the actual plant was probably brassica nigra—which can exceptionally grow to 6-8 feet. Its seeds and leaves were used for culinary purposes, and the seeds also for their oil, possibly for medicinal purposes. Matthew and Luke both clearly regarded it as a crop, either a farmer’s field crop (Matthew) or a suitable plant in the herb or vegetable garden (Luke). No doubt some birds such as linnets would have fed upon its seed. The plant itself is not mentioned in the Old Testament, but as we look for other allusions, then the birds and the shade may be seen as

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significant. In the fable of the trees to be found in Judges 9.8-15, the bramble, the only plant willing to be king, ludicrously and ironically invites the other trees to take refuge in its shade, symbol of acknowledging its power and taking advantage of its protection. In Ezekiel 17.23, God’s cedar or vine becomes so great that birds nest in its shade, while the great tree of Ezekiel 31, which symbolizes the Pharaoh of Egypt, provides branches in which the birds nest, and a shadow under which dwell all great nations (31.6). Nebuchadnezzar dreamt of a great tree in which the birds made nests, and under which the animals found shade. Daniel interprets the tree as referring to the King, whose dominion over other nations extends to the ends of the earth, clearly symbolized by the spreading branches and the animals and birds living within its shelter (Daniel 4, especially verses 12, 21-22). When we look for bizarre or unlikely elements in the parable, the whole idea of a mustard plant as big as a tree is laughable. A.N. Wilson in his book Jesus rather ploddingly and unimaginatively makes this deduction about Jesus from the parable: Nor was he an experienced or observant agriculturalist. If he had been, he would not have told his hearers that the mustard plant was the tallest tree, so large that birds could settle in its branches: another piece of hyperbole, which he probably derived from reading; the Talmud informs us that the mustard shrub was as tall as a fig-tree, which it is not.1

(Incidentally, Wilson cites the version in Mark’s Gospel, and therefore betrays the fact that he has not read the text carefully, since in Mark, Jesus refers to the mustard plant as a ‘shrub’ not a tree!) Wilson fails to take account of the possibility that the unreality is deliberate. This particular seed not only grows amazingly, as do all seeds, but it grows miraculously, way beyond human expectation. There is a further bizarre element if we consider that the birds and the shade are the final significant element of the parable. The first hearers would have been jolted by the strange symbol of the kingdom of God as a mustard plant, a member of the cabbage family, rather than the dignified cedar or fruitful vine which Old Testament precedents would have led them to expect! This kingdom will be a world kingdom, but one quite unlike those pictured by Ezekiel and Daniel. Further, the presence of the birds and ‘tree’, in the light of the Old

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Testament background, would be taken to imply a kingdom under the judgement of God, rather than the kingdom of God. How might this parable have been understood by Jesus and its first hearers? The fundamental image of the seed, that it becomes lost, buried and dies, yet is logically continuous with the plant that follows needs to be borne in mind.2 This parable could well have been used to explain how God’s kingdom could possibly come about as a result of such small and unlikely beginnings as were evident in the ministry of Jesus. The parable might have been used in controversy with scoffing opponents, or to encourage disciples or sympathisers who were disappointed with what they had so far seen. We know that John the Baptist, because of the contrast between what he had expected and what Jesus actually did, had doubts about whether Jesus was the one who was to come and establish God’s Kingdom. No doubt he was not alone in this. Because of the fundamental seed imagery, the parable also insists that the germ of that kingdom is in Jesus, and because of the Old Testament imagery, that the kingdom will be of world-wide significance and benefit. Yet the satirical image of a cabbage-related plant as a tree invites us to be alert to the strangeness of the kingdom, according to usual human expectations. Mark records this parable along with other seed-based parables at the stage in Jesus’ ministry where Jesus has said and done sufficient for his followers to understand that seed is being sown which will lead to the fullness of God’s kingdom. In the life and mission of the early Church, when the Gospels with their parables as we now have them were being written down, the birds of the air (the Gentiles) are becoming part of that kingdom begun and inaugurated by Jesus. Luke, with his special interest in the world-wide mission of the Church, sees the main thrust of the parable in its end as portraying a tree with the birds nesting, something already happening in his day as the Gentiles flocked into the Church. The parable is told in the aorist mood, the way of speaking of completed action in New Testament Greek. Matthew takes a similar view, seeing in his times the seed planted by Jesus having become a shrub with birds in the branches, that is, the Church growing remarkably to a substantial size with Gentiles included, but not yet fully grown. For Matthew, the day of the tree, the completion of the kingdom, was yet to arrive.

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Matthew and Luke both pair this parable with the parable of the Leaven (Matthew 13.33 and Luke 13.21), suggesting that they saw a similarity of meaning between them. Like a mustard seed-plant, leaven is also an unlikely symbol for God’s kingdom. Because it was always excluded from Temple offerings, and from home and food during the solemn Passover festival, it was a symbol of secularity. Because the yeast was not isolated in pure form, but introduced as a small piece of dough retained from the previous batch, which rapidly became foul in a hot climate, then it was easy to regard it as a symbol of corruption. Jesus was accused by the Pharisees of being a source of evil contamination, as demon-possessed or even in league with the Devil. Is he deliberately being provocative and saying that the kingdom, understood his way, would end up by ‘contaminating’ everything? He was setting in motion a process which will ultimately affect the whole creation. The kingdom is not compared to yeast, but to yeast-hidden-in-flour-by-a-woman. The amount of flour seems to reflect Old Testament stories when God or his angels met people, and they responded with hospitality (Abraham, Gideon and Hannah). So the parable may include the meanings: (a) the kingdom does not come with observable signs, but is hidden; (b) it comes as an inversion or abolition of sacred and profane; (c) there is a delay between its beginnings and its completion; (d) it has the power and festive character of an epiphany. Any or all of these meanings are very far from the common moralizing interpretation of the parable, that Christianity spreads by quiet influence, and by mixing generally into human life. The Labourers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20.1-16) Starting with the questioning of presuppositions, we see that—as with so many parables—the traditional title is not particularly helpful, focusing as it does on the workers. As we read the parable carefully, we find that the central character is the vineyard owner. Jeremias suggests ‘The Good Employer’ as an alternative title. Perhaps ‘The Generous Employer’ would be even nearer the mark. Analyzing the plot, we find that the action of the story takes place in three scenes. The first scene shows a householder seeking day labourers for his vineyard. He makes a total of five trips to the market place in his

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quest for hired hands. He negotiates a precise wage with the men hired for a whole day’s work; he makes no commitment beyond the promise to act justly with the second batch; the question of pay is not mentioned with any subsequent group of workers. The second scene briefly describes payment at the end of the day. The owner’s steward begins with the last men to be hired, and they are given a day’s pay for their one hour of work. The other groups apart from the first are not mentioned again. The first-hired group expect (and so do first-time hearers of the story) that they will be paid a bonus, in the light of the generosity shown to the last. They too receive only the day’s pay they had agreed. The final scene shows the whole-day workers complaining of their treatment, and the owner justifying his action to their spokesman—their shop steward? Clearly, the central character is the householder. His decisions, actions and final words govern the whole plot. Three groups of workers play no significant role, and the story would apparently function without them. The last-hired workers do not in themselves play much of an active part. They made no bargain and received no promises about their pay, but they are clearly treated very generously, and this is their only function in the story. The only other major role rests with the full-day workers. They give a vivid account of their labours in the course of their complaint. They have ‘borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ They seem to feel that their status and dignity is demeaned because the other men had received the same pay for only one hour’s work: ‘You have made them equal to us.’ The steward is not important. It is somewhat surprising that he is not the one to do the hiring. His only function is to implement the owner’s decisions, though perhaps his presence sharpens slightly the dissatisfaction of the workers. They receive their pay from the steward, but are sufficiently aggrieved to seek out the real boss to complain to him in person. The bizarre or exaggerated element in the parable is twofold. Hiring labourers no-one else wants for just one hour and paying them for a whole day is no way for a businessman to make good profits, let alone maintain good labour relations with the rest of his work-force. The parable shows very clearly that trying to mix justice and generosity only leads to jealousy, resentment and problems. Perhaps it is best for us all if God also has to choose just one style too, that he opts for generosity rather than justice.

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Exploring the cultural setting, we find that work in vineyards was seasonal, and probably the only time that labourers would be in such demand as this parable seems to suggest would be at harvest. Once the grapes ripened, they needed to be picked very quickly. However, harvest is not mentioned in the plot, so cannot be a central issue. The men in the story are hired labourers who were very much bottom of the social pile in their day, marginalized people. They had no guaranteed income; they were landless; they were casual and seasonal workers, and unlike slaves, no-one had any responsibility for them. If they found no work, then they had no money and they and their families may well have had no food. The conversation between the master and the last-hired workers makes it clear that they had no wish to be unemployed; they are idle because they have not been hired (Matt 20.6-7). We probably should not ask why, in that case, he did not see them and employ them on an earlier visit. Rather, we should probably assume that they are the least promising workers, everybody’s last choice. As an unathletic child and least useful potential team member, I frequently experienced the humiliation of being last to be chosen when two teams were being selected by two captains for soccer or rugby in a school games lesson! Their plight was similar, but far more serious; potentially a matter of life and death. Thomas Hardy in his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge describes a minor tragedy at a hiring fair in the West Country in the agricultural economy of the early nineteenth century—not so very unlike the agricultural economy of the Holy Land in Jesus’ time. He pictures an old shepherd: The battle of life had been a sharp one with him, for, to begin with, he was a man of small frame. He was now so bowed by hard work and years that, approaching from behind, a person could hardly see his head... He had quite forgotten where he was, and what he had come for, his eyes being bent on the ground.…

His son is negotiating for work for him with a farmer from a distant part, who will only take the two of them together. The young man explains to his distressed sweetheart that he will have to accept the offer, even though it means the lovers will be hopelessly separated, because ‘I can’t starve father, and he’s out of work at Lady-day.’3

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At the heart of the story is the vineyard owner. His repeated visits to the market-place suggest someone who, like the host in the parable of the Great Feast is determined to have his vineyard full! (Luke 14.16-24; especially v. 23). His quixotic actions in taking on the least promising workers for a ridiculously short period of time and paying them generously, offend the other workers. Like Jews with a grounding in the Old Testament, we should be ready to recognise the vineyard as a symbol for Israel, God’s people, so its owner then becomes a figure for God, as in the Wicked Tenants. The complaining workers are given short shrift. The owner addresses their representative as ‘friend’, a form of address which tends to be ironic or threatening in Matthew’s Gospel. It is important to remember that, in contrast with any of the other groups, these labourers alone negotiated and agreed their wages in advance. The others all trusted the owner to treat them fairly. He counters their complaint on three grounds. They have not suffered any injustice: he has kept his word with them. His money is his to use as he chooses, it is no business of theirs what he does with it. Why do they begrudge it if he treats someone else with generosity? His words ‘Take your pay and go home’ (GNB) probably imply final dismissal, since otherwise the words are redundant—all the workers would do just that at the end of the day anyway. Their attitudes have produced a breach with their employer. As Dan Via comments, ‘Because of their impenetrable legalistic understanding of existence... they exclude themselves from the source of grace.’4 This parable most likely has its origins in the controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees over his forgiveness and welcoming of sinners, even calling a tax-collector to be a disciple. Further, he spoke of a reversal of expected order of precedence in the kingdom of God: Jesus said to them [the Chief Priests and Elders in Jerusalem], ‘I tell you: the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John the Baptist came to you showing you the right path to take, and you would not believe him; but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. Even when you saw this, you did not later change your minds and believe him’ (Matthew 21.31-2. GNB).

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There is a reversal in the present parable. The least promising workers enjoy the vineyard owner’s favour, while the longest-working group end up alienated from him by their own attitudes, perhaps in final dismissal. We also call to mind the comparable reversal in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in Luke 18.10-14. The actual underlying issue in the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees concerns the truth of God’s nature. In the extreme generosity of the vineyard owner of the parable to the last minute last-hopers, just as in his own behaviour in loving and restoring the lost, Jesus insists upon a God characterized by amazing grace and extravagant goodness, which over-rides strict fairness or justice. God’s revolution levels up. The parable also includes a second theme, a warning to the virtuous, the same one that we find in the parable of the Prodigal Son in the behaviour of the elder brother, that people who cannot accept that such is the true nature of God are in danger of cutting themselves off from him. If their judgementalism and moral book-keeping mentality have distanced them from the real God it does not matter how decent their lifestyle, or how faithfully they have served a God they imagine behaves justly with nicely calculated rewards and punishments for the good and the bad, the faithful and the unfaithful. If God were the God they think, then of course people who have spent a lifetime faithfully serving and worshipping him and trying to keep his commandments deserve better than sinners who make a late repentance. But Jesus emphasizes that such a God does not exist. The parable describes the difficulties caused by an employer functioning both according to strict justice and compassion. Jesus clearly teaches a God who chooses compassion as his way of dealing with human beings. Those who refuse to believe him find that the generosity of God has surprising consequences—the first being last and the last being first among them. It is not easy to understand the function of the workers hired at intervening times, who, after they are hired, disappear from the narrative. In some ways they confuse the story, which would work perfectly well without them. First of all, the repeated trips of the owner to the market-place makes it implausible that he failed to see the last-hired workers earlier in

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the day, unless they are lying and had not been available for work the whole time. Secondly, the presence of other groups in the wage queue at the end of the day would make the surprised discontent of the whole-day workers less realistic since, presumably, they would have seen ahead of them several groups of workers who, like the one-hour workers, received a whole day’s pay for less than a day’s work. These workers are neither essential to the plot, nor do they add any touch of realism. It is most unusual for there to be redundant elements in parables. There is in existence a Rabbinic parable which is somewhat similar but which, unlike the parable of Jesus, seems to have an element of proportional reward for skill or effort: A king… had a vineyard and hired many labourers to work in it. Among them was one far more skilful in his work than the rest, so what did the king do? He took him by the hand and walked with him up and down. At evening the labourers came to receive their wages and this one came with them and he gave him the full amount. The others began to grumble, saying, ‘We toiled all day, whereas this man toiled only two hours, and yet the king has given him the full wage.’ The king said to them, ‘What cause have you for grumbling? This man did more in the two hours than you in a whole day.’5

However, it would be dishonest interpretation to assume that there are traces of such an earlier story in our present parable, accounting for the various workers. This would amount to saying, ‘We cannot interpret the given parable, so we will invent another one and interpret that!’ Perhaps these workers serve another symbolic function. They function in the parable as markers of time—every ‘hour’ of the ancient day is represented. It is always the right time for the vineyard owner to be recruiting labour. We have already noted the likelihood that the owner represents God, and the vineyard, God’s people. We also noted that vintage time, harvest, would be when the maximum numbers of hired labourers were needed. These other workers perhaps point to a God who calls everyone available to be part of his harvest, and to the truth that people of different times are involved in the one harvest, the one fruition of God’s intentions. It is always the right time to hear God’s gracious call to service. Alternatively,

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the presence of these ‘intermediate’ workers may warn us not to over-simplify life into opposing categories. There are many who are intermediate between ‘all-day’ and ‘last-minute’. We can see clearly from the Rabbinic parable that the vineyard owner almost certainly represents God. There is therefore an amazing implicit claim to divine knowledge and status in the way Jesus confidently tells a parable about the nature of God and his dealings with people to justify his own ministry. Less centrally, there are interesting insights into human behaviour and motives. The longest working labourers seem to feel that their own status and worth is called into question by generosity shown to others, and by doing so, show up a sad poverty of spirit in themselves. Do they really have such a low opinion of themselves that they feel humiliated by someone else’s good fortune? They lose, or are shown never to have had, any solidarity with their fellow hired labourers in the precariousness of lives in which job and basic income cannot be guaranteed. There is a similar theme in the parable of the Unforgiving Debtor. The perspective on life they choose is to be envious of other people. They are described in the Greek (20.15) literally as having an ‘evil eye’ (compare Matthew 6.22). Rather than share in other people’s joy when life turns out well, or take delight in big-hearted behaviour when they see it, they prefer to complain and sink into self-pity. Although these insights are probably not central to the parable’s meaning, they do arise legitimately from it, and from the behaviour and personalities of the characters. Some other moralizing interpretations have been popular from the pulpit, but they usually bear little relationship to the true thrust of the parable. For instance, exhortations to people to be content with their lot hardly need such a sophisticated story. Or again, Campbell Morgan’s interpretation6 that the parable teaches God’s interest in how faithful we are in our service, not the length of time we spend in it, assumes that all the workers worked hard for however long they were in the vineyard, so that there is a kind of ‘justice’ about the owner’s actions. He is rewarding the quality of work, if not the quantity. However, the text nowhere suggests this, so such an assumption seems totally unwarranted. The location of the parable in Matthew’s Gospel seems to suggest that he saw it in the context of Christian service and rewards at the Last

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Judgement. It is prefaced by the incident in which Jesus promises Peter that there will be rewards for his followers, after a good-living rich man fails to become a disciple (19.16-30). It is followed shortly by the request for honours for her sons by the mother of James and John (20.20-28). It is difficult to see how Matthew or his readers could have thought it added any information on the topic of rewards and honours. The reverse order of payment is hardly significant, and the parable squashes any idea of rewards proportional to length or laboriousness of service! It seems more likely that Matthew is applying the original meaning of the parable to the life of the Church. Christians as well as Pharisees need to understand and remember the character of the God they serve, and not expect special favours because of life-time service. Even worse would be for them to live obediently from the motive of calculated reward, and to resent God’s generosity to sinners who repent at the last gasp. Christians, like so many of the religious Jews of Jesus’ day, find it difficult to lay aside a bookkeeping mentality about religion. The Judge and the Widow (Luke 18.1-8) This parable has traditionally been called either the Unjust or Unrighteous Judge, or the Importunate Widow. The Good News Bible calls it ‘The Widow and the Judge’, while the NIV opts for ‘The Persistent Widow’. When we read the text we see that the two characters are of comparable importance, and each affects the other. The judge is characterized as at the very least slothful. The widow comes to him repeatedly and he refuses to act. He is described by the narrator as ‘fearing neither God nor man’; in other words, he recognizes no responsibility in the way he performs his duties either to God or to any human individual or agency. In his soliloquy, he is endearingly honest with himself and admits the truth given by the narrator. His decision to act, when it finally comes, does not arise from any compassion for the widow, nor from any commitment to the cause of justice, but only from concern for his own comfort or even safety. The Greek which is usually translated to mean that the widow will ‘wear him out’ literally means ‘beat him up’ or ‘black his eye’. If we accept Luke’s explanation of the parable, that it teaches the disciples persistent prayer, then the central comparison is with the widow

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finally (by implication) getting her request. Thus the comparison appears to be: ‘Widow approaching Judge’ = ‘Christians approaching God’ This, however, results in the unlikely comparison of God with a Judge ‘who did not fear God’! There are striking similarities and important differences between this parable and the teaching which follows it, and a passage in the Wisdom of Ben Sirach: The Lord always repays and will do it many times over. But don’t try to bribe him... The Lord is fair and does not show partiality. He is not prejudiced against the poor; when someone prays who has been wronged, the Lord listens. When orphans and widows pour out their prayers, he does not ignore them. The tears running down a widow’s cheek cry out in accusation against the one who has caused her distress. Serve the Lord willingly, and the Lord will accept you; your prayers will reach the skies. The prayer of a humble person goes past the clouds and keeps on going until it reaches the Lord Most High, where it stays until he answers by seeing that justice is done and that the guilty are punished. And the Lord will act quickly. He will show no patience with wicked people. He will take vengeance by crushing the heathen. He will completely wipe out the merciless and the arrogant, and will destroy the authority of the wicked... Because of the Lord’s mercy, his people will be happy when he has judged their case. (Ecclesiasticus 35.11-19. GNB)

In both Ben Sirach and the story of Jesus we see a widow and prayer, and vindication of God’s people. But the unjust judge is a totally novel element in the parable. From the Old Testament, we discover that this judge’s characteristics are the exact opposite of those appointed by King Jehoshaphat of Judah in his attempt to ‘call the people back to the Lord.’ He instructed them to ‘Be careful in pronouncing judgement; you are not acting on human authority, but on the authority of the LORD, and he is with you when

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you pass sentence. Fear the LORD and act carefully, because the LORD our God does not tolerate fraud or partiality or the taking of bribes’ (2 Chron 19.4-7. GNB).

The widow is a representative of a group of people who were extremely vulnerable in ancient society, when most rights of ownership and power were vested in men. On innumerable occasions, they are linked with orphans and aliens as especially liable to be victims of injustice and poverty. They are the particular concern of God himself, for ‘God ... cares for orphans and protects widows’ (Psalm 68.5), and individuals and societies are to be judged according to their treatment of such folk. The book of Ruth clearly illustrates their vulnerability, and need to act resourcefully. With regard to the cultural setting, we need to remember that a judge in Jewish society did not simply preside in a court of law and pass sentence. His role also included the active responsibility for implementing a fair and just settlement in favour of the innocent or offended party. The widow’s plea for vindication could be for the judge to sort out a financial or property dispute, or to punish someone who had wronged her, or perhaps both. The former is probably the more likely, but is not a critical matter in interpretation. If the parable points to rewarding outcomes for persistence in prayer, then the picture of a widow is a fine symbol for weakness, and the judge for relative power, so depicting the situation when a human being comes before Almighty God in petition. However, we need to introduce a ‘how much more’ qualification. If even an unsatisfactory judge will in the end agree to do what is right, even if only for the wrong reason, how much more will God do what is right for his people. An unjust judge is certainly an arresting symbol for God, but it is also a difficult one. In the structure of Luke’s Gospel, this is one of two similar parables concerning prayer. The other is the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11.5-13). A close examination shows many parallels. In particular, in both cases, the focus shifts from the suppliant to the supplier, and both have a central ‘how much more’ emphasis. It seems at least possible that they are not about prayer in general, but that together they relate to two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11.2-4), namely ‘your kingdom come’ and ‘give us

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each day our daily bread.’ The parables take up, in reverse order, the themes of bread and justice (= kingdom). The friend at midnight is followed by teaching which compares God’s willingness to give with a father providing food for his children (Luke 11.11-13). The Widow and the Judge is followed by teaching about the coming of the Son of Man, probably to be understood as the establishment on earth of the kingdom of God (fulfilling the prayer, ‘Your kingdom come’). If this parallelism is valid, then the differences in ending may also relate to prayer. The friend is quite definitely said to provide bread (11.8) at the end of the parable, and God’s people may expect to have their daily need for food met without waiting. On the other hand, the widow at the end of the parable has not yet received justice. We are only told that the judge has decided to grant it. In a similar way, though God’s people pray for the kingdom, they may well have to wait longer for it, even though the final outcome is firmly decided in God’s will. The parable shows and encourages great confidence in God, both on the part of Jesus, and of the early Christian Church as it suffered persecution and awaited vindication at the time this parable was first written down. If the parable were considered separate from its setting as teaching about prayer, then we could interpret it differently. Its plot consists of a surprising reversal. The free-wheeling judge, who regards himself as totally independent of God and human beings, ends up being controlled by the widow, who is apparently powerless without family or influential friends and unable to afford a bribe. It thus illustrates the coming of Jesus and dawn of the kingdom, which bring about a reversal in power structures. The mighty are brought down from their thrones while the lowly are lifted up (Luke 1.52). One of the powerless ones, though the victim of injustice, shatters convention and confronts the judge, himself part of the system which is against her because of his inactivity, and demands her rights with the vehemence of a prize fighter. In God’s kingdom, previous victims will claim their rights, and seek and find justice. If we consider the judge as an anti-type of God, then he is a negative model too for human behaviour. When he is confronted by one of the victims of his own carelessness or wrong-doing, he does not repent. He is not moved by thought of God and his nature, nor even by a humanistic concern for justice, nor by empathy for a vulnerable, suffering fellow human

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being. In the end he decides to do the right thing, but for the wrong reason. He remains locked into his own self-serving interests, in particular, his own comfort and security. It is not consistent or safe to believe in a God who ‘will bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night’ (Luke 18.7. NIV) unless we too are actively concerned to respond to cries for help and assist victims of oppression in obtaining justice. Our method opens up many possibilities for the meaning of the parables, and I would not suggest that we have exhausted them, even for the three parables here considered. So far as the Widow and the Judge is concerned, we find ourselves with two very divergent readings: either the judge is a type of God, in which case the parable is about prayer, or the judge is an anti-type of God, in which case the parable is about the surprising reversals and the empowerment of the weak produced by the kingdom of God. Luke himself seems to have seen it in the first perspective, but that is not necessarily conclusive for us. The parables are not for those who like definitive pronouncements and secure conclusions. Even after our best endeavours, they continue to tease and intrigue, and draw us into the spiritual search. Notes to Chapter 8 Wilson, Jesus, p. 123. This is discussed at length above, pp. 48-9. 3 Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Folio Society, 1968), ch. 23, pp. 168-9. 4 Dan Via, The Parables, p. 154. 5 B. Abodah Zarah 17a. Cited in Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1967), p. 117. 6 G. Campbell Morgan, The Parables and Metaphors of Our Lord (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1945), p. 99. 1 2

9 The Bible, Story and God Story is the very heart of the Bible. A significant proportion of the Old Testament consists of narrative: the books of Genesis and Judges, the books of Samuel and Kings, Esther, Nehemiah and Ezra are virtually entirely story. Other books such as Exodus, Jeremiah, and Daniel contain a significant amount of narrative, while yet others express response to the narratives contained elsewhere. Many of the Psalms, wholly or in part, celebrate the story of creation, the story of the exodus from Egypt, or the story of the return from Babylonian exile. The preaching law-book Deuteronomy calls for a response to the story of what God has done for the patriarchs and for the Jewish nation in providing a homeland: Then, in the LORD’S presence you will recite these words: ‘My ancestor was a wandering Aramean, a homeless refugee, who took his family to Egypt to live. They were few in number when they went there, but they became a large and powerful nation. The Egyptians treated us harshly and forced us to work as slaves. Then we cried out for help to the LORD, the God of our ancestors. He heard us and saw our suffering, hardship and misery. By his great power he rescued us from Egypt. He worked miracles and wonders and caused terrifying things to happen. He brought us here and gave us this rich and fertile land’ (Deuteronomy 26.5-9. GNB).

The pattern of story continues in the New Testament. The first four books are the Gospels which record the story of the life, passion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The next book is the Acts of the Apostles which tells of the spread of Christianity during the succeeding thirty years or so. The final book, Revelation, is mostly a strange allegorical narrative of world history extended forward to the end of time, portrayed as a struggle between God and the forces of evil, and culminating in the Resurrection of the Dead, the Last Judgement, and the establishment of God’s kingdom in a new Jerusalem as part of a new heaven and a new earth. The Epistles which are letters to particular recipients—Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon—give us snatches of narrative of the life of early Churches and their members. Paul’s theology in these Epistles, as

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well as in those which are more in the nature of circular homilies – for example, Romans and Ephesians—is shot through with the implied and specific narrative of his spiritual autobiography. He was permanently surprised by joy and amazed at grace which could totally forgive an enemy and call him into service as friend and child of God by adoption. Luke faithfully portrays this characteristic aspect of Paul’s thinking in Acts, where Paul in preaching twice tells the story of his conversion or commissioning. Further, the author of Hebrews reviews the story of famous Jewish heroes in his well-known chapter on faith (Hebrews 11) and uses Jewish story to interpret Christianity: You have not come, as the people of Israel came, to what you can feel, to Mount Sinai with its blazing fire, the darkness and the gloom, the storm, the blast of a trumpet, and the sound of a voice. When the people heard the voice they begged not to hear another word, because they could not bear the order which said, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.’ The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, ‘I am trembling and afraid!’ Instead, you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, with its thousands of angels. You have come to .... Jesus, who arranged the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that promises much better things than does the blood of Abel’ (Hebrews 12.18-24. GNB).

Elsewhere in the New Testament stories like the exodus from Egypt, and acts of Old Testament figures like David and Moses, are used to explain the meaning of Jesus. One consequence of the establishment of the Christian canon of Holy Scripture is that the whole Bible now forms an over-arching narrative, or ‘meta-narrative’. This is expressed naively in a children’s hymn about the Bible: God has given us a book full of stories, which was made for his people of old, it begins with the tale of a garden, and ends with the city of gold.1

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The same idea is examined at a deeper level by contemporary literary critics, for instance Northrop Frye, in his book The Great Code. He writes: Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure. It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, or the aspect of history it is interested in, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel.2

This particular development was only made possible by the establishment of the Bible as a ‘book’ or ‘codex’, a Christian development. The Jewish tradition with sacred scriptures was, and still is, the scroll, and a collection of scrolls kept in a cupboard has no ‘order’, unlike the same scriptures gathered together as the pages of a book. The Bible as we now know it tells as one story the whole history of the universe, from its beginning in the mandate of God’s word to its ultimate end in the New Creation when the present heaven and earth are transformed in God’s presence. Also within this great imaginative sweep is the story of God’s self-revelation to his people, beginning with the call of Abraham, proceeding through the exodus from Egypt, the law given through Moses, the Jewish monarchy, the exile in Babylon and return to the homeland. In Jesus of Nazareth, there is God’s supreme act of self-revelation when God becomes human story, and the whole human race begins to be gathered into one family under God the Father. Living within this story has shaped Christian civilization, and given purpose and context to innumerable individual lives. Lesslie Newbiggin quotes a ‘brilliant Hindu scholar friend’ with a wide knowledge of the sacred books of the world’s religions who said ‘I find in your Bible something quite unique. It is a unique interpretation of universal history, and therefore an interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor within history.’3 It necessarily follows that story is central to both Jewish and Christian religion. Religious faith, in the first place, does not consist in extracting ideas or knowledge about God from these narratives, but in knowing and repeating them, in living with them in dynamic interaction. As the literary critic Gabriel Josipovici points out, we read the Bible ‘not as a set of

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secrets to be deciphered but as accounts of lives to which we listen and respond’.4 He describes the nature of this response as an open-ended living with the Bible’s story: Every event that takes place in the Hebrew Bible seems to have a meaning, but this does not imply that the meaning can be spelt out. We sense that the binding of Isaac is meaningful, but our way of asserting it is not to dissect it but to repeat it. Events ... are not so much interpreted as lovingly recalled and re-told. Questions are certainly raised, but there is no great urgency to answer them. That Sarah conceived after the age at which such things are possible, that Joseph survived and brought his brothers and father down to Egypt, that God made it possible for Moses to lead the descendants of Jacob back out of Egypt—that is what is important. Why and how these things happened is much less so. Events in the narrative portions of the Hebrew Bible happen in the way they do because the world in which they occur goes easy, so to speak, on interpretation. We invoke such events, remember them in wonder, question them. But a question is never meant to throw up an answer, only another question.

Faith, in the second place, consists of the struggle of seeing the narrative of our own lives as part of the grand design of God, part of that grand sweep of God’s creative and redeeming love which stretches from creation to culmination. The whole of history is God’s story, and however insignificant, we are part of it. We try to view our own lives as parable, discerning the signs of grace which not only occasionally disturb us by ‘miraculous’ intervention, but which also more often lie below the ‘normal’ surface of events. We seek, too, to live in such ways that we are evidence for the graciousness of a loving, forgiving God to other people, parables to them as well as to ourselves. So the seventeenth century poet John Donne writes: All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some

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by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that Library where every book shall lie open to one another.5

It is highly intriguing, and suggestive, that the four ‘Gospels’ are so named. Mark, who as far as we know is the first Gospel writer, seems to have chosen this title for his work: ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ (Mark 1.1). The word ‘gospel’ means ‘good news’ and is the technical term for the essential Christian message. According to Mark’s thinking, and the church has agreed and extended this to include Matthew, Luke and John too, the good news itself is the story: the gospel is not a lesser part of the story of Jesus, such as his death or resurrection alone, nor yet any deduction from it, explanation of it or statement about it. There is a deep affinity between story and theology.6 Narrative is a peculiarly appropriate medium for the message about the God who reveals himself in story, and so all Biblical story needs to be taken very seriously, and thought about very carefully. This respect for story, and understanding of its central position in theology does not come easily to many Christians, and perhaps especially to Protestant Christians. The great Protestant enterprise has often presupposed that a single, logical, consistent, conceptual, doctrinal system underlies the Bible, from which it may be deduced and extracted using stories, parables and proof-texts, or even by ‘comparing scripture with scripture properly understood’. Ironically enough, people holding this view have always utterly failed to produce a systematic theology which answers to this description, as exemplified by their inability to agree about such basic doctrines as baptism (infant or believers’), pre-destination, and the true nature of the Church and its ministry. However, this does not prevent the assumption continuing to be influential, and when imported into the study of the parables, it results in the search for a ‘core’ encoded message, rather than an attempt to relate to the parable as a whole story. In November 1995 I heard an address from a well-known leader of the ‘Ichthus Fellowship’ group of house-churches, in which he denied that the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16.19-31 is a parable. He then went on to develop an account of what happens to human beings on

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death in which the content of this story played a significant part. We might, however, take notice of the fact that there is a folk-tale in the collection made by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm called ‘The Peasant in Heaven’: Once upon a time a poor pious peasant died, and arrived before the gate of heaven. At the same time a very rich, rich lord came there who also wanted to get into heaven. Then Saint Peter came with the key, and opened the door, and let the great man in, but apparently did not see the peasant, and shut the door again. And now the peasant outside heard how the great man was received in heaven with all kinds of rejoicing, and how they were making music, and singing within. At length all became quiet again, and Saint Peter came and opened the gate of heaven, and let the peasant in. The peasant, however, expected that they would make music and sing when he went in also, but all remained quite quiet; he was received with great affection, it is true, and the angels came to meet him, but no one sang. Then the peasant asked Saint Peter how it was that they did not sing for him as they had done when the rich man went in, and said that it seemed to him that there in heaven things were done with just as much partiality as on earth. Then said Saint Peter: ‘By no means, you are just as dear to us as anyone else, and will enjoy every heavenly delight that the rich man enjoys, but poor fellows like you come to heaven every day, but a rich man like this does not come more than once in a hundred years!’7

No one with any sensitivity considering such a story would use it to deduce detailed beliefs about the after-life. It is not really about heaven at all, but clearly a subversive story about life on earth, and the economic, social and political implications of the Christian Gospel. Yet when a comparable story appears in black leather binding with gold edges to the paper, some of God’s people still treat it as though it were a solemn theological treatise on life after death! A highly significant feature of most Biblical narrative is that God appears in it very rarely, if at all, as a character in his own right. Take as an example the Joseph saga (Genesis 37-45). We are told in description of Joseph (39.2ff) that ‘the Lord was with him’ with the result that Joseph prospers, and the Lord’s blessing comes on the affairs of his master

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Potiphar, which the latter naturally notices. Joseph asserts that the interpretation of dreams comes from God (40.8) and the Pharaoh recognises that Joseph’s ability to interpret them successfully depends upon God’s help (41.37ff). Joseph claims to be a God fearer (42.18) and speaks of the God of his father and brothers (43.23), while old Jacob prays for God’s blessing on his sons’ mission in search of food (43.14). In the denouement, when Joseph reveals his identity to his brothers, he asserts that at a deeper level than his brothers’ machinations, God was responsible for bringing him to Egypt and raising him to a position of power where he was able to help his family (45.5ff). This relative scarcity of reference, and total absence as a character in the narrative, contrasts dramatically with the stories of Gods and their doings which are found in many religions. Nevertheless, as Joseph voices it, God is the prime mover of the narrative, though he is only known through his relationship with people, and moves in mysterious ways to perform his wonders. The centrality of God in the story is well expressed by the literary critic Harold Bloom in considering the nature of the passages in the Old Testament which scholars postulate to be from an Old Testament source they call ‘J’ (and which, incidentally, Bloom argues was the deliberate composition of a woman author). Bloom writes that the ‘Book of J’ ...begins with the creation of Adam and passes through Eden to Cain and on to Noah and the Deluge. Then come the great cycles of Abram, Sarai, Isaac and Rebecca, of Jacob and Rachel, of Joseph, of Moses, Pharaoh and the Exodus, and of the wandering in the Wilderness until the blessing of Balaam and the death of Moses. The one binding figure in this great variety is Yahweh, a unique God who remains the precursor of what is called God by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even the secularists of the Western world. J’s principal character is God....’8

Although the miracles and occasional ‘supernatural’ events attributed to God in the early chapters of the Bible may stick in our minds, they are rare, and in much of the writings they are non-existent, as we have seen in our examination of the Joseph Narrative. Most of what happens in these stories is what happens in our normal world of family relationships, political manoeuvring and the rest. The same can be said for the stories of Saul

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and David, while God is never mentioned at all in the book of Esther. In spite of this, Bloom’s remark that God is the ‘binding figure’ and ‘principal character’ can be extended to the whole Bible story. God is central to all the everyday events and relationships of which the Bible tells. The parables reflect these characteristics of Biblical narrative very closely, as many writers have noticed. For example, Amos Wilder perceives that ‘Jesus does not proclaim the Kingdom of God in “God language” ’, but that he summons his hearers to realize that their destinies are at stake in their ‘ordinary, creaturely existence, domestic, economic, social’.9 Similarly, John Donahue maintains that The realism of the parables means that Jesus places the point of contact between God and human beings in the everyday world of human experience. The Jesus of the parables does not speak God language, and even the language of his religious heritage, the Hebrew Bible, is rarely quoted..... The parables claim that the arena in which God summons human beings to the risk of decision is the world of everyday existence, that same world in which the life of Jesus unfolded in dialogue with the mystery of God.10

Biblical narrative, and the parables of Jesus, both take for granted a particular theology of God. He is the Creator of the natural world and of human beings alike, so that life is not necessarily hostile to his will, nor foreign to his ways. He is at work in the seasons, the natural world, and in the growth of plants. Human beings are created in his image, so that God’s likeness is to be discerned in ordinary people and in ordinary life, even in your enemies. When Jacob returns in great trepidation to his homeland, and is greeted with joyful forgiveness by his wronged elder brother Esau, he rightly exclaims to Esau ‘...to see your face is like seeing the face of God, with such favour have you received me.’ (Genesis 33.10. RSV) Surely the description of Esau’s welcome of his younger brother ‘But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him’ (Gen 33.4. RSV) has provided the model for the father of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.20). For those with eyes to see, God is like Esau, and is at work through Esau, the patriarch and representative of the Edomites, hated enemies of the Jews.

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As Creator, God relates actively to all that exists and to every human life, yet his ‘home’ is not here, but in heaven. The world has its own order and pattern, and God does not often meddle and interfere with it by appearing himself and changing things miraculously. However, nor is he excluded or limited by its order and regularity, which he himself has created and ordained. He is the Lord, who is known by those who trust in him, and who look below the surface of events for inner meaning. We already considered at length (in chapter 2) the roots of parable in Old Testament wisdom and prophetic writings, but it has now become clear that Old Testament narrative, too, was a very formative influence on them. Sallie TeSelle says of the Prodigal Son: What is ‘seen’, however, is not something ‘spiritual’ (God’s love ‘in itself,’ whatever that would be), but the homely and familiar in a new context—ordinary life lived in a new context, the context of radical, unmerited love. That love—and God himself—are nowhere directly mentioned in the story: the perception of divine love is achieved through stretching the surface of the story with an extreme imagery of hunger and feasting, rejection and acceptance, lost and found, death and life.11

We have already written of the parallels between this parable and the Joseph Narrative. In the earlier story too, God’s nature and love is nowhere mentioned or made explicit, yet it is seen by ‘stretching the surface’ of the story: in the forgiveness of Joseph, in the personal growth and change of heart of Judah, in the way the Egyptians (one of the traditional enemies of God’s people) are saved from starvation through Joseph, along with his family. Although not alluded to, there is a partial fulfilment of God’s promise to Joseph’s great grandfather, Abraham, that his descendants would be a blessing to the nations (Genesis 12.1-3). The Gospels themselves stand fair and square within the Old Testament Biblical narrative tradition. They are about God yet he rarely appears in them, except as the human character, Jesus. The greater part of what happens does so in the normal arena of human affairs. There are miracles and mysterious happenings, but the greater part of the gospels is about that ‘which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands’ (1 John 1.1. NIV). God is known when a weary traveller holds a conversation with a

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woman at a well; when a teacher plays the part of the most menial slave and washes the feet of his followers; when a condemned criminal is publicly executed by the authorities. The life of Jesus almost seems to consist in an extended series of parables. When we read the three parables of Luke 15, we note their common theme of celebration at the recovery of the lost. The shepherd and the woman both call together their friends and neighbours to rejoice over the sheep and the coin, while the father of the prodigal son orders a banquet to celebrate his son’s return. This was not a private family party, but a big gathering to justify slaughtering the fatted calf, complete with band and dancing, exciting enough an event in the community for the village boys to gather outside in curiosity and for free entertainment (15.26—the word usually given as ‘slaves’ or ‘servants’ should probably be translated ‘boys’). But the whole context of these parables is the complaint of the Pharisees about Jesus, that ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them’ (Luke 15.2. RSV). There is surprisingly not even any hint of a thanksgiving offering to God for the son’s return, a purpose for which fatted calves were often raised by pious Jews. So the well-attested behaviour of Jesus of attending parties with sinners, itself becomes an implicit fourth parable. It is a sign and an example of God’s love and forgiveness and joy in welcoming back his lost children. It is impossible to quarrel with Josipovici’s remark that ‘The parables have the same kind of realism as the Gospels themselves.’12 It has been suggested that the parables told by Jesus provide the literary model for Mark’s Gospel as the story about Jesus. Certainly Mark’s Gospel shares three characteristics of parable, namely realism, paradox or wonder, and a challenge to the readers or listeners which leaves them free to make their own response. John Donahue comments: Like the parables, the Gospel points beyond itself to the ultimate mystery of the divine-human encounter; not even the picture of Jesus in Mark exhausts this encounter; like the parables, the Gospel must be adapted to new situations.13

There does seem to be a harmony between the parables and the behaviour of Jesus. Indeed, the miracles of Jesus are from the earliest records treated as stories with a deeper meaning. Gerd Theissen, in his

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study of the historical figure of Jesus, points out that the process of interpreting the miracle stories in a symbolic way begins in the New Testament itself, in all four Gospels: At decisive points in the Gospel Mark embarks on miracle stories which ‘symbolically’ anticipate what is to follow: before Peter’s confession of the Messiah there is the healing of a blind man which shows that the disciples who previously were chided as being ‘blind’ now have their eyes opened to the true status of Jesus.... Matthew gave a symbolic meaning to the stilling of the storm: it shows the ‘ship’ of the church threatened by wind and waves but not sinking, despite all dangers.... In Luke the miraculous fishing trip has a symbolic meaning: it describes mission. Finally in John miracles basically have a deeper underlying meaning.14

It is significant, maintains Theissen, that only the miracles of Jesus are interpreted symbolically like this in antiquity. This process, which he argues began with Jesus himself, does not lead to any diminution of them: Rather, it indicates the high esteem in which they were held: they become the vehicles of central theological insights. In the last resort the accentuation of their symbolic meaning lies with Jesus: in interpreting them as signs of the dawn of the end-time, he gave them a surplus symbolic value which then prompted many further interpretations of their meaning.15

Like the parables of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus point to the kingdom of God. Acts such as the feeding of the five thousand in Jewish territory and the four thousand in Gentile territory, the cursing of the fig tree (which Luke significantly omits and replaces by the parable of the Barren Fig Tree!), the cleansing of the Temple and the Triumphal Entry are obviously symbolic or parabolic. But other actions can also be seen in a deeper light. When Jesus allows a prostitute publicly to wash his feet with her tears, kiss them, and dry them with her hair, he is involved in activity capable of more than one interpretation (Luke 7.36ff). He is open to the accusation that either he lacks spiritual perception and does not realise what kind of woman she is, or that he lacks moral standards by even associating with

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her, let alone accepting such intimate favours from her. Such would have been Simon the Pharisee’s thoughts. Jesus himself interprets what happened between himself and the woman as a sign and experience of the forgiving love of God in action in and through Jesus himself. Jesus seems to have interpreted other people’s actions symbolically or parabolically too. When an unknown widow offers all she has to God, ‘her whole living’, (Mark 12.41-4) he singles her out as a pointer to his own forthcoming total sacrifice on the cross. When a woman publicly anoints him at Bethany (Mark 14.3-11) Jesus gives immense significance to her act: ‘Wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her’ (RSV). Not only has she caught some understanding of his impending death, but by her act, she makes him ‘Messiah’, literally, the ‘anointed one.’ We are told of no other anointing; indeed, medieval art often portrays Jesus’ baptism as an anointing by John the Baptist in an attempt to rectify this apparent omission! The Gospel is essentially about the paradoxical kind of Messiah who is anointed not by a leading prophet, or a Chief Priest, but by an anonymous woman of questionable virtue, and who dies. By her act, she remains indissolubly part of the Christian message. She points to the death of the Lord, and bears witness to the kind of Messiah he is. There are very few recorded instances when Jesus has dealings with Gentiles, but significantly, both a Syro-Phoenician woman and a Roman Centurion seem to speak to Jesus in parable. The first incident is found in Mark 7.24-30 and Matthew 15.21-28. In Matthew’s account, the woman is praised for her great faith. I would contend that this commendation comes not so much from her persistence after being rejected by Jesus, but from the insight of her reply. Jesus initially refuses to help her by healing her sick daughter on the grounds that his ministry was directed to the Jews, and that it would be wrong to give any time, attention or effort (the ‘bread’) intended for the children (the Jews) to the Gentiles (the ‘dogs’). She extends the parable, and imagines a family meal where the children are being careless and dropping the bread, or even in a rich family, using pieces of bread to wipe oil or gravy from the fingers and deliberately throwing it on the ground. It would be heartless in such circumstances to prevent the village dogs scavenging or family pets enjoying what the children clearly did not need or value! Is she contrasting her own faith in,

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and need for, the ministry of Jesus with the lack of interest in Jesus by many Jews, or even their hostility? Was her parable a moment of growth and enlightenment for Jesus himself, when he realised that he was of more than Jewish significance? Mark hints that this is so. He immediately follows this story of a persuasive answer which changed Jesus’ decision with a story of an immediately willing healing in Gentile territory, and the feeding of the four thousand in the same locality—bread for the ‘dogs’ (Gentiles) indeed! A second incident happens when a Roman Centurion in Capernaum asks Jesus to heal his servant (Matthew 8.5-13; Luke 7.1-10). When Jesus offers to accompany him to his home to heal the man or boy, the Centurion dissuades him, not wishing to embarrass a pious Jew who would normally refuse to enter a Gentile home because of fear of ritual contamination in a non-kosher household. He also humbly claims to be unworthy of the honour of receiving Jesus. But he then professes his faith in the power of Jesus by means of a parable about himself. The Centurion exercises authority by virtue of being the representative of Rome in a hierarchy of power. If he gives an order, he does so on behalf of the Emperor, with the enforcing ability of the whole Empire in its economic, political and military might behind him. In a similar way, he recognizes Jesus as the representative of God, able to give orders which must be obeyed because he does so with the power and authority of God himself. No wonder that Jesus claims not to have found such faith in Israel. The Centurion has real faith in Jesus as God’s representative and agent, and not just belief in the ability of Jesus to work miracles. His parable shows that he has perceived something of the true nature of Jesus, and is prepared to trust in it. When Jesus says in Matthew 13.10ff that the disciples are fortunate, compared with the crowd, because they understand at least something of parables, it is because this opens up to them more than the meaning of one or two stories, but the very secrets of the Kingdom of heaven. Their eyes saw and their ears heard what many prophets and faithful Jews had longed but failed to experience, namely the coming of God’s kingdom in the life and activity and teaching of Jesus. The parables usually demand a change of outlook from us. We need to see human behaviour from a different perspective; we need to consider possibilities which are outrageous by

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conventional standards. They illustrate the truth that we cannot meet God without changing and being changed. The same kind of ability which is needed to comprehend parables is also needed to understand who and what Jesus was. He and his acts were in themselves an authentic parable of God. Inability to cope with parables would rule out any possibility of understanding who Jesus was and what he was about. Ability to understand parables also allows us to experience and interpret our own lives as parables. An Asian theologian, Choan-Seng Song, perceives this clearly: The power of God at work in human experience—this is what Jesus wants to let others know through his parables and through what he does with them. This is the key to interpreting his parables. This is the clue to understanding the signs of God’s reign .... Life must be the stuff of Jesus’ parables. And out of that life Jesus makes parables of God’s power at work, enabling his followers to realise that God’s reign is in the midst of their lives. To feel life intensely, to live life expectantly, and to experience life deeply—is this not, then, the way to understand and interpret Jesus’ parables?16

Teaching in parables was part of Jesus’ overall teaching which, in turn, was part of his total activity. In approaching the parables sympathetically and with understanding, we better comprehend all his teaching and the whole of his incarnation. The following words were written by Sallie Teselle about the parables, but they apply equally to the whole Gospels too: The spectators must participate imaginatively, must so live in the story that insight into its strangeness and novelty come home to them. They are not told about the graciousness of God in a parable but are shown a situation of ordinary life which has been revolutionised by grace.... we do not interpret the parable, but the parable interprets us.17

The stories of Jesus and the stories about Jesus are not to be heard once and forgotten, not to be reduced to moral, doctrinal or ethical statements. Stories communicate, help us to understand and express emotions, call us into dialogue in which Bible stories form a counterpoint to our own individual life stories. These stories mediate redemptive truth,

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they do not simply inform us about it. When they do inform us, they make it clear that knowing about the kingdom is not the crucial thing; it is deciding and acting when we are confronted by it which is of ultimate importance. John Donahue puts it well: ‘Human life itself is a story lived out in time where memory re-creates the past and hope envisions a future. To read a parable or a Gospel is to align our stories with those told by Jesus and about him.’18 Notes to Chapter 9 Hymn by Maria Penstone (1859-1910), repr. in Baptist Praise and Worship,

1

200. Northrop Frye, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983), p. xiii. 3 Lesslie Newbiggin, Transmission (Newsletter of the Bible Society), Spring 1997. 4 Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God. A Response to the Bible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 233. 5 John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, XVII, repr. in John Donne. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (London: Nonesuch Press, 1941), p. 537f. 6 The exploration of this relationship in recent years has gone under the name of ‘narrative theology’. Hans W. Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) urged a recovery of a biblical hermeneutic based in narrative, analyzing and regretting its loss in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a useful survey, see George W. Stroup, The Promise of Narrative Theology (London: SCM Press, 1981). 7 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, transl. and ed. Margaret Hunt and James Stern (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1948), p. 701f. 8 The Book of J. Translated from the Hebrew by David Rosenberg. Introduction by Harold Bloom (London: Faber, 1991), p. 249. 9 Amos Wilder, The Language of the Gospel. Early Christian Rhetoric (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 82. 10 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, p. 14. 11 Sallie TeSelle, Speaking in Parables. A Study in Metaphor and Theology (London: SCM Press, 1975), p. 13. 12 Josipovici, The Book of God, p. 227. 13 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, p. 198. 2

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Gerd Theissen, The Historical Jesus. A Comprehensive Guide (London: SCM, 1998), p. 313. 15 Ibid. 16 Choan-Seng Song , Theology from the Womb of Asia (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. 46. 17 TeSelle, Speaking in Parables, p. 68. 18 Donahue, The Gospel in Parable, p. 25. 14

10 Preaching the Parables Oddly, Christianity has been guilty of undervaluing the earthly ministry of Jesus, including his parables. This seems to begin in the New Testament, where the Epistles are surprisingly silent on the life and teaching of Jesus, and contain no reference to his parables. Some people have deduced from this that the New Testament Church quickly lost interest in the historical Jesus, and focused instead on ‘the Christ of faith’. However, the legitimacy of this deduction must be questioned by a consideration of the Johannine books of the New Testament. The Epistles of John resemble all the other Epistles in saying little or nothing of the life or teaching of Jesus. Yet it would be disastrously mistaken to deduce a lack of interest or concern for the historical Jesus in the author, because the existence of the Gospel of John, emanating from the same author or circle of authors makes it abundantly plain that they knew a great deal about the history of Jesus, and thought it sufficiently important to produce the Gospel. Later in Christian history, the Creeds jump from his birth to his passion, as though only the plain fact of incarnation, and the events of his redeeming death and resurrection were important, not who he was and what he said and did. Relatively few traditional Christian hymns, and virtually no modern worship choruses, celebrate events of his ministry or his teaching. Dogmatic Protestantism has tended to focus on the Epistles of Paul, rather than the Gospels, and John’s Gospel has been treated as more spiritual and important theologically than the three Synoptics. Narrative and parables cannot readily be incorporated into systematic theology! Thomas Hardy in his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles accurately describes this mindset in his description of Mr. Clare, an evangelical clergyman, as one who loved St. Paul, liked St. John and hated St. James as much as he dared… The New Testament was less a Christiad than a Pauliad to his intelligence.1

Some branches of fundamentalist Protestantism have even, incredibly, relegated the teaching of Jesus to the ‘dispensation’ of Law rather than Grace. For instance, the once influential Scofield Reference Bible2 divides

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the text of the Bible into seven distinct ‘dispensations’. Of these, the fifth, ‘Law’, is said to have been inaugurated by the giving of the Law to Moses (Exodus 19.8) and to have continued till the rending of the Temple veil (Matthew 27.51 and the corresponding point in the other Gospels). Only at that point in time does the sixth (current) dispensation of ‘Grace’ begin. According to this scheme therefore, the parables, together with the rest of Jesus’ teaching, are to be understood as Law, not Grace, belonging essentially to the Old Covenant, not the New. These are perhaps some of the reasons why the parables are not preached on as much as they should be. Additional reasons include the practice of preaching formal three-part sermons upon a short text, which does not easily accommodate longer narrative. Those preachers who do verse-by-verse Bible studies as sermons, or theological word studies, do not find the parables easy to handle in these formats, since the action and the attitudes of the characters are usually more important than the precise language. Preaching is not instruction, the passing on of information, but at its best a shared encounter with God through his word, which therefore touches emotions and spirituality as well as minds. Yet sermons have often been modelled on the lecture or scholarly discourse, a format with little scope for the extended narrative. Again, ‘stories of Jesus’ have been extensively used in work with children, and this may have produced the unspoken thought that the parables are childish, the milk of the Gospel rather than its red meat. Perhaps the influence of Scofield, whether recognized or not, has deterred some preachers and pastors from giving the parables the attention and weight they deserve. Preachers may also have been deterred from using the parables by the reductionist false understandings of them that have been current. Even reputable and influential scholars have regarded some of the parables as mere moral example stories—fit for little more than a sermon illustration on ‘neighbourliness’ or ‘prayer’, for instance. Others have arbitrarily insisted that each parable only has one ‘point’ and that one probably relating to a fairly abstruse understanding of the kingdom of God. If preachers have been taught to rule out the richness by categorizing the symbolism, the allegorical elements, the drama, the poetry and the strangeness of the parables as only (excess) sugar coating for a pill of theological or moral truism, it is perhaps not surprising that sermons on the parables do not

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readily suggest themselves. Yet others have suggested that the parables as we have them in the Gospels reflect the interests of the early Church rather than Jesus, and so a process of reconstruction of the original story as told by Jesus is needed before their true message can be revealed. Few congregations would understand the necessary arguments during a sermon, and few would readily accept that the plain meaning of the story in the Bible text does not represent Jesus’s ideas. Whatever the reasons, conscious or unconscious, it is time the parables were preached again. They are an important chosen method of Jesus for teaching and preaching, both to the uncommitted crowds, and to his disciples. They represent a large proportion of the recorded content of what he had to say, particularly according to the Synoptic Gospels. They would not be part of our Holy Scripture if they had not been remembered and handed on. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and—in a lesser degree—John, all thought them worthy of the attention of God’s people, and saw them as part of the gospel. The Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has included them within the canon of Holy Scripture. It is undoubtedly Jesus’ mind that his people should know these stories, think upon them, and live with them and by them. Preachers have a vital function in making the parables known, and encouraging God’s people to take them into their hearts and minds. Preaching the parables need not be a duty undertaken for duty’s sake. They provide a wealth of important themes. The gospel of forgiveness, of God’s seeking for and inviting the lost, is found in the three parables of Luke 15 and in the parables of the Great Feast and the Wicked Tenants. The compelling need for a change of heart and attitude in those who have experienced the sweetness of God and his ways is found in the parables of the Labourers in the Vineyard and the Two Debtors. There are parables on prayer, on the correct use of possessions and money, on practical responsibility for the victims of society, and on the co-existence of good and evil. And although characters and motives are generally only lightly sketched in, according to the tradition and method of Hebrew Biblical narrative, psychological, moral and spiritual lessons may be drawn by inference from the behaviour, attitudes and relationships of the people in them. Thus, we find ideas on parenting and sibling rivalry (the Prodigal Son), on the self-fulfilling prophecy of victim mentality (the Talents), on

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the danger of allowing our self-esteem to be damaged by resentment and envy, and allowing damaged self-esteem to spoil our lives in other ways (The Labourers in the Vineyard). Above all, the parables speak of the nature of God and of his kingdom, puzzling and intriguing us as we seek to understand and experience just what God’s kingdom is, and what it might mean for it to ‘come on earth, as in heaven.’ When God’s people are comfortable with the idea of parables, of truth carried in incident and example, of detecting meaning under the surface and in the questions posed as well as the answers offered, then they are much better placed to detect God at work in today’s world, including events of their own lives. They will also better understand the Incarnation, and will be enabled to see Jesus as the ultimate Parable of God. Preaching is very much a personal and individual matter, and every preacher must work to discover his or her own style. It would therefore be invidious and useless to try to lay down instructions on how the parables should be preached. Instead, I intend to survey how they have been used by preachers of various times and nationalities, in the hope that this will stimulate others, and open up minds to a range of possibilities. Historically, there have been three approaches to preaching the parables. They have been treated as allegories, they have been moralized, and more recently, they have been expounded. In recent years, increasing numbers of preachers have responded to the parables more creatively, re-locating them, exploring possibilities within them, even playing with them. We shall now explore these various approaches, using examples from genuine sermons. Parable as Allegory For very many centuries, the parables were regarded as allegory. It was not thought possible that the Holy Spirit could have inspired Scripture stories in which details were present only to add colour and drama and heighten character, so preachers made a double assumption—that there must be hidden meaning in every detail, and that allegory provides the correct tool for de-coding.

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As we have already seen,3 there are allegorical elements in the parables, which often need to be brought out. But the preacher must maintain the important distinction between allegory meant by Jesus or the Gospelwriters, and allegory read in by the interpreter, which has no roots in the mind, experience and context of the original story and its author. The early interpretation of the numerical results in the Parable of the Sower, that the thirtyfold, sixtyfold and hundredfold yield of grain represent respectively the mass of Christians, Gospel celibates and martyrs is hardly faithful to Jesus and his intentions; nor is it likely to commend itself to modern congregations. Allegorical elements such as vineyard or harvest, already used as such in the Old Testament, would have been meaningful to Jesus, his first hearers, the Gospel writers or the early Church, so are much more likely to be valid. Early in this century, James Denney wrote: Don’t try in the interests of an arbitrary theory to eliminate everything allegorical and don’t trim the texts into pure parables. On the other hand, don’t allegorise to the point which mars the one lesson every parable was meant to teach.4

Allegorical sermons, or rather, sermons which develop one or more elements of a parable symbolically, can still be effective. For example, Martin Luther King preached on the parable of the Friend at Midnight (Luke 11) during the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, at a very significant moment in the black Civil Rights campaign.5 The first words of his sermon make it clear that he knew perfectly well that the parable was originally intended to give teaching about prayer. Nevertheless, he proceeded to allegorize or use the parable symbolically, particularly verses 5-6: Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set before him? (RSV)

King takes midnight as a symbol of the darkness and hopelessness of human affairs, in the social order, in individual psychological life with widespread fear and meaninglessness, and also in the moral order, where right and wrong are seen simply to be relative to the likes and dislikes of

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a particular community. In these kinds of darkness, he detects the sound of knocking, as people turn to the Church, in large numbers in the USA and increasing numbers in the countries of Eastern Europe, despite efforts to abolish or discourage religious faith. They are looking for the bread of faith, hope and love, the three loaves of the parable. Sadly, laments King, the Church is often unwilling to give the bread. Poor people around the world have asked for the bread of justice, black people for the bread of freedom, many in the midnight of war for the bread of peace; but too often Churches have aligned themselves with ruling classes, and sanctioned oppression and violence. American black churches too, fail to deliver bread, offering emotionalism, or class consciousness instead. Nevertheless, some people keep knocking, despite disappointments, because Jesus Christ, the bread of life is there. And midnight, declares King, will not last for ever—dawn must come because God is good and just. The American slaves were aware of brutal midnight when they sang Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’,

but they also sang ‘I’m so glad trouble don’t last alway’.

In preaching this way, Luther King knew perfectly well that he was not expounding the parable as Jesus intended it for its original hearers. But he took the central human situation of the parable—human need at a difficult time in difficult circumstances—and addressed another set of needs in his contemporaries. Preaching to a congregation of black Christians, the parable provided evocative common ground for preacher and people to meet and hear God’s word to them—beyond the parable. Parable as Morality Story The danger of inventing ingenious allegory and reading it into parables has been well emphasized and illustrated, not only in this book but in many books on the parables. For all that, the excesses of interpreters do not cancel out the existence of allegorical elements in the parables. Similarly, there are certainly moral elements in parables such as the Rich

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Fool, the Two Builders and the Good Samaritan. However, indiscriminate moralizing is rarely helpful. For instance, the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16.19-31) does have some moral content. The rich man after death suffers either because he was unaware of Lazarus’ plight, or because he hardened his heart against helping him, particularly reprehensible in view of his ostentatious lifestyle. Even after the reversal brought about by death, he still seems to regard Lazarus as a lackey who should be at his beck and call. But he is not all bad. He shows a certain commendable concern for his family, wanting his brothers to be warned against a selfish lifestyle before it is too late. This apart, nothing is said of his faith, his religion, or his morals, while even less is said of Lazarus, who is an entirely passive character. Within the text, the parable nowhere suggests that Lazarus is in Abraham’s bosom for his faith or his virtue, but only as compensation for his miserable existence on earth. However, this does not prevent John Bunyan from drawing more extensive moral conclusions in a sermon published with the rather lengthy title, typical of his times: A Few Sighs from Hell or The Groans of a Damned Soul or, an exposition of those words in the sixteenth of Luke, concerning the Rich Man and the Beggar. Wherein is discovered the lamentable state of the damned; their cries, their desires in their distress with the determination of God upon them. A good warning word to sinners, both old and young to take into consideration betimes, and to seek, by faith in Jesus Christ, to avoid, lest they come into the same place of torment... By that poor and contemptible servant of Jesus Christ, John Bunyan.6

In his moral ‘warning’, Bunyan goes way beyond what the parable teaches of the nature of Hell, and the suffering there: Set the case you should take a man, and tie him to a stake, and with red-hot pinchers, pinch off his flesh by little pieces for two or three years together, and at last, when the poor man cries out for ease and help, the tormentors answer, Nay, ‘but beside all this, you must be handled worse. We will serve you thus these twenty years together, and after that we will fill your mangled body full of scalding lead, or run you through with a red-hot spit’; would

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not this be lamentable. Yet this is but a flea-biting to the sorrow of those that go to hell. Bunyan also draws surprising moral conclusions from the rich man and Lazarus on the way that God’s people and unbelievers should adjust their lifestyles; the former, he urges, should be more enthusiastic in attending worship, while the uncommitted should turn from their worldly ways to Christ: O thou that wast loth to foul thy foot if it were but dirty, or did but rain; thou that wast loth to come out of the chimney-corner, if the wind did but blow a little cold; and wast loth to go half-a-mile, yea, half-a-furlong to hear the word of God, if it were but a little dark; thou that wast loth to leave a few vain companions, to edify thy soul; thou shalt have fire enough, thou shalt have night enough, and evil company enough, thy bellyfull, if thou miss of Jesus Christ; and ‘beside all this,’ thou shalt have them for ever and for ever. O thou that dost spend whole nights in carding and dicing, in rioting and wantonness; thou that countest it a brave thing to swear as fast as the bravest, to spend with the greatest spendthrift in the country; thou that loves to sin in a corner where nobody sees thee! O thou that for bye-ends dost carry on the hypocrite’s profession, because thou wouldest be counted somebody among the children of God, but art an enemy to the things of Christ in thine heart. Thou that does satisfy thyself either with sins, or a bare profession of godliness, thy soul will fall into extreme torment and anguish, so soon as ever thou dost depart this world, and there thou shalt be weeping and gnashing thy teeth. More recently, A. Jülicher, a very notable figure in the history of parable study, taught that the parable of the talents holds the messages of ‘fidelity in all that God has entrusted to us’ and ‘reward is only earned by performance’.7 Mrs Margaret Thatcher, when British Prime Minister, notoriously drew the conclusion from the Parable of the Good Samaritan that it is important to make money and – like the Samaritan—‘have

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money in your pocket’, since only then is one in the position to help others in need. While it is not surprising that a lay person with little theological training and Biblical insight should deduce a moral meaning that Jesus and Luke could not possibly have intended, preachers who should know better have been guilty of the same error. George Buttrick, a distinguished American preacher of a previous generation, says of the Labourers in the Vineyard: ‘This is not an economic tract but it is a demand that industry shall exist for man, and not man for industry.’8 Such an interpretation misses the whole point, and makes Jesus moralize about issues in modern industrial relations which have little or no connection with the original parable. Again, Marcus Dods was known as a ‘Prince of Exegetes’ but this did not stop him moralizing the Parable of the Leaven. Christianity, he said in a sermon, works on this world in an inward, not outward way, and dislikes violent change. Further, it works its changes by the power of personal influence, by mixing and the contact of Christians with non-Christians. It is by having oneself a good character that good is communicated.9 But there is, by contrast, effective moral preaching from the parables. G. A. Studdert Kennedy returned from being a Chaplain in the trenches of the First World War to campaign tirelessly for a better social and political order, in which there would not be widespread unemployment and deprivation. He is probably best remembered for his book of verse, The Unutterable Beauty, much of it passionately anti-war and deeply critical of comfortable but false religion. He was also a considerable preacher. In one of his sermons, on the parable of the Good Samaritan, he explores and extends moral elements implied by the story, in ways that are legitimate and true, even though they would not have been in the mind of Jesus or Luke.10 Firstly, he pushes the parable beyond its single instance of suffering and help to consider the vast scale of human misery and need: The Good Samaritan was lucky, he only struck one man that had been knocked out, and he had all that was necessary—a donkey, some oil and wine and twopence .... I don’t find one man, I find processions of them, and I have not got all that is necessary. If I am to do it properly I seem to need a bottomless pocket, infinite

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wisdom, a fleet of motor-cars and a general hospital, and even that would not be enough, because an enormous number of these poor devils that lie beside the roads to Jericho have not merely been knocked about bodily, they have lost their characters, they have lost their power of will, they are without hope in the world and without faith in themselves or in anything else.... If there is no such thing as the Love of God and His redeeming Power, the endeavour to play the Good Samaritan on the million roads that in this world lead downward from Jerusalem to Jericho would break the heart of the bravest and burst the brain of the cleverest that ever lived on earth. Secondly, Studdert Kennedy extends the story to consider the corporate dimension of social and political responsibility, as well as the individual: ... if he [the Samaritan] had owned the road, his duty would have been to get it cleared of thieves, and not to keep trotting along with a donkey picking up men that had been knocked out..... you and I are part owners ... of these roads to Jericho that are infested by sharks and thieves, and it doesn’t do for us to think that our duty ends in helping to supply endless charitable funds, and financing innumerable societies to save the under-dog. We cannot stop short of an earnest endeavour to clear out the thieves, and so to strengthen the travellers on the road that they may be able to defend themselves against those we cannot clear out. Finally, the preacher considers the part played in a kind deed by the character of the donor. He reminds us that before saying ‘Go and do likewise’ to the lawyer, Jesus had told him ‘The first and greatest commandment is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind and with all thy strength.’ So: What we are matters, as well as what we do. A man has never been up against ultimate reality until he has stood beside a fellow

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man knocked out on the road down to Jericho and, looking at him, realised with horror that he had no donkey, no wine or oil, and not a sou to bless himself with, and nothing to give but himself. Then it is that a man asks ‘What am I worth?’ and cries on his God for help. I have been there many a time and have known, God help me, that I am not worth much. This example demonstrates well that even when the parables are being preached as moral story, there is scope and place for the gospel of God’s grace. Martin Luther King in another sermon expounds the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example story.11 The Samaritan, he proposes, shows altruism which he then proceeds to expound in three-parts: the Samaritan showed universal altruism, dangerous altruism, and excessive altruism. However, the sermon ends as gospel: In our quest to make neighbourly love a reality, we have, in addition to the inspiring example of the good Samaritan, the magnanimous life of our Christ to guide us. His altruism was universal, for he thought of all men, even publicans and sinners, as brothers. His altruism was dangerous, for he willingly travelled hazardous roads in a cause he knew was right. His altruism was excessive, for he chose to die on Calvary, history’s most magnificent expression of obedience to the unenforceable. Exposition of the Parable Perhaps the safest mode of using the parables is by expository preaching. This begins by aiming to make plain the meaning of the parable both in the context of the life and ministry of Jesus and also in the context of the life of the early Church, as indicated by the way the parable is shaped, worded, placed and used in a particular Gospel. This is followed by pointing out its relevance and application for today. As with Biblical preaching generally, there are three questions or topics which need to be dealt with. First, we must ask: what does the Bible actually say? Answering this question involves explication, such as comments on vocabulary, Biblical

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background and the cultural setting which would have been taken for granted by the first hearers and writers of the parables. It may also involve clearing away false presuppositions brought about by traditional titles for the parables, or impressions carried over from childhood or produced by earlier teaching and Christian hymns. We can then move on to what the scripture means: that is, what is it saying about God, human beings, the kingdom of God, faith and discipleship? Second, we must ask: is it true? If it is, in what sense is it true? Clearly, the question of ‘factual’ or ‘historical’ truth should not arise when the vehicle of teaching is the parable, though we have already observed that there are some who assert that we can deduce something of the topography of heaven and doctrines of life to come from the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Daniel Defoe wrote a novel, Colonel Jack, which purports to be the autobiography of a soldier. In his preface, he points to the irrelevance of ‘facticity’ in using many stories: ....neither is it of the least moment to inquire whether the Colonel hath told his own story true or not. If he has made it a history or a parable, it will be equally useful and capable of doing good, and in that it recommends itself without any other introduction.12

Defoe here is drawing attention to an ‘existential truth’ in stories. When preachers examine the truth which parables disclose about human existence, or their truth about the nature of prayer or the generosity and grace of God to be copied by his children, then they must go down deep into their experience of life, their faith, other Scripture, and also the wider experience of the Christian Church, both historical and contemporary. This is to the end that the truth ultimately proclaimed goes beyond intellectual conclusion and dogmatic assertion, and carries passion and commitment. So the third question the expositor must ask is: does it matter? What difference does it make or will it make to my attitudes, my relationships with God and other people, my faith, my lifestyle? If preachers are to be effective in helping their congregations experience the parable as true and important to them, then they must see and feel themselves to be part of the people of God, not apart from the people. They must themselves be

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under the judgement of the Word, both written and proclaimed, not consider themselves as separate, on another side, or even in opposition to the congregation, by virtue of occupying the pulpit. Even when their message is one of judgement, criticism or exhortation—and perhaps especially then—they must think of the church as ‘we’ and not ‘you’. Much of what has gone before in this book will be relevant for the kind of preaching which expounds the parables. Here, however, is an example of the genre. David Buttrick in a book on preaching demonstrates how a sermon could be constructed on the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard.13 In no way, he stresses, should we be trying to teach a congregation the content of the parable, or worse its ‘meaning.’ Rather, the sermon should seek to help the congregation be acted upon by the parable, helping them to move through different mental and emotional experiences of surprise, outrage, empathy with different figures or groups of people, and finally reflecting on themselves and their own attitudes. He analyzes the movement of the parable like this: The three forays in search of workers, plus mention of ‘fair pay,’ leads us to expect a just distribution of wages at the end of a day. When those hired last are paid $40, we are surprised and even impressed by the boss’s kindness. But then when the all-day workers are given the same $40, we are confounded. Automatically, we identify with the first hired as they recite their grievance; surely, they are just in their demands. The boss’s words are like a slap in our face: ‘Take yours and scram!’ Now we are doubly puzzled. At first the boss’s final remarks seem confusing, but finally, we muddle a meaning—there is a theology involved: (1) Didn’t you bargain with me for $40? Good heavens, do we conceive our lives as a performance/merit deal with God? (2) ‘Can’t I do what I want with my own?’ See God’s sovereign freedom! God is free even from our notions of justice. (3) ‘Is your nose out of joint because I’m generous?’ makes sense in view of the preceding remarks. If grace is free and generous, it will be resented by anyone who lives in a bargain and calculates advantage.’

Buttrick then sketches brief notes for a sermon with the following six ‘moves’, which we may summarize as follows:

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• Link the story into the congregation’s sense of justice in work: ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’. • Link the story into a sense of justice in religion: is it fair that someone like the dying thief who did nothing for anybody should get into heaven alongside those who have served sacrificially for a lifetime? • So does God say to us, if we demand ‘fairness’, ‘Take your religion and get out of my church’? Don’t we bargain with God when we pray, worship or give, expecting at least God’s approval, if not reward? • Have we been thinking about faith as a bargain with God? If so, no wonder we have resented our neighbours, because we have assumed that they are in a comparable agreement, and we don’t like it if they get anything free. • In God’s kingdom, everything is charity. It’s all free grace, we can never earn the cross or deserve mercy. We live in God’s free grace for all. Buttrick offers in conclusion: Tough to try to live in two worlds at once. We think we’re in a world of earn-and-get dealing with a paymaster God. Well, suppose we’re wrong. The real world, God’s world, is free. So, look how we can live. Not calculating ‘rights’ but giving ourselves away in love, love for love, in God’s good grace.14 Expository preaching does not, of course, have to concern itself with the whole narrative. D. Cleverley Ford, in his Theological Preacher’s Notebook, has a sermon on Matthew 25.27, the Parable of the Talents.15 His interpretation assumes that the third servant who hides his talent is the key point of the parable, that it is about hoarding, not trading, and his sermon has three points. First, the third servant represents the spiritual attitude of the Scribes, who were beginning to want to ‘fence’ their faith, and preserve it, pure and untarnished, free from contact with outsiders and all change and progress. His second point is that the church can behave like the third servant, by being fearful of new thought, of being defiled. Third, the individual Christian can hoard his faith, refusing to witness publicly among non-believers; he can join a rigid, narrow and exclusive sect of the like-minded where nothing is questioned or challenged. But rather we

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must mix, circulate, make sure that God’s ‘money’ entrusted to us is circulating in the world with every other idea and ideology. A.M. Hunter points out that ‘A true Word of the Lord may be drawn from a parable of Jesus even though it depends on a turn of meaning not uppermost in our Lord’s mind when he spoke the parable’16 and he offers two examples. George H. Morrison had a sermon on ‘The Two Petitions of the Prodigal’—‘ Father, give’ and ‘Father, make me’—illustrating the changes in attitude which grace brought to the young man, and which the coming of grace ought to make to us.17 Kierkegaard found teaching on penitence in ‘The Pharisee and the Publican’. True penitence, he urged, must include three elements: (1) being alone with God as the Publican was: when we are alone we realize how far from God we are; (2) looking downwards as the Publican did: when we see the majesty and holiness of God, we begin to realize our own littleness and weakness; (3) awareness of being in danger such as the Publican had when he cried for mercy: when we feel safe, like the Pharisee, we are in peril.18 Exposition like this, going beyond the intention of the original teller but in tune with it, has also often been applied to the parable of the Prodigal Son. Some, for instance, have explored the sequence of imagery of being ‘dead’ and ‘alive’, to preach on experiences of death and resurrection in life: the father divides his ‘living’, the son says ‘I will arise and go to my father...’, and the father twice speaks of a son who was ‘dead and is alive.’ Creativity and the Parable Narrative invites us to empathize, to fill in the gaps of character and motivation, to imagine the continuation of the story and its sequel. It is therefore possible to use the parables in preaching with imagination and creativity. Naturally, it is not possible to give detailed instructions on how to do this, but there are examples of good practice which can stimulate us into making our own experiments and ventures. One technique is to change the shape of the parable. The perspective, for instance, from which the parable is told can be changed. The Prodigal Son might be re-told from the point of view of the Elder Brother, or the Labourers in the Vineyard from the point of view of the last group of

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workers. Alternatively, or additionally, the cultural setting can be changed. Sometimes, an incident from real life may do this. Sir Alec Rose, the single-handed yachtsman tells in his autobiography19 of repeatedly risking his life while crossing the Atlantic in an attempt to rescue a pigeon. This bird was lost, or had been blown out to sea when it landed on his yacht. It was crotchety in nature and as is the way with pigeons, fouled his cabin. One day, the pigeon flew to take its exercise, but missed the boat when it came in to land, hitting the sea instead. He tried time after time to rescue it in a bucket, leaning far out over the edge of his yacht, while simultaneously trying to steer and not lose sight of a tiny grey bird in a wilderness of grey water every time he turned to try to sail close to it. Such a modern story can easily become another parable of seeking for the lost, as in the set of three in Luke 15. In a superb sermon, the American preacher Jerry Camery-Hoggatt20 describes to his congregation how he had been mentally preparing, while driving along the highway, the sermon which he is now delivering to them on the Good Samaritan. He wonders whether to re-draw the Priest and Levite as a Baptist Minister and deacon, and the Samaritan as an atheist. In the searing heat, he passes five migrant workers trying with inadequate tools to mend their old vehicle which had a puncture. It then comes to him, that the Samaritan was perhaps culturally equivalent to an illegal alien in the USA. Later, he recounts the story of how he himself breaks down after a bad day in a borrowed car with no air-conditioning, and sees a car speeding past him, in his imagination with one of the migrant workers at the wheel. He then informs the congregation that he cannot preach on the Good Samaritan at all! His highly original approach allows him to do much exposition in the context of a real-life contemporary story, and by portraying himself within his story both as Priest/Levite and victim in need of help, he makes it possible for his hearers to re-live some of the experience and surprise of the lawyer and the first audience. A second technique is to explore some of what seem at first sight to be the less important elements of a parable. I have myself a sermon on the Wicked Tenants which first of all considers the parable in the light of those characters – so exploring the sin and rejection of the Jewish authorities at the time of Jesus’ passion. I then move on to consider it under a different possible title, ‘The Parable of the Patient Vineyard Owner’, or

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even ‘The Parable of the Crazy Vineyard Owner’, and speak of God’s love and mercy as implied by the character of the owner. Finally, I suggest the title ‘The Parable of the Suffering, Silent Son’ and explore the character of the owner’s son, who makes the final appeal on behalf of his father. The popular title of the parable, the Wicked Tenants, puts all the emphasis on them. More thoughtful recent approaches focus on the owner of the vineyard, who is proactive in creating it, patient with its occupants, whose motivation is revealed by a touching soliloquy, and who draws the story to a close in a punitive raid. By contrast, little is said in the story of the son and nothing of his views. He seems to be the less important of the characters, and yet on closer inspection he is a key figure in the narrative. As agent for his father in a difficult business, the son must have been legally of age, and well-briefed as to the mission he undertook. We can therefore assume that he acted willingly, and was in agreement with the owner that a final appeal was right, rather than sending a posse of troops to evict the ne’er-do-well tenants. This leads on to a consideration of Jesus as being of one mind with the Father, of knowingly sacrificing his life for those unworthy of him. Considering his key role in the drama, the silence of the son seems the more telling and remarkable. A third technique involves looking at a parable laterally, seeing it from such a different perspective that a different or variant parable emerges. Gerd Theissen provides a wonderful example in a sermon on the Lost Sheep (Luke 15.3-7), in which he says ‘If I put myself in the situation of the ninety-nine, I would say that it’s a parable of the lost shepherd. One missing sheep wouldn’t cause any disturbance in a large flock. Perhaps it wouldn’t even be noticed. But what happens when the shepherd goes? That causes difficulties for the flock.’21 He then adds a variation on the parable. Once upon a time there was a flock of sheep. One day the shepherd disappeared. The sheep became restless. ‘Where’s the shepherd?’ they asked in agitation. One of them said, ‘He’ll come back. We must just be patient.’ Another said, ‘He’s disappeared for ever, we must get on without him.’ A third suggested, ‘Perhaps he’s looking for a lost sheep.’ A fourth said, ‘Perhaps something has happened to him. But a particularly wise sheep said, ‘We

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must look for the shepherd. We must do something to get over this lack of direction. Perhaps the shepherd has only gone away to test us. Perhaps he wants us to behave differently from the way sheep usually do.’ So they decided to look for the shepherd. They formed small reconnaissance parties and combed the country. They didn’t find the shepherd. But they found many lost sheep and brought them all home. They would never have imagined how many sheep were lost. But they never found the shepherd. However, they didn’t give up. Finally they came upon him. They were too late. He had fallen among robbers. The sheep saw in helpless rage that the robbers had first plundered and robbed him, and then killed him. Confused and in grief they returned. There is more, but I have quoted enough to indicate how Theissen, by taking liberties with the original parable and being imaginative, is able to explore the character of the Good Shepherd, the meaning of salvation, and some implications of being God’s flock. In his book on preaching, The Sign Language of Faith, Theissen suggests the value of varying the action in another parable: Four variant actions are conceivable in the parable of the prodigal son. I shall mention only one of them: the prodigal son comes back from abroad, by no means on his beam ends but with a fortune. He returns as a rich man, marries a rich woman and has many slaves, much property. Yet he is still the prodigal son, since he has denied the principles that he learned in his father’s house to acquire his riches. He has howled with the wolves, and lost no opportunity to enrich himself at the expense of others. Such a variation on the action fits a Central European congregation much better, since such a congregation usually contains well-to-do people.22

Such creative re-working is not limited to more radical theologians, as two examples from preachers of a conservative position illustrate. First, Gordon Bailey turns the prodigal into a modern version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim in his prose poem ‘Prodigal Preoccupied’.23

Preaching the Parables

Disillusioned, discouraged, dejected; his resources dissipated; The Prodigal determined to seek reconciliation With Father and Home. But on his journey He was waylaid by a septet of female strangers: Miss Apprehend, a pseudo-scientist, Offered him an unproven theory That his father didn’t exist. Miss Givings, an agnostic, Said to him that if there was such a person as ‘father’, And a place called ‘home’, She didn’t know about them. Miss Belief, calling herself an atheist, Bluntly said that there was no such place as ‘home’, And no such person as ‘father’. Miss Taken, a pseudo-psychoanalyst, Suggested that he had a father-fixation, And that ‘home’ was but a dream fantasy. She also suggested treatment at 25 guineas a session. Miss Informed, a cynic, Smiled at him, with curled lip, And mocked his every step. Miss Guided, a humanist, Told him he didn’t need a father, And that the fulfilment of his needs Could be found only within himself. And Miss Chief, a liberal theologian, Told him, glibly, that his father was dead! The father, a very real father, A very out-of-breath father, Running to meet the Prodigal, Stopped Then wept tears of love As he saw the fast-disappearing

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Figure of his son, with back turned, Moving even further away. The Prodigal meanwhile, armed with aerosol spray, Marched back towards the pigsty, Determined to make the best Of the very worst.

Offering a further example, the New Testament scholar Tom Wright picks up the action at a later point, changes it, extends it beyond its Biblical conclusion (though Luke himself has left the ending open) and 23 allegorizes it somewhat. He interprets the parable of the Prodigal Son as dealing with the relationship between Christianity (the younger sibling multiplied by four) and Judaism (the elder). Once upon a time there was a man with five children. The oldest stayed at home and worked hard, while the other four—two boys, two girls—went off with as much loot as they could, lived it up, went bust, and came home with their tails between their legs. The father welcomed them all back with amazing generosity, and gave them a party, while the elder brother sulked outside. The morning after, the four younger ones got together over a pot of black coffee to talk it through. ‘What are we going to do about Judah?’ said the first, whose name was Constantine. ‘He was so snooty last night—stalked off with his nose in the air as though we were something the cat had brought in. He made me so mad. Why don’t we all get together and beat him up, and teach him a lesson?’ ‘Hey, steady on,’ said the second, who was called Portia. ‘He is our brother, after all. I’ve got a better idea. Let’s have a wild party again tonight, and we’ll pick him up and drag him in by force and make him enjoy himself.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the third, whose name was Enlightenment. ‘I think he’s so different from us, it would be better to leave him alone entirely. He can go his way and we can go ours. It

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would be very arrogant of us to attempt to say anything to him or even about him. If we just ignore him....’ ‘Ignore him?’ said the fourth, whose name was Pauline. ‘Look, I couldn’t sleep last night. I was so sad when Judah walked out (and I can quite understand why he did); it was as though part of me went with him. I don’t think we’ll feel like a proper family again until he comes back. But he’ll have to come back in his own way and his own time. We certainly can’t put pressure on him. We mustn’t project our own guilt on to him. But what we can do, perhaps, is to try to live here in such a way that he’ll want to come back. We can hold the sort of party he would enjoy. We can let him know how sorry we are, and make it clear he’s really welcome, that we really do want him back. And I’ll tell you something else. Perhaps we should ask Father to have another go at persuading him. That’s probably the best way of all.’ In yet another imaginative approach, Luigi Santucci25 conducts us around a small town in the Holy Land, and introduces us to all the characters of the parables, not only the good ones but also the villains, in their self-righteousness, bitterness, tunnel-vision, hardness and inconsistency. I borrowed his idea and preached on ‘All the villains of the Parables’ which allowed me to present some old truths in a fresh way. Do read the parables; do read books about the parables; do read other people’s sermons on them. May some of the Spirit of Jesus, the storyteller genius, the humorist, the puzzler, the secret of the kingdom, rest upon those of us who are preachers as we share his stories with his people. Notes to Chapter 10 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (London: Folio Society, 1988), ch. 25, p. 164. 2 The Scofield Reference Bible. The Holy Bible…. edited by C.I. Scofield, New Improved Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945). 1

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See above, p. 68-71. James Denney, in The Expositor, August/September 1911. 5 Martin Luther King, Sermon ‘A Knock at Midnight’ in Luther King, Strength to Love (London: Collins/Fontana, 1969), pp. 56ff. 6 John Bunyan, Sermon repr. in Monica Furlong (ed.), The Trial of John Bunyan and the Persecution of the Puritans (London: Folio Society, 1978), pp. 179ff. 7 Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, II, p. 495. 8 George A. Buttrick, The Parables of Jesus (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929), p. 161. 9 Cited in Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 97. 10 Geoffrey A. Studdert Kennedy, The New Man in Christ, ed. William Moore (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1932), pp. 232ff. 11 Luther King, Strength to Love, p. 35. 12 Daniel Defoe, Colonel Jack (London: Folio Society, 1967), Preface, p. 14. 13 David Buttrick, Homiletics, pp. 347ff. 14 Ibid., p. 351. 15 D. W. Cleverley Ford, A Theological Preacher’s Notebook (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962), pp. 139ff. 16 Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 100. 17 Cited in Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, p. 92. 18 Cited in Hunter, Interpreting the Parables, pp. 92-3. 19 Alec Rose, Around the World with Lively Lady (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968). 20 Jeremy Camery-Hoggatt, Speaking of God (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), pp. 195ff. 21 Gerd Theissen, The Open Door. Variations on Biblical Themes (London: SCM Press, 1991), p. 87. 22 Gerd Theissen, The Sign Language of Faith. Opportunities for Preaching Today (London: SCM Press, 1995), p. 28. 23 Gordon Bailey, Stuff and Nonsense (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1989), pp. 64ff. 24 N. T. Wright, For All God’s Worth (London: Triangle, 1997), pp. 112ff. 25 Luigi Santucci, Wrestling with Christ (London: Collins, 1972), pp. 107ff. 3 4

Appendix Literary Re-workings of Some Parables Joseph Andrews (1742), Chapter 12, Book I by Henry Fielding1 [The hero on a journey has been robbed, beaten unconscious, stripped naked and thrown into a ditch.] The poor wretch, who lay motionless a long time, just began to recover his senses as a stage-coach came by. The postillion, hearing a man’s groans, stopt his horses, and told the coachman, he was certain there was a dead man lying in the ditch, for he heard him grown. ‘Go on, sirrah,’ says the coachman; ‘we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead men.’ A lady, who heard what the postillion said, and likewise heard the groan, called eagerly to the coachman to stop and see what was the matter. Upon which he bid the postillion alight, and look into the ditch. He did so, and returned, ‘that there was a man sitting upright, as naked as ever he was born.’—‘O J-sus!’ cried the lady. ‘a naked man! Dear coachman, drive on and leave him.’ Upon this the gentlemen got out of the coach; and Joseph begged them to have mercy upon him: for that he had been robbed and almost beaten to death. ‘Robbed!’ cries an old gentleman: ‘let us make all the haste imaginable, or we shall be robbed too.’ A young man who belonged to the law answered, ‘He wished they had passed by without taking any notice; but that now they might be proved to have been last in his company; if he should die they might be called to some account for his murder. He therefore thought it advisable to save the poor creature’s life, for their own sakes, if possible; at least, if he died, to prevent the jury’s finding that they fled for it. He was therefore of opinion to take the man into the coach, and carry him to the next inn.’ The lady insisted, ‘That he should not come into the coach. That if they lifted him in, she would herself alight; for she had rather stay in that place to all eternity than ride with a naked man.’ The coachman objected, ‘That he could not suffer him to be taken in unless somebody would pay a shilling for his carriage the four miles.’ Which the two gentlemen refused to do. The lawyer, who was afraid of some mischief happening to himself,

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if the wretch was left behind in that condition, saying no man could be too cautious in these matters, and that he remembered very extraordinary cases in the books, threatened the coachman, and bid him deny taking him up at his peril; for that, if he died, he should be indicted for his murder; and if he lived, and brought an action against him, he would willingly take a brief in it. These words had a sensible effect on the coachman, who was well acquainted with the person who spoke them; and the old gentleman above mentioned, thinking the naked man would afford him frequent opportunities of showing his wit to the lady, offered to join with the company in giving a mug of beer for his fare; till, partly alarmed by the threats of the one, and partly by the promises of the other, and being perhaps a little moved with compassion at the poor creature’s condition, who stood bleeding and shivering with the cold, he at length agreed; and Joseph was now advancing to the coach, where, seeing the lady, who held the sticks of her fan before her eyes, he absolutely refused, miserable as he was, to enter, unless he was furnished with sufficient covering to prevent giving the least offence to decency—so perfectly modest was this young man... Though there were several greatcoats about the coach, it was not easy to get over this difficulty which Joseph had started. The two gentlemen complained they were cold, and could not spare a rag; the man of wit saying, with a laugh, that charity began at home; and the coachman, who had two greatcoats spread under him, refused to lend either, lest they should be made bloody; the lady’s footman desired to be excused for the same reason, which the lady herself, notwithstanding her abhorrence of a naked man, approved: and it is more than probable poor Joseph, who obstinately adhered to his modest resolution, must have perished, unless the postillion (a lad who hath since been transported for robbing a hen-roost) had voluntarily stript off a greatcoat, his only garment, at the same time swearing a great oath (for which he was rebuked by the passengers), ‘that he would rather ride in his shirt all his life than suffer a fellow-creature to lie in so miserable a condition.’ Joseph, having put on the greatcoat, was lifted into the coach, which now proceeded on its journey. He declared himself almost dead with the cold, which gave the man of wit an occasion to ask the lady if she could not accommodate him with a dram. She answered with some resentment,

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‘She wondered at his asking her such a question: but assured him she never tasted any such thing.’ The lawyer was inquiring into the circumstances of the robbery, when the coach stopt, and one of the ruffians, putting a pistol in, demanded their money of the passengers, who readily gave it them; and the lady, in her fright, delivered up a little silver bottle, of about a half-pint size, which the rogue, clapping it to his mouth, and drinking her health, declared, held some of the best Nantes he had ever tasted: this the lady afterwards assured the company was the mistake of her maid, for that she had ordered her to fill the bottle with Hungary-water. The Newer Vainglory Two men went up to pray; and one gave thanks, Not with himself—aloud, With proclamation—calling on the ranks Of an attentive crowd. ‘Thank God, I clap not my own humble breast, But other ruffians’ backs, Imputing crime—such is my tolerant haste— To any man that lacks. ‘For I am tolerant, generous, keep no rules, And the age honours me. Thank God, I am not as these rigid fools, Even as this Pharisee.’ Alice Meynell2 Apologue on the Parable of the Wedding Garment The Prince Immanuel gave a ball: cards, adequately sent to all who by the smallest kind of claim were known to royalty by name, held, red on white, the neat express instruction printed: Fancy Dress.

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Within Earth’s town there chanced to be a gentleman of quality, whose table, delicately decked, centred at times the Court’s elect; there Under-Secretaries dined, Gold Sticks in Waiting spoke their mind, or through the smoke of their cigars discussed the taxes and the wars, and ran administrations down, but always blessed the Triune Crown. The ball drew near; the evening came. Our lordling, conscious of his name, retained particular distaste for dressing-up, and half effaced, by a subjective sleight of eye objectionable objectivity the card’s direction. ‘I long since have been familiar with the Prince at public meetings and bazaars, and even ridden in his cars,’ he thought, ‘His Highness will excuse a freedom, knowing that I use always my motto to obey: Egomet semper: I alway.’ Neatly and shiningly achieved in evening dress, his car received his figure, masked but otherwise completely in his usual guise. Behold, the Palace; and the guest approached the Door among the rest. The Great Hall opened: at his side a voice breathed: ‘Pardon, sir.’ He spied, half turned, a footman. ‘Sir, your card dare I request? This Door is barred

Appendix

to all if not in fancy dress.’ ‘Nonsense.’ ‘Your card, sir!’ ‘I confess I have not strictly ... an old friend ... his Highness ... come, let me ascend. My family has always been in its own exquisite habit seen. What, argue?’ Dropping rays of light the footman uttered: ‘Sir, tonight is strictly kept as strictly given; the fair equivalents of heaven exhibit at our lord’s desire their other selves, and all require virtues and beauties not their own ere genuflecting at the Throne. Sir, by your leave.’ ‘But—‘ ‘Look and see.’ The footman’s blazing livery in half-withdrawal left the throng clear to his eyes. He saw along the Great Hall and the Heavenly Stair one blaze of glorious changes there. Cloaks, brooches, decorations, swords, jewels—every virtue that affords (by dispensation of the Throne) beauty to wearers not their own. This guest his brother’s courage wore; that, his wife’s zeal, while, just before, she in his steady patience shone; there a young lover had put on the fine integrity of sense his mistress used; magnificence a father borrowed of his son, who was not there ashamed to don his father’s wise economy. No he or she was he or she merely: no single being dared

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except the Angels of the Guard, come without other kind of dress than his poor life had to profess, and yet those very robes were shown, when from preserval as his own into another’s glory given, bright ambiguities of heaven. Below each change was manifest; above, the Prince received each guest, smiling. Our lordling gazed; in vain he at the footman glanced again. He had his own; his own was all but that permitted at the Ball. The darkness creeping down the street received his virtuous shining feet; and, courteous as such beings are, the Angels bowed him to his car. Charles Williams3 Ash Wednesday Jesus, do I love Thee? Thou art far above me, Seated out of sight, Hid in heavenly light Of most highest height. Martyred hosts implore Thee, Seraphs fall before Thee, Angels and Archangels, Cherub throngs adore Thee. Blessed she that bore Thee! All the saints approve Thee, All the virgins love Thee. I show as a blot Blood hath cleansed not,

Appendix

As a barren spot In thy fruitful lot; I, fig-tree fruit-unbearing, Thou righteous Judge unsparing: What canst Thou do more to me That shall not more undo me? Thy Justice hath a sound, ‘Why cumbereth it the ground?’ Thy Love with stirrings stronger Pleads, ‘Give it one year longer.’ Thou giv’st me time: but who Save Thou shall give me dew, Shall feed my root with blood And stir my sap for good? Oh by Thy gifts that shame me Give more lest they condemn me. Good Lord, I ask much of Thee, But most I ask to love Thee: Kind Lord, be mindful of me, Love me and make me love Thee. Christina Rossetti4 (21 March 1859) The Good Shepherd O Shepherd with the bleeding Feet, Good Shepherd with the pleading Voice, What seekest Thou from hill to hill? Sweet were the valley pastures, sweet The sound of flocks that bleat their joys, And eat and drink at will. Is one worth seeking, when Thou hast of Thine Ninety and nine? How should I stay My bleeding Feet, How should I hush My pleading Voice? I Who chose death and clomb a hill,

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Accounting gall and wormwood sweet, That hundredfold might bud My joys For love’s sake and good will. I seek My one, for all there bide of Mine Ninety and nine. Christina Rossetti5 Notes to Appendix Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (London: Folio Society, 1967), Ch. 12, pp.

1

50ff. Alice Meynell, Poem, ‘The Newer Vainglory’, in The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete Edition (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1923). 3 First published in Time and Tide, December 1940; Repr. Charles Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, Selected by Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 166-8. 4 Christina Rossetti, Poem ‘Ash Wednesday—I’, repr. in Christina Rossetti. Poems: Feasts and Fasts, Introduction by Robert Van de Weyer (London: Collins/Fount, 1996). 5 Christina Rossetti, Poem ‘The Good Shepherd’, repr. in Hugh Martin (ed.), A Treasury of Christian Verse (London: SCM Press, 1965). 2

Index A Aesop, 13, 20, 71, 72, 77 Ahikar, story of, 77 allegory, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 36, 37, 64, 68-70, 71, 90, 148-50 Alter, Robert, 63, 64, 76 Ambrozic, A., 88 Arav, Rami, 15 Archelaus, 9 Augustine, of Hippo, 62, 69, 108 B Bailey, Gordon, 163, 166 Baker, H. W., 97 Balanchine, George, 5 Barash, Asher, 4, 14 Barclay, William, 103, 109, 111 Barrie, James M. 92-3, 95 Barth, Karl, 111 Birkin, Andrew, 95 Bloom, Harold, 135, 143 ‘Book of J’ (i.e. Yahwist’s history), 135, 143 Britten, Benjamin, 5 Brown, Raymond E., 15 Bultmann, Rudolph, 39, 40, 44, 81 Bunyan, John, 68, 69, 76, 151, 152, 163, 166 Buttrick, David, 82, 94, 153, 157, 158, 166 C Cade, Brian, 24, 29 Cadoux, A. T., 67, 76 Caird, G. B., 70, 76 Camery-Hoggatt, Jerry, 160, 166 Capon, Robert Farrar, ii, iii, 41, 44, 48, 60, 98, 99, 107, 111 Carroll, Lewis, 79-80, 94 Charles, R. H., 77

Charlesworth, James, 10, 11, 15 Chrysostom, John, 100 Church, the early, iii, 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 32, 41, 42-3, 49, 50, 81, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 116, 124, 127, 129, 139, 145, 147, 149, 155-6 city on the hill, image of, 35 civil rights, 149 Cleverley Ford, D., 158, 166 Crossan, John, 64, 76, 88, 104, 111 culture, 5, 32, 43, 65, 79, 88, 89-90, 94, 101, 103-4, 105, 114, 119, 126, 156, 160 D Dahl, N., 87 Daniel, story of, 115, 129 David, King, stories of, 22-4, 26, 39, 105, 130, 136 Dead Sea Scrolls, 13 Defoe, Daniel, 156, 166 Denney, James, 149, 166 Deuteronomy, 17, 59, 101, 129 Devil, 117; see also Satan Diaghilev, Sergey, 5 Dickens, Charles, 90 discipleship, 19, 39, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 65, 80, 85, 94, 108, 109, 116, 124, 141, 156 Dodd, C. H., 1, 12, 14, 15, 72, 77, 81, 83, 87, 94 Dods, Marcus, 153 Donahue, John R., 7, 15, 39, 44, 57, 60, 73, 77, 82, 88, 94, 136, 138, 143, 144 Donne, John, 132, 143 Drury, John, 26, 29 Dupont, J., 88 Dürer, Albrecht, 5

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E Essenes, 13 Evans, C. F., 15 example story, i, ii, 5, 28, 39, 64, 71, 98, 104, 110, 146, 155 exile of Israel, 27, 129, 131 exodus of Israel, 129, 130, 131 Ezekiel, 25, 105, 111, 115 F fables, i, 12, 13, 20, 71-2, 115 Fanthorpe, U. A., 61, 76 Fiebig, Paul, 15 Fielding, Henry, 5, 167-69, 174 forgiveness, i, 5, 27, 28, 37, 47, 66, 98, 106, 110, 120, 123, 130, 132, 136, 137, 138, 140, 147 Frei, Hans W., 143 Frye, Northrop, 131, 143 Fuchs, Ernst, 87 Funk, Robert, 76, 77, 94 G Galilee, iii, 7, 8, 11, 14, 32, 43, 45, 53 Gentiles, 2, 6, 54, 55, 116, 140, 141, 42, 69, 139 Gnilka, J., 87 God, passim but see esp. as creator, 49, 107, 110, 129, 131, 132, 136, 137 as compassionate, 28, 57, 110, 121 as Father, 1, 10, 56, 62, 67, 98-9, 103, 106-7, 109, 117, 132, 136, 159, 161, 163-4, 165 as generous, 27, 57, 66, 74-5, 101, 118-21, 123, 124, 156, 157 as judge, 36, 40, 53, 67, 88, 100, 110, 116, 125-8 as just, 25, 37, 100, 118-19, 125-6, 127-8, 150, 157-8 as loving, 10, 28, 29, 56, 57, 121,

132, 137, 138, 154, 161 Goldilocks and the Three Bears, story of, 55 Good Shepherd, image of, 1, 62, 97, 105, 162, 173, 174 Gospel of Thomas, 1, 10 Goulder, Michael, 4, 5, 14, 36, 37, 44, 86, 94 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 134, 143 H Hardy, Thomas, 9, 15, 119, 128, 145, 166 Harrison, Bernard, 53, 60 harvest, image of 3, 7, 48, 49, 50, 52, 74, 87, 88, 104, 119, 122, 149 Hebrews, Letter to the, 2, 31, 130 Hendrickx, Herman, 87, 88, 94 Herod Antipas, 7, 11, Herod the Great, 9, 11, 73, 101 Holy Spirit, 10, 42, 43, 62, 69, 93, 94, 147, 148 Hosea, 26 Hunter, A. M., iii, 62, 76, 88, 94, 100, 111, 159, 166 I Isaiah, 10, 17, 22, 25, 28, 70, 71 Iser, Wolfgang, 94 J Jacob, stories of, 74, 105, 132, 134, 135, 136 Jeremiah, 22, 25, 129 Jeremias, Joachim, 10, 12, 15, 32, 33, 44, 66, 81, 87, 103, 117 Jerusalem, fall of, 14, 32; see also Temple Jesus Christ, passim, but see esp. authentic voice of, iii, 11-13, 2234, 44, 81, 85, 89 in controversy, 80, 117-20

Index death of, 3, 50-1, 161 as God’s representative, 48, 131, 141 52-3, 108 as ‘Jesus of history’, 81-3, 145-6 as Messiah, 47f. as parable of God, 48, 49, 138-9, 142, 148 second coming of, 32, 110 self-understanding as wise man, 1822 self-understanding as prophet, 2229 as son, 10, 106-7 as teller of stories, 1-2, 5-8, 41, 43, 93-4, 147, 165 and voice of the risen Christ, 42, 54, 109-10 see also Parables of Jesus Jewish War, 8, 9, 15, 32 Jochanan ben Zakkai, 13 John the Baptist, 12, 88, 116, 120, 140 John, Gospel of, 1, 10, 12, 31, 49, 59, 62, 86-7, 94, 97, 139, 145, 147 John, Letters of, 2, 137, 145 Jonah, story of, 17, 18, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 40 Joseph saga, 1, 6, 15, 17, 39, 74, 104, 105, 132, 134, 135, 137 Josephus, 8, 9, 15, 18, 29 Josipovici, Gabriel, 131, 138, 143, 144 Jülicher, A., 12, 15, 66, 80, 87, 152, 166 K Kahlefeld, H., 88 Kermode, Frank, 12, 15, 31, 44 Kierkegaard, S. 159 King, Martin Luther, 149, 150, 155, 166

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Kingdom of God, 44, 47, 48, 63, 73, 75, 81, 91,115, 116, 120, 127, 128, 136, 139, 146, 156 Kümmel, W. G., 88 L Leonardo da Vinci, 84 Lewis, C. S., 68-9, 76 Linneman, Eta, 82, 94 Lohr, Charles, 50, 60 Lord’s Prayer, 126 Luke-Acts, i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38-41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53-60, 65, 72, 73, 76, 83, 84, 85, 86, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 133, 136, 138, 139, 141, 147, 149, 151, 153, 160, 161, 164 M Mark, Gospel of, i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 20, 31, 32, 34-5, 41, 45-6, 4750, 51, 53, 61, 71, 73, 83, 86, 88, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 133, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147 mashal, 18, 21, 62 Matthew, Gospel of, i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 18, 31, 35-8, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50-3, 55, 60, 61, 72, 73, 83, 86, 91, 102, 106, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 133, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 158 metaphor, iii, 1, 20, 24-5, 34, 35, 45, 62, 72, 105 Meynell, Alice, 169, 174 mission, 28, 49, 51, 54, 116, 135, 139, 161 Morgan, G. Campbell, 123, 128 Morrison, George H., 159

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Moses, story of, 28, 59, 130, 131, 132, 135, 146 Mulla Nasrudin, stories of, 66, 76 N narrative, 1, 3, 20,22, 24, 29, 31, 39, 44, 51, 53, 63-4, 66-7, 74, 79-85, 89-92, 102, 104, 129-38, 143, 145, 146, 147, 159 Nathan’s parable, 23, 24, 65 Nazareth, 1, 7, 11, 17, 93 Newbiggin, Lesslie, 131, 143 Nouwen, Henri, 107, 111 O Old Testament background, 17-29, 39, 48, 63, 70-3, 90, 102, 104-5, 11415, 117, 120, 125, 129-30, 135, 137, 149 Origen, 69, 76, 108 P parable, passim but see esp. comparison in, 19, 21, 24, 48, 55, 65-8, 72, 73, 80, 90, 100-1, 113, 114, 124-5 end stress in, 55, 56, 59, 100 and exaggeration, 8, 73, 118 and imagination, 25, 63, 79, 82, 91, 106, 159 and moral lessons, i, 28, 61, 64, 66, 80, 91, 98, 142, 146, 147, 149, 1505 mystery in, 48-9, 52, 61-2, 76, 136, 138, 141, 165 as open-ended, 40, 59, 82, 83, 91, 132 oral transmission of, 20, 32, 43, 46 and plot, ii, 9, 35, 66, 99-100, 114, 117, 119, 127 prompting change, 65, 72, 74, 75, 83, 111, 141, 142, 147

reversing expectations, 29, 74, 99, 104, 120, 121, 127, 128, 151 and rule of three, 55, 56, 99 and rule of two, 21, 35, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 99 as subversive, i, ii, 65, 66, 134 as surprising, 36, 39, 44, 52, 63, 73, 74, 82, 101, 111, 114, 118, 121-2, 127-8, 130, 138, 157, 160 and truth, ii, 60, 62, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 86, 91, 94, 99, 121, 124, 143, 148, 156 Parables of Jesus The Apprentice-Son, 1 The Barren Fig Tree, 40, 72, 139 The Burglar, or The Thief in the Night, 35, 38 The Costly Pearl, or The Pearl of Great Price, 35, 52, 70 The Doctor and the Sick, 34, 45 The Dragnet, 39, 46 The Faithful and Wise Servant, 51 The Friend at Midnight, 5, 20, 367, 126, 149 The Good Samaritan, 5, 6, 31, 33, 39, 40, 42, 46, 55, 57, 64, 67, 69, 74, 86, 99, 100, 102, 104, 108, 110, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160 The Great Feast, or The Wedding Feast, 6, 35, 40, 46, 51, 54, 55, 120, 147 The Hidden Treasure, 35, 46, 52, 67 The King going to War, 6, 55 The Labourers in the Vineyard, 3, 36, 71, 74, 98, 113, 117-24, 147, 148, 153, 157, 160 The Leaven, or The Yeast, 35, 39, 40, 52, 55, 61, 73, 117, 153

Index The Lost Coin, ii, 7, 40, 55, 97, 103, 138 The Lost Sheep, 1, 5, 31, 41, 42, 55, 97, 103, 105, 161 The Mustard Seed, 8, 34, 35, 48, 52, 113, 114-17 The New and Old Treasure, 53 The Patch, 34 The Pharisee and the Publican, i, 5, 6, 39, 42, 65, 98, 108, 121, 159 The Playing Children, 35 The Pounds, 9; see The Talents The Prodigal Son, ii, 4, 5, 6, 26, 38, 39, 40, 42, 55, 56-7, 60, 66, 69, 74, 83, 86, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 121, 136, 137, 147, 159, 160, 164 The Rich Fool, 6, 19, 39, 40, 59, 151 The Rich Man and Lazarus, 6, 40, 57, 58-60,133, 151, 156 The Seed Growing Secretly, 3, 4, 33, 34, 48, 87-8 The Sheep and the Goats, 35, 53 The Sower, 3, 8, 9, 19, 26, 31, 34, 42, 47, 48, 49, 51, 87, 88, 149 The Strong Man Bound, 35 The Talents, 36, 51, 147, 158; see The Pounds The Ten Bridesmaids, or The Five Wise Women, 31, 35, 46, 51, 106 The Tower Builder, 38, 55 The Tree and the Fruit, 35 The Two Builders, 21, 35, 42, 43, 55, 151 The Two Debtors, 5, 6, 38, 40, 46, 53, 65, 74, 147 The Two Sons, 4, 35, 38, 46, 51 The Unjust Judge, or The

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Importunate Widow 6, 38, 40, 46, 67, 84, 100, 113, 124-8 The Unjust Steward, ii, 37, 40, 57, 81, 102, 103 The Unmerciful Servant, or The Unforgiving Debtor, 37, 40, 73, 123 The Wedding Feast, see The Great Feast The Wedding Guests, 34 The Wheat and the Tares, 3, 4, 26, 33, 35, 48, 51, 61, 74 The Wicked Tenants, 3, 10, 11, 34, 41, 47, 50, 51, 120, 147, 161 The Wineskin, 34 Passover, 6, 53, 117 Patte, Daniel, 76 Paul, the Apostle, 1-2, 13, 14, 40, 12930, 145 peasant life, ii, 4, 6, 7, 13, 49, 55, 61, 65, 101, 102, 134 Penstone, Maria, 143 Perrin, Norman, 75, 77, 89, 95, 128 Peter Pan, story of, 20, 92-3, 95 Pharisees, 9, 45, 47, 54, 57, 103, 106, 117, 120, 121, 124, 138 poor, the, 6, 12, 23, 24, 39, 40, 41, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 66, 102, 109, 125, 150, 151 prayer, i, 6, 10, 37, 38, 39, 46, 65, 67, 84, 98, 100, 102, 124, 125-8, 146, 147, 149, 156, 158, 167 priests, 6, 9, 14, 120 probability, argument for, 33-4, 85, 89 Prokofiev, Sergey, 5 prophets, 10, 18, 22, 25, 42, 50, 59, 141 proverbs, 18-21, 35, 55 Psalms, 26, 27, 52, 105, 126, 129 Q ‘Q’ (Gospel source), 1, 2, 3, 35, 41, 86

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R Rabbinic exegesis, 14, 38, 43, 69, 122, 123 reader, response of, 67, 79, 80, 82, 85, 88, 89, 92, 94, 108, 138 Rembrandt, 5 repentance, 40, 75, 101, 121, 124, 127 Revelation, Book of, 43, 129 Revelation, Book of, 43, 129 rewards, 3, 19, 36, 87, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 152, 158 riddles, ii, 21, 62, 79, 80, 108 Rose, Alec, 160, 166 Rossetti, Christina, 172-4 Rouault, Georges-Henri, 5 Rousseau, John J., 15 S Sankey, Ira, 103 Santucci, Luigi, 165, 167 Satan, 17, 49; see also Devil Saul, stories of, 135 Schnackenburg, Rudolph Schweitzer, Albert, 61, 76, 87 Scofield Reference Bible, 145, 166 seed, metaphor of, 3, 4, 8, 9, 25, 48, 49, 50, 87, 114, 115, 116 Shah, Idries, 76, 83, 94 Snow White, story of, 68, 70 social class, 6, 13, 34, 38, 69, 98, 102, 150 Solomon, King, 17, 18 Song, Choan-Seng, 142, 144 Stroup, George W., 143 Studdert Kennedy, G.A., 153, 154, 166 Sullivan, Arthur, 56, 60 T Temple in Jerusalem, 5, 6, 9, 28, 50, 53, 101, 117, 139, 146 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 61, 76

Tertullian, 98, 111 TeSelle, Sallie, 137, 142, 144 Thatcher, Margaret, 152 Theissen, Gerd, 139, 144, 161, 162, 166 Trocmé, Étienne, 43, 44, 101, 111 Turner, David, 106, 111 V Vaughan Jones, Geraint, 15, 42, 44 Via, Dan, 101, 111, 120, 128 village life, 1, 6, 7, 8, 36, 54, 138, 140 vine, image of, 62 vineyard, image of, 3, 10, 11, 12, 25, 38, 41, 50, 70, 71, 73, 98, 104, 110, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123, 149, 161 Vitringa, Campegius, 76 W Wadsworth, Michael, 60 Walker, Michael, 91, 95 Walrond-Skinner, Sue, 29 wealth, ii, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 56-9, 66, 88, 110 Wenham, David, 88, 91-2, 94, 95 widows, 7, 38, 40, 46, 67, 100, 124-8, 140 Wilder, Amos, 136, 143 Williams, Charles, 169-72, 174 Wilson, A. N., i, iii, 8, 15, 115, 128 wisdom, 13, 18, 21, 24, 66, 105, 137, 154 wise man, 18, 24 Wittgenstein, 53 Wodehouse, P. G., i woman in childbirth, image of, 62 women, ii, 7, 21, 40, 46, 55, 56, 62, 65, 66, 73, 84, 100, 103, 106, 117, 135, 138, 140 Wright, N. T., 164, 167