On Parables

Beloved in Christ,

Parables.

So. Many. Parables!

The last two Sundays, our Gospel readings have been Parables (The Parable of the Sower, then the Parable of the Wheat & the Weeds). This Sunday, we get rapid fire parable action - with a lot going on.

In an article about parables, author and lecturer Martin Henry notes that parables make up about ⅓ of Jesus’ recorded teachings and are located almost entirely in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke).[1]

Paraboles seems to arise from the Greek para meaning “beside” and ballein meaning “to throw” and implies the placing of things next to one another in comparison. This is indeed, a lot of what Jesus does. Many of the parables begin with, “The Kingdom of heaven is like” or “The Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to…”

Parables are a way to use familiar concepts to tell us something new, something novel, something outside of what or how we normally conceive of things. And what a challenging thing it is indeed to conceive of the Kingdom of Heaven!

As I’ve been pondering the meaning and purpose of parables, I’ve thought about the seeming irony it is that Jesus Christ is saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like” for the one saying it is God Incarnate, He who rules the very Kingdom of Heaven which Jesus is disclosing to the avid listeners of his day - and to us some two thousand years later.

When Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2) - it is indeed very near, for Jesus is the very head of this marvellous, ponderous, celestial domain.

I increasingly find myself of the opinion that, while there are moralizing or allegorical aspects in all of the parables, it is important to situate in the context of Jesus disclosing as the incarnate God what the active action of God in the world is actively doing.

It is a literary device used to give substance and weight to the active work of God intervening in the history of the world, in the wake of humanity’s diddling and doddling, which has an ironic twist that it is Jesus Himself - the greatest divine intervention, God’s condescension to Earth in human flesh, God the Uncreated become Creation - telling us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like - what the intervention of God is like in the world.

A short reflection on the purpose of parables such as this does not do it justice - and I am confident that there are many interesting and profoundly detailed academic theses and authors out there who do much more justice on the theme of parables, but I hope this reflection helps to give some help to how we might understand the significance of parables.

In a parable, we come to bear witness to the active intervention of God in the lives of all people.

May we come to ever more fully understand what the Kingdom of Heaven is like as we strive to know Christ ever more fully!

Yours in Christ,

Alex+

[1] Martin Henry, The Point of Parables, p. 30; https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/4721/1/MH_PointParables.pdf