A story with one point, told to a particular crowd, and why pressing every detail ruins it
Reading a Parable
The good Samaritan has been made to stand for the church, the sacraments, the fall of Adam and the second coming, with the inn as the church and the two coins as the two testaments. Jesus told it to a lawyer who wanted to know how far his obligations went. The answer he got is still the point.
Lesson 8 of 12 · Reading a parable
A parable is a story told to a particular crowd to make one point, and the point is usually at the end, usually a question, and usually turned back on the hearers. Its details are the furniture of the story, not a code, and a reader who assigns a meaning to every coin and innkeeper has turned a parable into an allegory it was never meant to be. Find the crowd, find the question it answered, find the end, and then find where you are standing in it, because a parable was told so that its hearers would find themselves in it, and they mostly did not like where.
Told to a crowd
Luke is careful to say who was listening, and the listeners are the key. Before the three parables of lost things, the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son, he tells you exactly who had gathered and who was complaining about it.
The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them.” — Luke 15:2 · WEB
Read the comment on The Sheep That Was Lost
This man receives sinners and eats with them. That grumble is what the three stories answer, and it is why each of them ends with a party. The elder brother standing outside the feast at the end of the third is the Pharisee standing outside the meal at the start of the chapter. Take away the audience and the story of the prodigal becomes a story about repentance. Keep the audience and it is a story about the people who resented it, told to their faces.
He also spoke this parable to certain people who were convinced of their own righteousness, and who despised all others: — Luke 18:9 · WEB
Read the comment on Two Men Went Up to Pray
To some who trusted in themselves. Luke names the target before the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the story is aimed at them like an arrow. The gospels do this repeatedly, and a reader who skips the sentence before a parable has skipped its address.
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One point, at the end
The lawyer who asked which neighbor he was obliged to love was asking for a boundary: how far out does the duty run? Jesus told him a story and then asked him a question, and the question changed the subject.
Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?” — Luke 10:36 · WEB
Read the comment on Who Is My Neighbor?
Which of these three was a neighbor to the man who fell among robbers? The lawyer had asked who counted as his neighbor. The parable asked him who had behaved like one. That reversal is the whole point, delivered in the last line, and everything before it exists to get there. The priest and the Levite are not the clergy of every age; the oil and wine are not the sacraments; the Samaritan is a Samaritan because a Samaritan was the last person a Judean lawyer would have chosen to be saved by. The story has one point, and it is a question the hearer has to answer about himself.
παραβολή parabolḗ G3850
from παραβάλλω; a similitude ("parable"), i.e. (symbolic) fictitious narrative (of common life conveying a moral), apothegm or adage:--comparison, figure, parable, proverb.
The word means a setting-beside, a comparison: this is like that. It is the Greek the ancient translators used for the Hebrew mashal, the word behind proverb, and the two kinds of writing are cousins. A proverb sets one thing beside another in a line; a parable does it in a story. Both leave the reader to see the likeness, and both are ruined by explaining more than they say.
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Where pressing the details fails
Some parables cannot be read as codes at all, because their details, pressed, say things Jesus did not mean.
““His lord commended the dishonest manager because he had done wisely, for the children of this world are, in their own generation, wiser than the children of the light.” Luke 16:8 · WEB
A master praises a manager who has just defrauded him. The point is shrewdness about the future, not the fraud.
“I tell you, although he will not rise and give it to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will get up and give him as many as he needs.” Luke 11:8 · WEB
A man gives his neighbor bread at midnight to make him go away. The point is persistence in asking, not a God who has to be worn down.
““Hear, then, the parable of the farmer.” Matthew 13:18 · WEB
The sower, which Jesus explained piece by piece: seed, path, rock, thorns, soil, each standing for something.
The first two show what happens when a detail is made to carry meaning it was not given: God becomes a defrauded employer or a grumpy neighbor. The third is the honest complication. Jesus did explain the sower element by element, and the parable of the weeds too, and a reader cannot pretend those explanations are not in the text. Where readers divide is over how far that licenses the rest. Some hold that since Jesus allegorized two, all may be read so with care; most that the two he explained are the exceptions he chose to explain, and the others should be read for their point. The second view has the parables themselves on its side, since most of them end in a question rather than a key. But the argument is a real one, and the sower is why.
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The sting
The oldest parable in the Bible is not in the gospels. When David had taken Bathsheba and arranged Uriah’s death, Nathan the prophet came to him with a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s one lamb. David, who was a judge, judged it: the man deserved to die. Then Nathan said the sentence the parable existed for.
Nathan said to David, “You are the man! This is what Yahweh, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. — 2 Samuel 12:7 · WEB
Read the comment on You Are the Man
You are the man. That is the shape of a parable at its purest: a story the hearer is invited to judge from outside, and then the turn that puts him inside it. Jesus used the same shape, and his hearers felt the same turn.
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he spoke about them. — Matthew 21:45 · WEB
Read the comment on The Wicked Tenants
They perceived that he spoke of them. The chief priests had listened to a story about tenants who killed the owner’s son, agreed that such tenants deserved destruction, and then understood whose story it was. A parable that has not made you uncomfortable somewhere has probably not been heard yet.
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How to read a parable
Read the sentence before it, to find the crowd. Find the question it is answering, which is often stated and often not the question it appears to answer. Go to the end, where the point is, and notice whether it is a question. Let the details be scenery unless the text itself makes them more. And then ask where you are standing in the story, and be honest about it, because the people Jesus told these stories to were the religious, the careful and the respectable, and so, probably, are you.
Take a parable you know well and read the verses immediately before it. Who was listening, and what had they just said or done? Write down what the parable says to those people, and then where you stand in it.
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