Reading the Parables

Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church

Richard Lischer

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781611645200, 9780664231651
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645200
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Parables make up one-third of Jesus' speech in the New Testament. In this volume, Richard Lischer provides an expert guide to these parables and proposes an important distinction between reading and interpreting the parables.

Emphasizing the importance of reading the parables versus interpreting them, Lischer asserts that reading offers a kind of breathing space to explore historical, literary, theological, and socio-political dimensions of the parables and their various meanings, whereas interpreting implies an expert and critical position that must be defended.

In this volume, Lischer lays out four theories for reading parables: 1) parables obscure truth; 2) parables teach many truths; 3) parables teach one truth; and 4) parables undermine the truth. Ultimately, he concludes that biblical parables undermine dominant myths called "the truth" to shine light on the Truth that is Jesus, God's presence with us.

CHAPTER 1

A Preface to Reading the Parables

Søren Kierkegaard tells the story of a king who issued a royal command to everyone in his realm. His message, however, produced an unexpected response from his subjects. Instead of endeavoring to obey the command, they all became interpreters of it. Soon a prodigious body of criticism captured the imagination of all the people, who became fierce partisans of this or that critical position. Everything had become interpretation, but no one paid the least attention to the royal command. The king was willing to forgive his subjects everything—except their mistaken notion of what is truly important!

Kierkegaard frames his parable with the question, “What is the difference between criticism of a text and radical accountability to it?” (Parables, 12–13). The question contains its own answer. It is a warning to anyone foolish enough to engage in critical reflection on the parables of Jesus.

This is a book about reading the parables in such a way that we are held accountable by them. Although the title of the series in which this book appears is Interpretation, I prefer Reading because that is actually what we do with the parables. The word “reading” is a reminder that any piece of literature, including a parable, is not defined by its source, transmission, or the history of its interpretation, but by a text on the surface of a smooth page that lies across the lap. “Interpretation” ties the average person into knots. The very word implies expertise, finality, and a critical position that has been staked out and must be defended. “Reading” gives us breathing space. It reminds us that no parable of Jesus has ever found its definitive, unassailable interpretation. In what follows we will examine several ways of reading the parables, not in the disinterested spirit of relativism, as if to claim that each reading is as true and makes as much sense as the next, but reading, first, as the primal interaction with a written document, and second, as the discriminating appreciation of all the dimensions of the text, including the historical, theological, literary, and sociopolitical.

If this book has a methodological premise, it is both medieval and postmodern in nature: no parable can be limited to one exclusive meaning, nor to a meaning that is unrelated to the milieu in which it has originated or the situation of those who read it. Reading begins with listening carefully to the text and allowing oneself to be perplexed by it. Reading comes in a flood of perceptions, including mixed and simultaneous messages, as well as echoes from other literature and from one’s own experience. A community reads together in order to “get it right”—not necessarily in an academic sense, but for the sake of its common life and mission. Kierkegaard’s warning speaks to everyone in the church but especially to those who write books for the church. We who balance our lives between church and academy know how easy it is to defer obedience to the word until we have surveyed every interesting interpretation of it.

In what follows, the reader will notice more than a few references to sermons preached on the parables of Jesus. This is because among Christians, as among the rabbis, the sermon quickly became the vehicle of the parable’s interpretation and the locus of its authority. Unlike ancient sagas and ballads that were orally performed for millennia, the substance of the parables was “frozen” in circulating documents that were fast-tracked to the status of Christian Scripture. The church’s roving prophets and balladeers did not long enjoy the freedom of performing the parables in ever-evolving mutations. What the church lost in the process of canonization, however, its preachers and biblical commentators gained in the creative freedom with which they interpreted the parables as texts. The parables found their home in the worshiping assembly, where preachers interpreted them and audiences endeavored to understand and live them.

The parables of Jesus are fictional stories. They are what Aristotle would have called “poetry,” for which he claimed a higher seriousness than “history,” since the historic is limited to what has happened, but the poetic is free to explore what might happen and is therefore more universal in nature (Poetics 1.9). The parables of Jesus belong to a category for which Aristotle did not have a name: theopoiesis (Greek theopoiēsis), the creative interplay of theological witness and poetic imagination (Wilder, Theopoetic, 1–12). Poiēsis is Greek for the act of “making.” The first maker/poet is God, who, by means of the imaginative gifts of Jesus, crafted artifacts and performances of the divine presence in the world, much in the way a novelist “makes up” a set of characters, a plot, and setting in order to say something true and profound about human behavior. The second maker of a parable is the reader, who makes the internal assessments necessary to engage the story, allows it to speak, and makes a new home for it in the soul and the community. We do not read a parable in order to reduce it to a “lesson” any more than we would summarize a novel or a poem in a single sentence. Literature does not work that way. Moreover, churchgoers know that the elasticity of the parable is such that it can be preached from different perspectives and to different ends on successive Sundays. They also know that since a parable is a story to be told, its interpretation cannot be claimed as the exclusive province of the scholar but best emerges from its performance. The most effective teller of parables is not always the most educated preacher in town, for parables have a way of seeking out narrators with gifts and powers appropriate to their nature.

A parable communicates the most when it is read bifocally from within the heart of a religious community by believers who live fully in the world. For them, the parable serves as a bridge between the sacred life of faith and their duties and experiences in a secular world. As I hope to show in this book, the parables of Jesus are best read in constant conversation with the world and its many forms of literature. They belong to the world because in some measure they belong to human nature. They may even be called “worldly” or “secular”; for God loves the world depicted in them with a vividness and a humanity that only Jesus could fully express. The last three chapters of this book will explore the theological, literary, and sociopolitical dimensions of that worldliness.

The Problem

One of the first things we notice about parables is how rare they have become in our day. These tiny, stylized narratives have all but disappeared from the secular world as we know it. In politics, law, business, media, and ordinary conversation, the parable is largely absent from contemporary discourse. Its scarcity offers the first clue to its true character. It is a strange and difficult word—an other word—and, like the other race, language, accent, or worldview, the parable sounds a dissonant tone.

Imagine a press conference. An official of the World Bank has just been asked to comment on the worldwide debt crisis. She responds, “There was once a slave who owed his master one hundred million dollars.…” Or the chairman of the Federal Reserve, reflecting on the nation’s economic prospects, muses, “A sower went out to sow.”

Most scientists would not explain their painstaking devotion to research by querying, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them …” And psychologists have another, more clinical word for the failure-to-launch, adult child who says resentfully, “You have never given me a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.”

Parables can be notoriously puzzling to the average reader, since by definition a parable is a story whose meaning is rarely transparent and whose origins are often obscure. But it is not merely their opacity that has led to the disappearance of parables from our everyday language. It is something else. Mark Twain once said it wasn’t the passages in the Bible that he could not understand that bothered him; it was the parts he understood all too well. Take Matthew 18:23–35, for example. As they contemplate the economies of Africa, the financial leaders of the developed world are more than capable of understanding Jesus’ parable of the Unforgiving Slave. The first servant in Jesus’ parable has been released from a huge, unrepayable debt by the powerful king. In turn, he refuses to forgive the tiny debt incurred by his fellow servant, for which he, the first servant, is roundly condemned by the Lord. In the context of the crushing debt load borne by the poorest countries, who among the powerful nations of the world, which have been given so much, could fail to understand the simple metrics of forgiveness in this little story? Thus from the beginning of our study, we must recognize that resistance to the parables of Jesus is not due to a lack of understanding. It proceeds from something deeper and harder to cure.

When considering the parables of Jesus, the reader faces an additional difficulty. Unlike other stories from antiquity, the parables of Jesus are integrally related to the character and mission of their teller. One can enjoy an Aesopian fable or a rabbinic story without much biographical or contextual background. The parables of Jesus, on the other hand, do not stand alone as individual stories but are woven into a larger narrative. In the Synoptic Gospels, the parables constitute approximately 35 percent of everything Jesus is reported to have said. In Luke, the figure rises to 52 percent, and in Matthew 43 percent (Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, 22). The earliest written account of Jesus’ ministry, the Gospel of Mark, attests to their centrality: “He did not speak to them except in parables” (4:34a), which, as we shall learn, covers a broad range of figurative and poetic language. This means that what is often treated as a specialization by New Testament scholars might legitimately claim the lion’s share of research on the spoken message of Jesus. It also means that the believer’s investment in the parables runs deeper than the ordinary critic’s, for the parables offer verbal evidences of Jesus’ identity, message, and saving purpose in the world. Indeed, the most influential modern scholar of the parables, Joachim Jeremias, is convinced that in the parables of Jesus we are confronted by a unique and particularly trustworthy tradition. On the basis of stylistic and historical criteria, he asserts, “We stand right before Jesus when reading his parables” (Parables of Jesus, 12). To interpret a parable is to meet Jesus.

But interpretation is a circle. If the parables shed light on Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels’ story of Jesus guides our interpretation of the parables. Two questions circle around and complete each another: How are we to relate these little stories to the figure of Jesus? How are we to compare what we know about Jesus to the distinctive stories attributed to him? Are the parables the gnomic utterances of a wandering teacher of wisdom? The coded ideology of a political and religious reformer? Or the veiled predictions of an apocalyptic seer? These options and many others are substantially represented in the tradition of parable interpretation. In our own day, followers of Jesus ask a simpler but more existential question: How are we to relate our prosaic lives and the parable-free zones in which we live to the one who found this alien, other word indispensible to his ministry?

A second set of problems presents itself to modern interpreters. At first glance, the parable is not alien to us at all, or not as alien as it should be. When condensed into an aphorism, the parable plays a conserving function in all civilizations and cultures, embalming the practical wisdom of generations. Recently, the president of the United States warned that his opponent’s economic plan was a case of “building on sand,” and everyone knew what he meant without the citation of Matthew 7:26. Sometimes the parable form lends itself to a faux profundity, as in the brilliant satirical film Being There (1979), based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski (1970). In it an illiterate gardener named “Chance” (played by Peter Sellers) is mistaken for an economic genius named Chauncey Gardner. His parabolic utterances are received as economic wisdom by the White House, Wall Street, and the media:

PRESIDENT: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives? [Long pause]

CHANCE: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.… In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.

BENJAMIN: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we’re upset by the seasons of our economy.

CHANCE: Yes! There will be growth in the spring! Benjamin: Hmm!

The parables have been around a long time, but a comfortable familiarity does not breed understanding. A highly attenuated Christian culture has detached the better-known parables from their moorings in the life and ministry of Jesus and reduced them to a few bullet points of common sense. With their narrative strangeness gone, their punch lines are well known and approved by all. Everyone knows what a Good Samaritan or a Prodigal is. There is no need to rehash the stories or reacquaint ourselves with their context in the Gospel of Luke.

The tendency to simplify is not new or characteristic of our era alone. In the nineteenth century Adolf Jülicher opposed the church’s allegorical method by insisting that each parable is a simple, straightforward story with but one point, which he called the tertium comparationis, the point of comparison. The tertium is the “third thing” which unites the abstract religious idea and the vivid picture contained in the parable. The problem with Jülicher’s magisterial (and still untranslated) book on the parables, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, is that the single “points” he substituted for the church’s florid allegories tended to be universal maxims or truisms of the lowest common denominator. For example, the parable of the Talents reminds us that a reward must be earned by performance. The parable of the Dishonest Steward enjoins the wise use of the present as the condition of a happy future. The parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man teaches joy in a life of suffering and fear of a life of pleasure. The Good Samaritan represents the ideal of the neighbor (Greek plēsion), who is above all a fellow human being (Gleichnisreden Jesu, 485, 511, 634–35, 596; cf. Stein, Introduction to the Parables, 53–56). In his reading, Jesus’ lessons tended to confirm what enlightened moderns already believed. The generic approach prompted the British scholar C. W. F. Smith’s famous one-liner: “No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality” (Jesus of the Parables, 17).

One can assume that Jesus and his followers told and retold the parables many times and in a variety of circumstances. Unlike ancient performances of Homer, however, for the most part the parables were not recited in succeeding centuries but read from a uniform text and preached upon. Every sermon on a parable is a performance of a performance whose oral matrix and variability have been lost to us. The interaction of the spoken word with the later, written text produces at most a residual “voice” that can be heard only if one listens closely for it (cf. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 11, 31). One thinks of the disjunction between the immediacy of God’s speaking in the Old Testament and God’s subsequent command to write a book. Increasingly, the voice takes up residence in the book and in the prophet’s interpretation of it (cf. Exod. 17:14).

The parables of Jesus arrive at our door as texts bound in a holy book. They are frozen transparencies of a ministry so dynamic that it was defined by dialogue and conflict until it was terminated in death. When Jesus told a parable, his voice occupied a particular register; his facial expression undoubtedly matched his vocal intonation. He might have looked to the sky or to his Father above as he told the story, as if to invoke the precise word he was looking for. We suspect he may have laughed a little more heartily at his own jokes than did his perplexed audience. His interlocutors must have looked a bit uneasily or perhaps angrily at one another as these stories sliced through their religious pretensions. Surely they raised salient questions and objections, only a few of which we have on record in the Gospels.

The real challenge to the modern imagination is not deciphering the meaning of a particular parable, but again inhabiting an oral world in which voice, memory, performance, and repetition are the working tools of communication. In its spoken form, the parable functioned in a rhetorical ecosystem of multiple signs and social gestures that cannot be retrieved. More than any scholar in the twentieth century, Joachim Jeremias attempted an “archaeology” of the parables by restoring their Aramaic wording. His important efforts notwithstanding, the recovery of an “original” parable has proved impossible because the original once belonged to an acoustical rather than a textual moment, a singularity that will never again exist. Socrates argued against books as useless tools, since they cannot expand or enlarge upon their arguments but only repeat the same words over again. On very different grounds, Luther spoke of the written Scripture as a fall from a more primal and kerygmatic experience of orality. In the case of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: A Preface to Reading the Parables
• Chapter 2: Four Theories for Reading the Parables
• Chapter 3: Reading the Parables with Mark, Matthew, and Luke
• Chapter 4: Reading the Parables in the Human Condition
• Chapter 5: Reading the Parables with the Poor
• Chapter 6: Reading the Parables with the Saints
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects