Why Parables?

One of Jesus’ favorite ways to teach about the Kingdom was through parables. Some of his most well-known stories are parables, and together they make up nearly one-third of all his teachings in the Gospels. And yet, parables are also among the most misunderstood.

Most of us assume Jesus used parables as simple illustrations to make spiritual truths clearer, or as moral lessons to show us how to live. But Jesus himself explained that parables serve a deeper purpose: they draw some people into the Kingdom, and they push others away from the Kingdom. Parables aren’t just moral tales, theology lessons, or simple illustrations. They are surprising, subversive stories that confront us with the reality of the Kingdom.

And just like our response to the parables, our response to the Kingdom is never neutral: we can resist and turn away, or be drawn in and transformed.

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when I was in third grade, uh, my mom made me take an afterschool improv class. Now she says she doesn’t remember, but the memories that I have are traumatic and ingrained into my psyche and probably will be forever. And now I was incredibly shy as a kid. No way. Right?

Which should come as no surprise to any of you who know me at this point in my life. We had just moved to a new city in south Texas and my mom wanted to help me break out of my shell and make friends. So she put me in this improv class. Now it started with the teachers, uh, creating a sketch and then acting out that sketch and then inviting up the students one by one to participate in that sketch alongside of them.

Uh, my strategy was to kind of hide myself behind my mom behind her arm, and I had done that pretty successfully. I had avoided being called up to act out the scene that these teachers and students were performing. I was perfectly content watching other students make absolute fools of themselves as they acted out these scenarios.

But soon my mom realized my strategy and she kind of like moved her arm and kind of pushed me, nudged me to the front, which caught the teacher’s attention. And soon I was fully participating in this story. I was standing over another classmate who was having a lot more fun at this than I was, and I was pretending to be a doctor, giving them a checkup, because that was the scenario that these guys had created.

And again, this was an improv class for third graders. Now that experience didn’t do anything for my shyness. Honestly. It probably made it a lot worse. Uh, but, uh, I, I did end up in a lot of school plays after that. Again, not by my own choice. Uh, for example, I played one of the Three Musketeers, our third grade class did a, a play with the Three Musketeers.

I was one of ’em, but I had a feather duster instead of a sword. That’s all I remember. We did another play that was the whole elementary school, uh, where, uh, the third grade class, or maybe second grade, or I don’t remember, fourth grade. Uh, we were jazz musicians. We were kinda this jazz ensemble. And they had asked for one student, they, they wanted to pick one student to, to, they needed somebody to stand up and give a saxophone solo to pretend to give a saxophone solo.

They would play music over. And so I had to take this fake saxophone home and practice my, like, jazz moves. So they were gonna play this jazz song and at some point I had to stand up in front of everyone, the masses and kind of fake play this jazz solo. I don’t remember what the play was, but that’s all I remember.

Uh, the last one I remember was, uh, I played a secret agent, uh, in a play that was actually, I went to a, it was South Texas, very Christian private school. So I was a secret agent who, uh, was actually one of Jesus’ disciples performing as a secret agent to combat spiritual warfare against hidden demons that were operating in the world today.

It was very bizarre, but that’s my memory. Now. Throughout all those experiences, I never really got over my shyness again. I think all of those actually made it a lot worse. But here’s what I did learn, is that 📍 there’s a huge difference between observing a story and participating in it.

See, observing a story, which is what most of us do, watching movies, sitting through plays, reading books, TV shows, whatever it is, that’s easy, it’s comfortable, and it really doesn’t take much from us to do it. But participating in a story that’s a lot scarier. It is weighty, it’s dangerous, and it actually requires something from us.

Now, this morning, we’re starting a new teaching series. It’s gonna carry us all the way up to advent. We are going to spend the next few months working through the parables of Jesus and the parables of Jesus are found throughout the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, mark, and Luke. Our goal as a church over the next few months is to see what Jesus has to say about the kingdom through his parables, what the parables reveal about ourselves and the world we live in, and what the parables show us about being witnesses in that kingdom in our world that we live in today.

Now, Jesus’ parables contain some of his most well-known teachings, the Good Samaritan. The prodigal son, the lost sheep Christian or not follower of Jesus or not. You’ve likely heard these stories, or at least you know generally what they’re about. Uh, parables also make up about one third of Jesus’ teachings in the gospels, and so if we don’t get a good grasp of the parables, what they are, how and why Jesus uses them, then we miss out on about a third of Jesus’s main message.

And yet, parables are also among the most misunderstood and misinterpreted of all of Jesus’ teachings. Now, we started out this year at our church with a parable. If you remember, back in January, our vision series for the year, fourth quarter, fourth soil, which is what this is all about, was based on a parable that Jesus gives just before the passage that we read a few moments ago.

Now, in case you’ve forgotten or you need a recap, here’s the context. At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Matthew’s biography of the life of Jesus, Jesus has gained some notoriety. So he’s been traveling, teaching about the kingdom, casting out demons, healing, and performing miracles, and he’s gained quite a following at this point.

And so where we just read, Jesus has gone out to the lake where he’s been followed by a huge crowd who want to hear him teach more about the kingdom. Now, if Jesus ever needed an opportunity to explain who he is, what he’s here to do, and what exactly this kingdom of God is, this is that opportunity. It’s a huge moment for Jesus to capitalize on, but instead of being clear in his witness, Jesus tells a story.

Listen. He says There was once a farmer who planted some seeds in the ground. Some of the seeds were eaten by birds. Some of the seeds were dried out by the sun. Some of the seeds were choked out by the weeds. The rest of the seeds then grew into fruit. If you have ears, listen,

that’s the parable of the four soils. It’s the one we set up as we focused our church on becoming a fourth soil this year. That was our whole vision series in January. And the way this story is written, it seems as if Jesus gets off the boat at this point and walks away. As if that story that he just told about a sower and some seeds was enough to explain everything that that hungry crowd needed to know about the kingdom.

And that brings us back to our passage this morning. Now, we taught on that parable. We explained the four soils the whole month of January of this year. But if that parable is still confusing to you, well, you’re honestly in really good company. It turns out that the people who were the most consistently in proximity to Jesus himself didn’t even understand it.

Why are you speaking to them in parables? The disciples ask him. And honestly, Jesus gives an answer, but it’s really not that helpful. Verse 11, he says, because the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given for you to know, but it has not been given to them, for whoever has more will be given to him and he will have more than enough.

But whoever does not have even what he has will be taken away from him.

Why not just say what you mean? Jesus, if you really are the Messiah coming to restore God’s rule here on earth, if you really do desire everyone to be saved, why not just speak clearly? Are you playing games with people’s souls and eternal security? Why parables? That’s our question this morning, and to answer it, we’re gonna work back through Jesus’ explanation and our goal this morning is not to dive into any parables specifically, but we wanna set the stage for the next few months as we do begin to look at the parables.

Now, fair warning today is gonna feel a little more teachy than preachy. It’s one of those Sundays, but bear with me. I’m sure that by the end, we will all be better for it. Now, before we dive in, there are a few things that you should know. First, Jesus was a rabbi. Now, most of us know this, and if you’ve spent any length of time here at our church, you’ve heard us talk about this ad nauseum, but I think it’s worth repeating and explaining again now as we kick off this series.

Uh, so a rabbi was a Jewish teacher who would travel and teach people about how to follow Yahweh. It was the one true God, uh, rabbis were among the most revered and respected members of Jewish society. Not only were they expected to be the most knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, but they were also expected to show people how to follow it, how to live.

Now. It was an honor for you to find a rabbi who would accept you as one of his disciples. If that happened to you, then your life was changed. It would now become oriented around this rabbi as you observed, the way that he taught, lived and interacted with others. A second thing you should know, parables were actually really common.

Uh, parables were not unique to Jesus at all. Uh, the word parable comes from the Greek word para bole, 📍 para, which literally means alongside and bole, which means to set. So a parable literally means to set something besides something else in order to compare and contrast them together. Now that Greek word parable is often a Greek translation of a Hebrew word al.

Now, al is difficult to translate, but at its root, it simply refers to something again, being compared. 📍 The best definition of Michelle is a riddle. A fable, or a proverb meant to represent a spiritual truth, and so rabbis. Would use Al or M is the plural. These stories, these riddles, these poems, Proverbs, to make a theological point, their disciples and their listeners would then hear these stories and mu them over.

Think about them like puzzles in their minds. The goal of the meha was to get you thinking, not to get you to the right answer right away. Which means that there are a few things that parables are not. 📍 So first, parables are not just moral lessons. Now, the easiest way to misinterpret parables is to assume that their primary goal is to teach a basic lesson about morality and ethics.

And many of the parables do that. They show you what it means to live a godly life and how to live in accordance with the kingdom, but that’s not its primary objective. For example, in Luke chapter 16, Jesus tells a parable, a story about a manager who’s been stealing from his rich master. Now, when he gets caught, he comes up with a shrewd plan to save himself by actually stealing more from his master and gaining street cred with the poor people of the city.

But eventually, he’s caught by that plan again. But this time he’s commended by both his rich master and by Jesus the one telling the story for being street smart and figuring out a way to get outta trouble. So if parables are primarily about teaching a moral lesson, then what’s the moral lesson there that it’s okay to steal if you don’t get caught.

Not only the street smart, make it to heaven. See, if we try and read the parables as stories that are primarily about teaching a cut and dry children’s lesson, then we’ll leave confused and with really, really bad theology. 📍 But that leads to the second thing, that parables are not parables are not primarily theology lessons.

Now again, parables do teach us theology in that they show us something about God and ourselves and the world. But their primary job is not to teach you something foundational about theology. So for example, take the Parable of the Rich man and Lazarus also from Luke chapter 16. Now, in this story that Jesus tells, there’s a rich man who dies and goes to a place that we assume as hell, though Jesus doesn’t call it that.

He calls it Hades, which is actually something a little different. A poor man also dies, a poor man named Lazarus, and he goes to a place that we assume as heaven, though Jesus again doesn’t call it that. He calls it something else. He calls it Abraham’s side or Abraham’s bosom. Now, in this parable, they can see each other from Hades and from Abraham’s bosom.

They can talk to each other. The rich man even asks for water to quench his thirst. It’s honestly a really bizarre story that has created so much confusion. Scholars today debate whether it even counts as a parable or whether it might actually be a true story. Now, if this parable or this story is meant to teach us theology, then what theology is it teaching that we can see heaven from hell, vice versa, that we can communicate with others in the afterlife.

📍 A third thing, parables are not simple illustrations. Now we use illustrations all the time. Teachers, preachers alike use metaphors, stories, and illustrations to make something more simple and easy to understand, and many of the parables do that. Jesus does seem to pair his parables along with a teaching about the kingdom.

But honestly, many of the parables are really confusing. They’re not clear at all. They’re not illustrations and stories meant to make a point more simple and according to the words of Jesus himself, parables can actually make things more confusing, but that’s intentional. So look again at how Jesus answers his disciples Question in Matthew 13, starting in verse 13.

That is why I speak to them in parables, because looking, they don’t see ad hearing. They do not listen or understand. Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says, you will listen and listen, but never understand. You will look and look, but never perceive. For this. People’s heart has grown callous.

Their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts and turn back, and I would heal them. Now, Jesus is actually quoting from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah here. Uh, here’s the context of that quote.

Isaiah was a prophet who lived centuries before Jesus. And now, if you were a prophet in the Old Testament, contrary to popular belief, your job was not to tell the future or make doomsday predictions. Your job as a prophet was simply to be a mouthpiece for God to his people. Literally, your job was to confront God’s people by showing them how they were actually living.

Compared to the standard that God had set for them to live. So as a prophet, you would literally set a picture of God’s will alongside a picture of their lives. Now, God’s will was for Israel to live in line with what he said was good, true, and beautiful in accordance with His commandments, so that they would then become effective witnesses to the other lost nations around them.

That was God’s will. Now instead, as the story of the Old Testament goes over and over again, they turn their backs on God. The Old Testament describes the slow and gradual drift away from God’s will and towards their own. Now, Jesus quotes Isaiah because just like the prophet Isaiah, Jesus’s primary job is to confront us with the reality of God’s will for us here on Earth and give us the option to respond.

And that’s exactly what parables are. Parables are not moral stories. They’re not theology lessons or simple illustrations. 📍 Parables are surprising and subversive stories that confront us with the reality of the kingdom.

A New Testament scholar, NT Wright, puts it this way. 📍 Jesus’ stories are designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revolutionary message about God’s kingdom and garb that would leave the listeners wondering, trying to think it out, whatever the parables are. They’re not, as children are sometimes taught in Sunday school.

Earthly stories with heavenly meaning. 📍 Rather, they were expressions of Jesus’. Shocking announcement that God’s kingdom was arriving on Earth as in heaven.

See parables are meant to confront us, to disarm us, and to leave us scratching our heads because our default way of seeing God, ourselves and others is being confronted and attacked. They set a picture of God’s will alongside a picture of our lives, and that’s why, according to Jesus, some people will hear these stories, listen to these parables, and still close their hearts off to the kingdom entirely.

They’ll hear, but they won’t receive. They’ll see, they’ll witness and they’ll even experience the kingdom in these stories and these riddles, but they won’t reorient themselves in response. See the parables are, as Eugene Peterson once put it, like time bombs that would explode in unprotected hearts. Now, his argument was that listeners and readers today would hear these parables, see how simple they are, and walk away thinking they understand.

Until later the Holy Spirit works and the parable explodes. It’s activated. You realize what it’s actually doing. So the parables are puzzling and confusing and they either push you away or they draw you in. But that’s exactly the point. See, Jesus says the secrets of the kingdom haven’t been given to everybody.

And when he says that, he doesn’t mean that he’s holding the keys to heaven behind his back for people to guess which hand they’re in, and he’s not playing games with their eternal security of their souls. What Jesus means is that our ability. To understand and receive the surprising and subversive ways that the kingdom works compared to the wisdom of the world depends on us.

See parables work by revealing what’s already in our hearts. Those of us who hold on so tightly to our own kingdoms, our own rule and reign will never be able to understand God’s will here on earth. We can’t. It’s literally impossible. Not because Jesus won’t let us, but because the kingdom won’t make sense to us until we abandon our notion of what we think makes sense.

Author and priest, Robert Ferra. Capin puts it this way and resorting so often to parables. His main point, meaning Jesus’s main point was that any understanding of the kingdom his hearers could come up with would be a misunderstanding. Mention Messiah to them and they would picture a king on horseback, not a carpenter on a cross mention forgiveness.

And they would start setting up rules about when it ran out from Jesus’ point of view. The sooner their misguided minds had the props knocked out from under them, the better. 📍 After all their yammer about how God should or shouldn’t run his own operation, getting them just to stand there with their eyes popped and their mouths shut would be a giant step forward.

See parables, confront what we believe about ourselves, about God, and about the good life, and they show us what’s really true. For example, worrying about this age and chasing wealth don’t lead to the good life. They choke out your ability to live in the kingdom just like weeds, choking out good seeds or witnessing about the kingdom isn’t optional.

It’s not just for super Christians or really mature disciples. It’s a requirement for living in that kingdom. Just like money given from a manager to his employees is meant to invest and work with, or the healing and the forgiveness that you are after aren’t found After presenting your perfect and obedient self to God, the healing and forgiveness that you are after are both found by submitting to the open arms of a loving father when we’re at our lowest and most sinful.

Just like a rebellious son returning home. See parables confront us with the kingdom by showing God’s will alongside our lives. And for most people, according to Jesus, this actually pushes them away. Seeing their lives compared to the reality of God’s kingdom makes them unwilling to yield what they’ve created for their lives.

Jesus says what they have created, even what they do have that aligns with the kingdom, they’re eventually going to lose because of their unwillingness to yield themselves to that kingdom. Right? But he also says the opposite is true, which means that there’s an even deeper layer to Jesus’ parables and why he used them.

Look again at verse 16. Jesus tells his disciples, blessed are your eyes, because they do. And your ears because they do hear for truly, I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see the things that you see, but didn’t see them to hear the things that you hear, but didn’t hear them. See.

Parables aren’t just stories and riddles meant to confuse those who have already set their will against God’s parables are insights into the kingdom. They’re invitations that God’s people have been longing for since the Old Testament invitations that the disciples and us get to see and experience today.

Each one is a peek behind the spiritual curtain, a glimpse into true reality, a conversation that we are invited to eavesdrop on. See, there’s a direct correlation between our receptivity to the parables and our capacity to live in the kingdom as disciples of Jesus. See, like the parables. If our approach to Jesus is based on getting a good return on our investment, getting the right answers, or knowing just exactly what we should do in every single situation we find ourselves in, then discipleship to Jesus will just be as frustrating as trying to understand the parables themselves.

But if our approach to Jesus is to enter into a dynamic relationship, one where we are invited into what the church, fathers, and mothers called a divine and mysterious dance between father, son, and spirit, where Jesus wants our hearts, not just our minds, and the parables make perfect sense. They’re not quippy illustrations to make a point.

They’re riddles and stories to give us a peek behind the spiritual curtain, an invitation to see what God is up to in the kingdom here on earth. A conversation for us to eavesdrop on and participate in like the parables themselves. Jesus invites us into a relationship with him, not just an accumulation of facts about him.

The way we hold the parables, as riddles about the kingdom in the forefront of our minds is how we should hold Jesus himself at the forefront of our lives. See, our goal in following Jesus is not just to learn more stuff, it’s to become holier people, people who are set apart in a world and culture of individualism and idolatry.

People marked by love, joy, and peace, not anxiety, fear, and hostility. People who work to form genuine communities of love, not tribes of political ideology. And Jesus knows that the parables are the only way that we can truly learn to become these types of people. Why? ’cause 📍 there’s a huge difference between observing a story and participating in it.

See, parables require something from us. They require our participation. See if it’s information that we’re after, if information alone is enough to transform us, if Jesus was just after our intellect, then he would’ve given more lectures and told less stories. See, it’s one thing to know that Jesus teaches you to forgive your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you.

It’s another thing entirely to see yourself in a story of an older brother watching his enemy be loved and forgiven by God. It’s one thing to know, for example, that Jesus tells us not to be mastered by mammon the love of money. It’s another thing entirely to see yourself as a weed trying desperately for life, but getting choked out by the very thing you think will give it.

If our goal is to become disciples who reorient their lives around Jesus, then we have to participate. We have to allow our current default ways of living to be confronted by the kingdom. We have to allow Jesus and His teachings to confront us, to challenge us, and to convict us of all the ways that we are living outside of God’s will.

We have to receive the teachings, receive the parables, enter into them, mull them over as we mull over, and think about the reality of the kingdom. Not looking for quick fixes and spiritual platitudes to motivate us in the morning, but instead for true bread that nourishes and satisfies. See, the kingdom isn’t hidden because God is playing games with our eternal security.

It’s hidden because we crowded out with our own wills, desires, dreams, goals, values, and opinions. What Dallas Willard called our own kingdoms see? Parables are an invitation to allow ourselves to be exposed for our attempts at creating a satisfying life for ourselves to be deconstructed, for our minds, to be shaped by the rules of the kingdom, not the wisdom of the world, for our habits to reflect the love the lifestyle.

And the leadership of Jesus, not the default sins of our flesh and for our hearts to be oriented around the God who’s created us to be satisfied by him, not by the false kingdoms that we are creating and chasing.

So why don’t we stand and respond?

Our goal this year has been to become a fourth soil. Uh, we, uh, which means a lot of things, but one thing that it means is that we are, uh. Just like good and healthy soil is receptive to receiving a seed and helping it grow. We wanna become not just individuals, but a community here in the middle of Queen Creek that receives the word of God, responds to it, and then blesses the city that we’re in as witnesses who bear good fruit.

And our hope and our prayer is that as we look ahead at these parables for these next few months, that we would be confronted first and foremost by the reality of the kingdom before we look at the world around us, that we would reorient ourselves in response. It’s what the Bible calls repentance that we would allow ourselves to be confronted.

And so that’s, that’s the goal of this morning is as we look ahead to the parables, as we prepare our hearts to, to, to look at them as riddles, to engage in these stories that we would do so with a posture of submission, um, asking that God would confront us. And so as you respond, I just want to, uh, respond this way.