July 24, 2008
Parables
Pentecost 11/12A
Patience has been called a minor form of despair disguised as a virtue. God is usually very generous with it. If you ask for it, you’ll more than likely get it. And you’ll probably be sorry.
I don’t know about you, but Matthew has been testing my patience these past few Sundays. He’s been in what might be called ”parable-of-the-kingdom overload,” reporting Jesus telling one parable after another. There’s been the parable of the sower, the parable of the wheat and the tares, and now, today, the parable of the mustard seed, the parable of the leaven, the parable of the pearl of great price, and finally, the parable of the indiscriminate net, the one that that catches all sorts and conditions of fish. Finally, the twelve who’d been his upfront audience all along, sound a bit like they’ve run out of patience. They ask, in effect, What’s with all these parables?
Jesus takes a breath, maybe somewhat out of patience, himself, and answers with this: “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven” (Mk 4.10-12). I hear that, and I wonder, Does that include us? Does that include his church? These wall-to-wall parables and all the others here and there sound like a mystery wrapped in an enigma. When we don’t get them, does that mean we’ve not been given the secret of the kingdom? Is it not the kingdom we are supposed to savvy and to tell others about?
What are we to think? The disciples get the password to the kingdom, and all the rest of us churchers are handed the parables to do with the best we can lest we figure it all out and get saved? What can we say, then, about the parables and about the kingdom of God? We can say this: A parable is a small story with a large point, not with a lot of points all over the ballpark like an allegory. You can easily miss the point altogether if you start assigning people and things to the parts like a stage production. A parable is not an allegory.
Many of the ones Jesus told reveal the intriguing irony so common to and so revealing of the ways of God. They make a statement of facts readily enough, but in a mystifying way that tends to an exclusiveness intended only for an inner circle, just as Jesus says. Some of them illustrate that a foolish question deserves a foolish answer. The disciples’ question reminds me of one put to Louis Armstrong when a fan asked him, “Pops, what is jazz?” only to hear him answer, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”
Parables are ripe with metaphor and are indeed often metaphors in themselves. There’s a lesson herein for any who would need to make Scripture into some infallible verbal inerrancy only to render it altogether impotent, to rob it of its poetic beauty and power, and indeed of its parables, of their truth.
At any rate, like jokes and jazz, if you’ve got to have parables explained, don’t bother. Parables are not to be explained, they are to be understood, and like most of the important things in life, they are understood only by our opening ourselves to them and listening with wonder and imagination and the faith that undergirds these presents, participating in them in a way, accepting this freedom as the gift from God it is intended to be.
Parables, Jesus seems to be saying, are not stories that cause or intend us to be faithful, but stories that open themselves to us through the eyes and ears of whatever faithfulness we can bring to them. We are to find the meaning in them. In other words, these parables of the kingdom do not exist in and of and for themselves, but for to give God a place, a room with a view to maneuver in our lives.
In one of his delightful theological ABC books, Frederick Buechner says things like this… The parables of Jesus are not historical allegories telling us how God acts with us, neither are they moral example-stories telling us how to act before God and towards one another. They are stories that shatter the deep structure of our taken-for-granted world. In the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, the legalists are outraged when Johnny-Come-Lately gets as big a slice of the worm as the Early Bird (Mt 20.1-16). The point of the Unjust Steward is that it’s better to be a resourceful rascal than a saintly schlemiel (Lk 16.1-8). In the parable of the Talents, spiritually speaking, playing the market will get you further than playing it safe (Mt 25.14-30). [Wishful Thinking, pp 66f]
Parables remove our defenses and make us vulnerable to God. It is only in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments does the kingdom of God arrive. At such times we best realize the startling irony that true security is the serenity that comes from accepting insecurity as our mortal lot. The thoughts and stories in the Bible do not furnish easy assurance, but awaken and challenge us with their contradiction even of each other.
And so what of the kingdom of God, the freight these parables are designed to collect and to move and to deliver? What would these stories have meant to Jesus’s audience? First, their primary and essential reference is to the sovereignty of God conceived in the most concrete possible manner, that is, to God’s activity in ruling. The kingdom of God is the authority of God expressed in deeds. It is that which God does that reveals to us that God is king. It is not a place or even a community ruled by God nor even an abstract idea of these things. The kingdom of God is the activity of God as king and places the major emphasis on those acts wherein and whereby God’s sovereignty is made manifest. Once again, the parables and their devastating challenges to the status quo provide room for God to reveal these acts in our lives. W H Auden put it like this, “You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences… ”
Perhaps their most important relevance in these times is to remind us that biblical morality is not about sex and abortion and gay marriage. Biblical morality is about caring for the poor and dispossessed, about our stewardship of the environment, about our life together in communities where justice and peace are as welcome and tangible as when the sun also rises. The Lutheran bishop and scholar Krister Stendahl spoke most winningly, I think, of the message of the parables when he said, Wherever and whenever the brokenness of the world and our life in it is being mended, there is present the kingdom of God.
Jesus reminds us as he did the disciples, parables are not told to convince or convert us to God, but to enable us through our faith to understand God’s presence and to make room for God, for us to find meaning in our lives, to realize that all along Jesus is God’s parable, and that we by our own faith-filled imaginations can become parables ourselves. That is at least one of the secrets of the kingdom that has been given to us.
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