In the powerful film Lincoln, There is a scene where the President and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton are discussing war strategy with other colleagues. Suddenly Lincoln starts to recall a popular story from his days as an Illinois lawyer, and Stanton screams something like, “My God, not another story! I can’t stand another one of your stories!” and storms out of the room. (I’ve embellished the language a bit.)
Lincoln historian Ross Peterson comments, “Stanton would go crazy when Lincoln told his stories. They would be in the middle of a heated discussion and Lincoln would start telling a story. He was a prolific storyteller. Sometimes people would understand what he meant, sometimes they wouldn’t.”
Bill Leonard
“My God, not another parable!” Can you not hear the disciples saying this when Jesus once again set out on the path of the parable gospel?
Fantasy Simon Peter’s directness: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, but we have no idea what you are talking about. Can’t you just say what you mean, without these absurd stories?”
In Matthew 13, the disciples finally ask him: “Why do you speak to people in parables?” And Jesus answers:
Although they see, they do not see;
although they hear, they hear and understand nothing.
In them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled:
“You will always hear, but never understand;
You will always see, but never perceive.
For the heart of this people is hardened.
They hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they could see with their eyes,
hear with your ears,
understand with the heart
and turn, and I will heal them.”
Listening without understanding
In 2024, there seems to be a growing public perception that American Christians are listening without understanding because our hearts are hardened. Are we actually correcting many of Jesus’ parables here and now?
“American Christians listen without understanding because our hearts are hardened.”
“A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves.” But before we could help, we had to know his political affiliation.
“A nobleman gave a great banquet and invited the lame, the blind and the poor.” No illegal immigrants allowed!
“The young man has squandered his inheritance by living a dissolute life.” But he can’t come home unless he votes for us!
“The people who show up at the end of the day get the same pay as those who started in the morning.” No more DEI hiring!
“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.” But it grows too slowly, so we need government help to accelerate its growth.
Eight Lessons on Parables
Such contemporary realities led me back to the parables, in the biblical texts and the works of scholars who know more about them than I do. Why the parables? Because they are the means by which Jesus explains the nature of the Kingdom of God and what some of us call God’s new day in the world.
Here are some things I learned:
Firstly, in The power of parables, New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan says: “A parable is a metaphor expanded into a story, or more simply, a parable is a metaphorical story.”
It is not an “ordinary story” that “wants you to focus on yourself.” Rather, a parable “always points outward, beyond itself, to another or broader” reference. It is a story that is more than the sum of its parts.
“A parable is a story that is more than the sum of its parts.”
Second, Crossan says that because of the Romans, Jesus taught by parables, a lesson he learned from the beheading of John the Baptist. If you speak too directly and at too much length about a new kingdom in the world, the Romans will put you on their hit list. If you proclaim your message too early, too publicly, and too individually, the Romans will kill you before you can put it into action.
So until you teach other people to sow the seeds of God’s new day, it’s best to express it in code – give them parables. Jesus began using parables in response to a governmental, secular reality. The “kingdom” he describes is not protected by Roman legions.
Third, parables help people find their way into God’s new day through stories, not dogma. Jesus does not reject the dogmas of the law, but finds them inextricably linked to caring for “the least of these.” He warns against those who religiously “tithe mint, dill, and cumin” but ignore the “more important things” such as “justice, mercy, and faith.”
Fourth, parables demand something of the listener because they take us beyond the details and lead us on a personal quest. As Crossan says, “Parables, in the best riddle tradition… have profound implications. If you successfully understand them, you win the kingdom of God.” If you don’t “get it,” you miss the depths of life’s spiritual, personal, and communal experience.
Fifth: Proclamation of the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God, Homiletics professor Tom Long examines the numerous analyses that scholars have given them, including the work of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Parables Seminar. Long paraphrases Crossan’s idea that “Jesus was not killed because he spoke in parables; he was killed because he believed parables, saw the world parabolically and acted according to the powerful vision created by the parables.”
“Parables confuse our heads and, with luck, our hearts too.”
Sixth, parables confuse our heads and – with luck – our hearts too.
My long-time friend Paul Simpson Duke writes, “It is in the nature of parable to be unpredictable. Like Jesus himself, parables defy neat categories; they come to us in their own way. To hear them requires an unusual openness, a suspension of expectations, and a lightness of foot.”
Parables can also revise our personal and cultural norms. Just when his listeners thought they knew where Jesus was leading them, he threw a doppelganger in their faces—cheating tax collectors, creepy landlords, or various party animals.
Seventh, parables blur the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. On April 9, 1944, when the Allied armies were only days away from him, Lutheran preacher and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Bonhoeffer had been imprisoned for over a year for his resistance to Nazism. On that April day, Bonhoeffer’s life of brilliant thought and courageous resistance ended.
Bonhoeffer’s death seems a long way from God’s new day, but from prison he wrote: “The church is only church when it is there for others. … The church must participate in the worldly problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men (and women) of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to be there for others.”
Each parable takes us into this moral, spiritual and worldly realm.
Eighth, what does the idea of God’s new day, which the parables point to, actually mean? Tom Long explores several answers, but ends with a reference to Christopher Morse’s The difference that heaven makes: Hearing the Gospel again as news, in which Morse concludes his discussion of God’s new day by saying that “people of faith are called to be there for what is there. But not in hand.”
Long adds, “It is not under our control and cannot be conquered, institutionalized and turned into another rival kingdom on earth. … This means that when God’s life breaks into our lives, it makes a difference in this world, but it does not belong to this world.”
Sometimes …
And sometimes God’s new day actually breaks through.
“Shoot me, I vote yes!”
In the film Lincolnwe observe a dramatized but somewhat authentic scene in the US House of Representatives on January 31, 1865. It concerns the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, a document which states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Every time I see this scene, I have to fight back tears as one congressman votes no and claims, “How can we grant equality to people whom God created unequal?” Another congressman screams, “Shoot me, I’m voting yes!”
After the votes were counted, there were 119 votes for and 56 against – seven votes more than the two-thirds majority needed to end slavery in the American Republic.
Sometimes God’s new day comes, even if it is only by seven votes. Who among us or our Congress today would have shouted, “Shoot me, I vote yes,” 159 years ago to abolish slavery, thereby destroying the use of Scripture in its defense?
The legacy of slavery persists, along with a host of other “secular problems of normal human life.”
God’s new day is yet to come, and Christ’s church is still called not to dominate, but to “help and serve.” We are “sowers sent out to sow.” Let’s get started.
Bill Leonard is the founding dean and James and Marilyn Dunn Professor Emeritus of Baptist Studies and Church History at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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The Good PhD Student: A Modern Parable | Opinion by Arthur Wright
Do we still call him the “Good” Samaritan? | Opinion by Russell Waldrop
Three stories from Jesus about the danger of hierarchy and gratitude | Opinion by Rick Pidcock
