Jesus (28 page)

C
HAPTER
12

Parables

“He began to teach them many things in parables.”

H
ERE
'
S A STORY SPANNING
several decades. It shows why it sometimes takes a long time for people (including me) to understand a Gospel story.

The first chapter happened when I was a Jesuit novice. Twenty-five years ago, during the first month in the novitiate, I read about a place called the Bay of Parables. While I can't remember what book this was, I remember the vivid impression it made.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus finds himself so hemmed in by crowds that he climbs aboard a boat and asks Peter to row out into the Sea of Galilee, so that he can preach from the boat.
¹
The Gospels of Mark and Matthew also report incidents of Jesus's preaching from a boat.
²
In Galilee, said this book, there is still a place known as the Bay of Parables, where that Gospel passage most likely happened. Near the shoreline is a naturally occurring amphitheater, where people would have been able to sit comfortably to listen to Jesus; moreover, the unique acoustics of the site made it easier for the large crowd to hear Jesus.

The notion that people could identify exactly where a particular Scripture story happened captivated me. I remember thinking,
Cool!
But the explanation baffled. Why would Jesus get into a boat to address a crowd? (I imagined the carpenter standing up in the boat, wobbling, and falling into the water.) Why wouldn't he stand on the shoreline? Because of its oddness the tale of the Bay of Parables stuck with me.

The second chapter of my story: A few years later, I was on a summer vacation at a Jesuit house outside Boston, in a town on a bay that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. After breakfast, a few Jesuits would sit on the broad lawn that overlooks a harbor and spend a relaxing morning reading books or chatting. One morning, we heard a commotion in the harbor, which turned out to be the ruckus from a sailing school for some boisterous kids. The distance between us and the group of miniature sailboats was about a mile. To my surprise, we could easily hear the kids talking (or whining) as if they were only a few feet away: “I don't know how to fix my
rudder
!” “My sail isn't
working
!” You could also hear the frazzled instructor encouraging her students: “No, do it
this
way!”

I remarked how amazing it was that we could hear their voices so clearly. One older Jesuit said, “Well, of course. Sound travels over water very easily. You remember that story of Jesus preaching from the boat, right? That's one reason he did it that way. It was probably easier for the crowds to hear him.”

His casual insight delighted me. It reminded me that some of what we may not “get” in the Gospel often turns out to have a real-life explanation, once we think about the context of the story. Perhaps because I felt that I'd been let in on a kind of secret, I had a renewed desire to learn more about that story, and about the Gospels.

Finally, the third chapter: George and I arrive in Jerusalem about a decade after my encounter with the noisy sailing school. At dinner on the first night, Father Doan, the Jesuit superior at the PBI, asks me what we'd most like to visit. The first place I want to see, I tell him, is the Bay of Parables.

Doan replied, “The what?” Now, here was a Jesuit priest who has lived in the Holy Land for years. “I've never heard of it.”

Okay
, I thought,
maybe it's the
one
place he hasn't heard of.
George looked doubtful.

A few days later, we made the four-hour drive to Galilee and found our way to the Franciscan hostel on the Mount of Beatitudes. After we settled ourselves in our rooms, Sister Télesfora asked us, “So, Fathers, what would you most want to see?”

“The Bay of Parables!” I said.

“The what?”

When I described it, Sister Télesfora shook her head and furrowed her brow, as if I were deluded. Or insane. And she is not simply a Franciscan sister—she also teaches New Testament Greek, so she would presumably know about the site.

George rolled his eyes and said afterward, “It's like you were asking about Santa's workshop at the North Pole.”

A few hours later, we made our way to Tabgha, the traditional site of the miracle of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, and we prayed briefly in the small chapel there. Afterward, in the gift shop, I noticed one of the Benedictine monks, screwed up my courage, and asked, “Do you know where the Bay of Parables is?” I fully expected him to say, “The what?”

Instead, he said in a heavy German accent, “
Ja, ja!
Zee Bay of Pah-rables!” He stumbled in English, so I called over George, who speaks German. “It's verry cloze to here,” he said.

The monk grabbed a small map from beside the cash register and scribbled some directions. Then George translated his German. “Just walk along the road and you'll see . . . an opening in the bushes. Then go down into the bush and you'll see . . .” George paused, looked at the man, looked at me, and then asked him to repeat a word. George said to me, querulously, “I think he said to follow the stones . . . painted
purple
?”

“Ja, ja!
” he said excitedly. “
Wie-o-let
. Wie-o-let paint on zee rrocks.”

So under the blistering hot sun—it must have been 110 degrees—George and I followed his map and, sure enough, almost tripped over several boulders marked with violet bars.

“Wie-o-let,” said George dryly.

As we walked farther into the dry grass, a handful of wood hyraxes, squirrel-size rodents, scurried around our feet and zoomed up the low trees.

Immediately (
euthus!
) the ground dropped away from us, and we found ourselves on the rim of a natural amphitheater. People had likely stood here and listened to Jesus preaching from the boat. Or, as is often said in the Holy Land, “If it didn't happen here, then it happened a few hundred yards from here.” As I gazed on the blue-green water sparkling under the sun, I could easily picture Jesus sitting in a boat just a few hundred feet from where we were standing. I couldn't stop smiling when I realized what we had found.

“Zee Bay of Pah-rables,” said George.

Then I saw something that amazed me even more. All around us was this: rocky ground, fertile ground, stony ground, and even a thorn bush.

D
OES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR
? In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus tells the story of a farmer who goes out to sow and whose seed falls on different kinds of ground. Told in all the Synoptic Gospels, the parable illustrates (among other things) the way that Jesus's message is received, in both his day and our own.
³
Jesus even explains the parable at length in the Synoptics. The rocky ground represents those who hear the word, but do not allow it to take root; when trials come they “wither away.” The thorny ground is an image for those who hear the word, but the “cares of the world” and “lure of wealth” choke it off, and the seed produces no yield. But the fertile ground represents those who hear the word, accept it, and bear great fruit, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
⁴

As I stood under the broiling sun, I was gobsmacked to see rocks, thorns, and fertile ground. No one planted the thorn bushes, carted in topsoil, or arranged the stones to make the locale look as it did in Jesus's time, as if we were in a theme park called Jesus Land. They were just
there.

It dawned on me that when Jesus used objects from nature to convey his message—seeds, rocks, birds, clouds, water—he may not have been talking in generalities, but about these things
right here
. Not “Think about rocky ground,” but “Look at
that
rocky ground.” Not “Those people are like thorns,” but “Those people are like
those
thorns.” It grounded the Gospels, and Jesus, in a way that I never could have imagined. It made me think more about the way Jesus drew on nature in his parables.

Then I remembered another insight I once heard about this passage. The Parable of the Sower may refer not only to which individuals are open, or not open, to receiving the Gospel message. It may also refer to those
parts
of ourselves that are open, and not open. Can you see your whole self as the field and consider what parts are fertile, what parts are rocky, and what parts are choked with weeds?

Where, for example, are you open to God's word in your life? Perhaps you are easily able to find God in your family. That may be your good soil. Where is your rocky soil? Perhaps you are compassionate at home but less so at work, stubbornly clinging to old grudges. That aspect of your life may be unyielding, and God's word cannot penetrate the soil of your soul. What part of your life is choked with weeds? Perhaps you desire to follow God but are obsessed with wealth, which chokes off the fruitful growth that God might wish.

To continue the metaphor, God may want to dislodge a few rocks and pull out some weeds in order to clear a space for God's word to take root. This may take the form of a friend confronting you on some selfish behavior, a sudden recognition of your own stubbornness, or even a period of suffering that opens you to God in a new way. God plows, unearthing the good soil where God's word can be planted, take root, grow, and flourish.

Facing the Sea of Galilee, I wondered about the people who, in Jesus's day, sat where I was standing now. What did they think when they heard these parables for the first time? I thought about how glad I was that I had listened to Drew and come to the Holy Land. I thought of all of these things as I stood at the Bay of Parables.

I also thought about C. H. Dodd.

I
N OUR
I
NTRODUCTION TO
the New Testament class, Father Harrington began our discussion of the parables by quoting a definition from the Scripture scholar C. H. Dodd, which was memorable in its precision. In his book
The Parables of the Kingdom
, Dodd defines a parable as “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”
⁵

The Greek
paraballō
means “to place one thing beside another.” As Harrington notes, “A parable is a form of analogy that seeks to illuminate one reality by appealing to something better known.”
⁶
The complex reality of the reign of God, the main theme of Jesus's preaching, is illuminated by something as simple and familiar as a mustard seed. But Jesus used this device creatively, and he spun out parables in many forms. Some are elaborate stories with multiple characters. “There was a man who had two sons,” begins his Parable of the Prodigal Son. Others are the briefest of metaphors: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.”

The parables are poetic explanations of spiritual concepts impossible to comprehend fully. The reign of God is far too rich to be encompassed by any one definition, no matter how theologically accurate. True forgiveness is impossible to explain in a few words, no matter how well chosen. And where a strict definition can close down a person's mind, a story is more likely to open up the imagination. Jesus saw the benefit of telling a parable about a shepherd seeking out a lost sheep and allowing the hearers to “tease” out the underlying meaning for themselves. When people find meaning in stories on their own and discover the truth for themselves, it's easier for them to make the message their own.

The parables are endlessly rich, and Jesus's brilliant use of these images remains unmatched. As an experiment, try coming up with a parable of your own and you'll see how difficult it is to create one that is short, fresh, memorable, easily understood, and open-ended enough to allow a person to enter more deeply into the mystery of the reign of God.

But beyond that, the parables, says N. T. Wright, are not simply information about the reign of God; they are “part of the means of bringing it to birth.” Jesus's frequent use of parables was intended to jump-start the reign, not just by giving people something to think about, but by inviting them to live in the new world being created.
⁷

Many of the parables also go against the expectations of the audience and are therefore subversive, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, when the man from a hated ethnic group was ultimately revealed to Jewish listeners as the good guy who cares for the stranger.
⁸
Jesus thus forced his listeners—gently, through stories and images—to confront their prejudices about others and their preconceptions of God. “The deep places in our lives—places of resistance and embrace—are not ultimately reached by instruction,” writes the Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann. “Those places of resistance and embrace are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.”
⁹

Jesus grasped all this about the parable form—either through divine inspiration or through the human experience of having lived among the people of the region and knowing how to speak with them. Besides, if Jesus
had
given an abstruse philosophical lecture to the predominantly peasant audience, they wouldn't have understood him. And if he had taken an hour to explain a complex theological point to farmers worried about returning to their crops, they would have just walked away. Far better to grab them with a provocative story or a piquant metaphor.

Or to draw on what is happening in the here and now that might illuminate the reign of God. As Jonathan Reed notes, the construction of the nearby towns of Sepphoris and Tiberias for people far wealthier than those living in Capernaum and the smaller towns might have increased people's awareness of income disparities. So Jesus's stories about the rich and the poor would have been applicable in general, but the presence of the towns then being built by Herod Antipas would have given the stories added punch. Archaeologists have found that the well-built houses in Sepphoris were far more lavish than the single-room dwellings found in Capernaum and Nazareth; in wealthier towns houses were covered in roof tiles and had frescoed interiors and occasionally mosaics. The building of Tiberias and Sepphoris, notes Reed, meant the “accentuation of social stratification” to people living in poorer towns.
¹⁰
So Jesus's listeners might have heard Luke's parable about the rich man who lives in comfort while the poor man starves outside his door and thought,
Yes, just like in Tiberias and Sepphoris
.
¹¹