The parables of Jesus are considered by scholars to be among the most authentic words of Jesus we have.  Used by many venerable teachers for millennia, the purpose of teaching in parables is to stir up the imagination, to pique the curiosity, to make the listener reflect and arrive at his or her own meaning.  What does this method tell us about the mind and message of the teller? 

 First in a 3 part series on parables.

Reading for 1/27/08  from The Kingdom of God is Like…, by Thomas Keating

The thrust of parables is to subvert the distorted myths by which people live their lives. To understand what we mean by  "living in a myth" just think of some of our own contemporary myths. Take the myth of the "American Dream, [for instance]:" two cars in every garage, vacations in Florida, houses in Spain, and so forth…[T]he American dream has been part of a vision of America's invincibility, of its absolute entitlement in the eyes of God.

 

A myth is often what holds people's lives together. It is an attempt to resolve the tensions of everyday life by promising an idealized future in which one will be rescued from all the problems of ordinary life. When a myth begins to falter, great leaders may try to find ways to recapture the glory of earlier days…

 

…For the Israelites of Jesus' time, the tension [was] between everyday reality and a mythical vision of Israel as God's chosen people…  The cultural symbol for this myth was the great cedar of Lebanon. Cedars of Lebanon were comparable to the huge redwood trees of California. They grew straight up for two or three hundred feet or more. Every kind of bird cold enjoy their shade. This image was deeply embedded in the cultural conditioning of the Jewish people. The kingdom of God as a nation would be the greatest of all nations just as the great cedar of Lebanon was the greatest of all trees.

 

    Instead, Jesus proposed this parable, "What is the kingdom of God really like? It is like a mustard seed"--proverbially the smallest and most insignificant of all seeds--"that someone took and sowed in his garden." for an alert hearer of Jesus' day, the detail about the garden would be a tip-off. In the Jewish view of the world, order was identified with holiness and disorder with uncleanness. Hence there were very strict rules about what could be planted in a household garden. The rabbinical law of diverse kinds ruled that one could not mix certain plants in the same garden. A mustard plant was forbidden in a household garden because it was fast spreading and would tend to invade the veggies. In stating that this man planted a mustard seed in his garden, the hearers are alerted to the fact that he was doing something illegal. An unclean image thus becomes the starting point for Jesus' vision of the kingdom of God in this parable.

 

    If the starting point is an unclean image, the rest of the parable becomes even more perplexing. What do we know about a mustard seed, botanically speaking: it is a common, fast-spreading plant, which grows to about four feet in height. It puts out a few branches, and with some stretch of the imagination, birds might build a few down-at-the-heel nests in its shade.

 

    Steeped in their cultural images of the great cedar of Lebanon, the hearers would be expecting the mustard seed, Jesus' symbol of the kingdom, to grow into a mighty apocalyptic tree. Jesus' point is exactly the opposite. It just becomes a bush. Thus the image of the kingdom of God as a towering cedar of Lebanon is explicitly ridiculed. According to Jesus, the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which some man illegally planted in his garden. It became a shrub and a few birds nested in its modest branches. That's all. The parable subverts all the grandiose ideas about what the kingdom is going to be like when it finally arrives.

In seeking to understand the nature of the world we live in and its mysterious, numinous core, humanity has always resorted to stories.  We had to—how else could we express the deeper realities beneath and within the prosaic details of our daily lives?  What else could we relate to?  But even more fundamentally, how could we even begin to grasp that the great mystery of life is, in its own magnificent way, yet another ordinary thing?  So when saints and sages, philosophers and prophets from time immemorial wanted to teach some important truth, they most often reached for a story to illustrate their meaning.

 The parables of Jesus are among the words and message most certainly authentically his own.  There were the heart of his preaching and teaching, but they were not original or exclusive to him.   He was making brilliant use of a genre which was already of long tradition and which was familiar to all throughout the Mediterranean world. In Greece and Rome, parables were employed by rhetoricians, politicians and philosophers, most notably by Socrates and Aristotle.   

In Israel, parables were uttered by prophets and wise women and men. They appear even in the oldest books of the Old Testament. Parables were often used by Jewish rabbis who were contemporaries of Jesus.  A famous and quite ancient example is the parable of the Ewe Lamb which the prophet Nathan addressed to David. After the king had arranged the death of Bathsheba's husband on the battlefield so that he might himself marry Bathsheba, Nathan told him this story:

12 There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him.

(2 Sam 12:1-4)

When David condemned the man who had done this as deserving to die, Nathan revealed that the story was a parable, saying, "You are the man"

So the parables of Jesus are unique only in a very limited sense, in that the primary teaching of Jesus is not taking texts out of the Hebrew scriptures and explaining them, blasting them, commenting on them. What he is doing is telling a perfectly ordinary story. And using that as the major teaching. "The Kingdom of God is like this." So then you have to think, ‘well, I hear the story, but how on earth is the Kingdom of God like that?’-And that’s your job as the hearer.  

 This is not to say that Jesus employed parables with the aim of making his subject obscure. . Although in several places in the gospel accounts, he tells his disciples that not everyone would understand his parables, I don’t think this was by design.  Like any teacher, he was well aware that some who heard his words had already made up their minds not to understand and some could not be bothered to try, and , well,  there’s just not much you can do about that except keep on teaching...   

But that not because parables are out of reach—quite the contrary: a parable is open to anyone.  That’s part of the point of using them. So if your practice is to teach through parables, then you are intentionally leaving yourself open to interpretation.  You are telling people you trust them to think for themselves and to contribute to the discussion.

A parable is an implied comparison. The comparison is not always obvious; but once it is perceived it sheds new light on the subject under discussion. The purpose of a parable is to move from inquiry to decision or action.  Paradoxically, that purpose is often more effectively achieved precisely because the speaker proceeds indirectly rather than directly.  The purpose of a parable is to strike the imagination, to pique the curiosity, to make the listener reflect and work to arrive at the meaning, but only so that the lesson will be more deeply engraved on the mind.  For example, Jesus tells a parable about somebody who takes a mustard seed, plants it, and it grows up to be a great tree…or at least a really big bush… 

But we all know its just a weed..

Now, imagine an audience reacting to that.  What does this guy mean describing the Kingdom of heaven like this?  So they start to ask questions.  You mean, the Kingdom is big? Well, yes—but you just said it's a big weed. So why don't you say a big cedar of Lebanon? Why a big weed? And besides, this mustard, we're not sure we like this mustard. It's very dangerous in our fields. We would never plant it on purpose. We try to control it. We try to contain it. Why do you mean the Kingdom is something that the people try to control and contain?" Every reaction in the audience ... the audience arguing with themselves, as it were, answering back to Jesus is doing exactly what he wants. It's making them think, not about mustard, of course, but about the Kingdom. But the trap is that this is a very provocative, even a weird, image for the Kingdom. To say the Kingdom is like a cedar of Lebanon, everyone would yawn, say, "yeah, yeah, everybody knows that ."  But if we say, ‘It's like a mustard seed...” a weed we are not even allowed to plant in the garden because it is so invasive, well, that gets us thinking.

Keating realizes that if the kingdom of God is like a big weed we can’t get rid of no matter what we do, then God is right here, common and ordinary.  So if we can accept the God of everyday life, we’ll find God in everyday life—we’ll hardly be able to avoid it!  

This further suggests that God's greatest works are not done on a grandiose level. Not in cathedrals, big buildings, or large mausoleums. Cathedrals too often turn into museums.   That’s not what the kingdom of heaven is like, Jesus says.  The kingdom is in everyday life with its ups and downs, and above all, in its ordinary insignificance. Such as where most people actually live our lives. The kingdom is thus readily accessible to everybody.  It’s as common as dirt—or a weed.

The parable also affirms that grace is like a mustard seed sown in us, the smallest of all seeds. It grows, but it’s not going to turn us into cedars of Lebanon. If we’re lucky we’ll grow up to be shrubs.  So we don’t have to wait for a grand day of deliverance. The kingdom is available right now.  Here and now. 

On the other hand, it also lets us know that God is probably not going to intervene in this world for the triumph of the just. He may not intervene apocalyptically, trailing clouds of glory, to deliver Israel or the world and bring about justice and peace. That job has been entrusted to us.  We shouldn’t wait around for a miracle.  And the good news is we don’t have to!

But that’s not what people expected to hear—nor really what they wanted to hear.  So we reframe the story the way we want it or just keep telling ourselves the old story despite all the new information available to us.  So hard was it for people of Jesus' time to get over their idea of the kingdom of God as a triumphant institution that even the evangelists tried to change it into something great anyway. In other words, the myth recaptured the parable. The parable was meant to change our ideas about how to live on the earth, but what happened was that the old mindset began to interpret the parable in a way that was consistent with its former mythical expectations. There are four versions of the parable of the mustard seed in the Gospels, one each in Mathew, Mark and Luke.  There’s also one in the Gospel of Thomas, a document recovered about fifty years ago in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Collection, which many exegetes think is probably closer to the original oral tradition. For Luke and Matthew, contrary to all botanical good sense, the mustard seed turns into a tree. In Mark, it turns into the greatest of shrubs. In Thomas, it turns into a great branch so that a lot of birds can rest in its shade. All of these expectations are contrary to the facts A mustard seed does not become a tree or even a great of shrubs, but that image is closer to the old expectations of grandeur and vindication.  So people gradually slipped back into the old mindsets. They lost the radical thrust and the incredible freedom to which the parable called them.

And so do we.  For it may be tempting to look back at those people and smile at their ‘primitive’ willingness to delude themselves.  But are we really so different?  Are we not also loath to accept the stark realism of the teachings of our own prophets, both ancient and modern? Sometimes we go so far as to say there are no saints,  no sages, no prophets with a message for us.

How then shall we live our lives?   How shall we be startled out of our routines, out of our illusions that life really is about the lists, the mortgage, the errands, the shopping, the things and the Super Bowl?  How shall we be awakened to what matters, even to remember the epiphanies we have already experienced—the revelations that infused our being with light and purpose and understanding at some earlier time? 

The kin-dom of heaven is like a big weed that grows by the side of the road and which we pass every day without seeing it.  It is often in our way.  We call it invasive when what it really is is prolific, vital and so easily grown that you have to actively intervene to prevent it from spreading.  We are already there; ot is already among us.

And if is also so that that God does intervene to change what we ourselves have wrought, and if agencies and governments intervene only when pressured, who does that leave with the will to see the good that waits to be done and the with the freedom to do it?  Yes—us.  Little old weedy us.  For the kin-dom of heaven is always at hand—and those hands are at the ends of our arms

So let us make it so.  Let us take those seeds of love and grace and justice that are everywhere to be harvested and plant them in our gardens and by the roadsides and school yards and by the doors of city halls and all the capitol buildings everywhere, that we might be fed by such a weed as this and strengthen by it for the work at hand.

Amen.  Ashé.  Blessed be.