Transcription
[Music] This is Dr. Robert C. Newman in his Synoptic Gospels course, lecture number six on The Parables. Okay, we're looking at the Synoptic Gospels course here. So far, we've looked at the Historical Jesus, Jewish background, introduction to ex Jesus and narratives, authorship and date of synoptics, and we're about here to start on section five, The Parables, or as I call it here, exing Jesus' Parables.
We started with some definitions relevant to Parables. There's some confusion that can arise about exactly what a parable is, since the definition used in English literature is not quite the same as the range of usage of the word "parable" in the Greek New Testament. On top of that, New Testament Parable studies have been messed up for about a century because commentators unwisely followed Bultmann's claim that Parables were quite different from allegories and always only made a single point. So let's have a look.
If you look in a standard English dictionary, a dictionary definition would be something like this: a parable is a short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle. That's not a bad definition, of course. A parable doesn't have to be fictitious, but we have no way, 2,000 years later, to tell whether any or all of Jesus' parables are fictitious. That a parable is a fictitious story, however, casts no shadow on the Biblical teaching of inerrancy.
The literary definition of a parable is: a parable is an extended simile, whereas an allegory is an extended metaphor. This definition gets us into technical questions of what a simile is, how it differs from a metaphor. On top of that, it makes a distinction that Jesus and the New Testament writers do not make. The word "parable," as used in the New Testament, includes allegories and a number of other figurative genres.
For your information, we give the following definitions of simile, metaphor, etc.: A simile is an explicit comparison employing words like "as" or "like," as for example, "God is like a king." A metaphor is an implicit comparison not employing words "as" or "like," for example, "God is a king." A parable is a simile expanded into a story showing how some item, person, etc., is like the story or like some element in the story. An allegory is a story picturing concepts and such by means of persons or elements in the story named for each concept. So Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan is probably the most famous of the English allegories, in which the chief character is called Pilgrim and Progress. We don't normally catch that today because it's changed meaning, but a progress is a journey. Okay, so it's Pilgrim's pilgrimage or Pilgrim's journey to Heaven, etc., and you run into all of these characters with different kinds of names, and they represent different kinds of problems and encouragements and such that Pilgrim faces in his journey, and that Christians will face in their spiritual journey as well.
New Testament usage of the word "parable" is a rather broad genre of illustration, including parable in its narrow definition, allegory, similitude, and sample parable, as well as proverb and paradox. We've already defined parable and allegory as used in this sentence in the second definition there, the literary definition. What do the other terms here mean? A similitude is something that's longer than a single simile but not really long enough to be a story. Think of the parable that Jesus gives: the woman who puts leaven in dough until it's all leavened. No action there. Okay, I know her kneading the dough might take some time, etc., but it's not an action-filled story, if you like. It's just kind of a sentence almost, or the parable of the mustard seed: just the seed grows until it becomes big enough for birds to rest in the branches.
A sample parable—we mentioned just briefly earlier when we discussed characteristics of Luke—a story which illustrates some spiritual truth by giving a sample of it rather than by giving an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, as parables more commonly do. The parable of the sower and the soils is an earthly story about planting seed with a heavenly meaning about the varied reception of the Gospel. A sample parable, by contrast, to the Good Samaritan, which gives a sample of what it means to be a neighbor.
We want to think a little bit now about how parables function, and we can say lots of things, but we're going to construct it here in terms of two things. First of all, parables are stories. They're designed artistically by the creator of the parable to be interesting and use a number of the standard devices of storytelling. For instance, Amos Wilder, in an article in S.A.A., pictures parables as stories in the sense that they're brief. So the longest parables in the New Testament are probably something like the prodigal son or something like that, and it's 20 verses or something like that, where so takes up a page, say, of the Bible, whereas a short story typically is half a dozen pages at least. So you can see very brief, unified—doesn't go shooting out all over the place, doesn't usually have several plots or anything of that sort.
Limited number of actors; Wilder mentions the rule of two—chiefly two principal actors. Not all parables satisfy two principal actors, but an awful lot of them would. Some of them—think of the parable of the prodigal son, for instance—your two principal actors are the father and the son, but then there's the other brother, etc. So there's a little bit more going on there. Huh. They typically are characterized by direct discourse to make the story vivid. You have the different characters speaking instead of the narrator describing what they said or something of that sort. A serial development: it goes from the beginning to the end without taking a few sidetracks here and there to explain other things going on, and that's probably partially just a result of their being brief and unified, not having multiple plots.
There's also what's called a rule of three, and that is that typically parables don't go beyond three items for certain things in order not to complicate things too much. So, for instance, in the parable of the pounds, the guy, the ruler who's going to a far country to receive a kingdom, returns, gives a pound of silver to each of his servants—so they're ten of them—but you don't get a working out of the ten. When you get back, you get a working out of three of them: one guy made five pounds with his, one made two pounds with his, and one hid the stuff in the ground. Okay, so the rule of three is a rather common feature to make the thing memorable and not get too complicated.
Repetition—often verbal repetition or thematic repetition in the thing—again to help make it easier to remember. This is characteristic not only of parables but also of other types of storytelling techniques, like fairy tales or something: that there are three brothers, and the one brother goes and does this and this and this and this, and finally this disaster happens, and then there's a second brother, and he goes this and this and this and this, and you get a lot of the same words that were used in the previous one, etc.
Binary opposition—black versus white. Okay, these are not discussions of some difficult psychological problem where you've got all these grays and nuances and things of that sort, but very typically very good, very bad—not always. Okay, the—again, the parable of the prodigal son is a little bit nuanced in that, although in the lost coin you have nine coins not lost and one coin lost, and in the sheep you have one sheep lost and 99 sheep not lost, in the prodigal son you kind of wonder whether both sons aren't lost to some extent and such, but but typically very strong opposition, very strong distinction between the various characters or events or things of that sort.
There's an end stress: that you often have the final resolution of things shows up quite suddenly at the end of the story. Often there's a resolution by reversal. This shows up pretty strongly in connection with the parable of Lazarus and a rich man, where the rich man is now begging and the poor beggar is now feasting, if you like, that sort of thing. And they're usually two-level. Okay, they're usually this earthly story, heavenly meaning thing, which I said the only real exceptions to are these sample parables of Luke.
So parables are stories, and so they've got the tight structure to them and these distinctive things that make it easy to see what's going on. In that sense, parables are analogies, and the best work on this I've seen is a book by John Sider called Interpreting the Parables, published by Zondervan back in 1995. And he says basically, a parable makes an analogy between the earthly story and its various features with the heavenly meaning and its various features. And in the terminology that's used in literary studies for verbal analogies, if you like, this—or parables—are the tenor, and that is the heavenly meaning, if you like; the vehicle, the means by which that tenor is conveyed, and that's the earthly story.
And for those of you who get tangled up with complicated terminology, a vehicle we think of as an automobile or a bicycle or a motorcycle: it carries the passenger. So here the earthly story carries the heavenly meaning, if you like, or if you're into paint, the vehicle is the oil or latex base that carries the color, okay, and sticks it to the wall. So so a vehicle: the story; the tenor: what the meaning of the story is; and then one or more points of resemblance, which are the analogies that you can make between the earthly story and the heavenly meaning. Almost all of Jesus' parables are what we call analogies of equation: that is, this is to this equals this is to this, if you like. Let's take a look at some of those.
I started with an example from Shakespeare, in King Lear, Act 4, scene 1, line 37. Lear is complaining: "As flies are to wanton boys, so are we to the gods." Okay, so that's the vehicle, if you like. Well, it's actually—that's actually both of them; that's the two analogies, huh. Here are wanton boys, which in early English means boys that are mischievous or something of that sort, and the way they treat flies is analogous to the way the gods treat humans. Okay, that's what he said, and he actually explains it in the last half of the line: "They kill us for their sport." Okay, so these boys kill the flies for fun; the gods kill humans for fun. Well, you can see it's not a Christian worldview that Shakespeare is presenting—presenting Lear's view on the matter, anyway. So the tenor: the relation of gods to humans. Okay, the vehicle: the way boys treat flies, if you like. Point of resemblance: "They kill us for their sport," said explicitly. So point of resemblance: if you try to construct the point so that it works for both sides of the analogy, it's in respect of how these people are mistreated, if you like. So the gods mistreat humans; the boys mistreat the flies, etc. And then he shows how that can be diagrammed, and that's not easy to work out verbally, so I'll just leave it with that.
An example from Jesus' parables: the wheat and the weeds, Matthew 13. The story: a man sows good seed in his fields; his enemy sows weeds on top of them. When what has happened is discovered, the man's slaves want to remedy the situation right away by pulling up the weeds, but the owner has them wait until the harvest. So that's the story; that's the vehicle. Okay, what's the tenor? Well, Jesus tells us, "The Kingdom of Heaven is like this." Okay, so Jesus' subject is the Kingdom of Heaven, and he's telling us about certain features of its, I would say, future history from the time that Jesus is writing that. There's going to be an analogy between this man sowing good seed and the enemy sowing bad seed and the discovery and desire to rip it up and the owner having to postpone it till the harvest, etc. So the vehicle is the story above. Jesus is telling about the Kingdom of Heaven, the heavenly subject, by means of an earthly agricultural story of an enemy's attempt to spite his neighbor by ruining his crop with weeds. Points of resemblance: this one has a number of them, huh, not just one. We kind of stop and think what they might be. Well, the owner is to the enemy as God is to Satan, or you can say make an analogy between what the owner does and just as the owner sows good seed in this field, so God puts sons of the kingdom in the world. Okay, and another analogy, another point of resemblance: just as the enemy puts weed seeds in the field, so Satan puts his people into the same world situation. And you can actually make a bunch of those sorts of things, but you're probably going to wind up with four or five kind of significant points of resemblance that are going on here. So that basically is the picture we have there; that's how a parable functions as an analogy.
I'm going to give you a quick walk-through of the parables in the Synoptics, and I'll also throw John in here as well, so you can get a feel for that, structured in terms of their content, if you like. So we'll start out first of all with christological parables. There are a number of those: the strong man defeated in Matthew 12, Mark 3, and Luke 11, and you've got the analogy there: just as a strong man can only be defeated by a stronger man, so Satan can only be defeated by someone stronger than him—implication: Jesus. Okay, so what's going on here in this demon exorcism, if you like, is that—or the rejected stone in Matthew 21:42-22:8, I believe it is—the stone the builders rejected, the same has become the chief cornerstone. And he leaves it to his audience to figure out what the analogy is, but Jesus, if you like, is this rejected stone, whether it's rejected because it's the wrong shape, it's not the shape they expect or something of that sort, would be speculation; that's my guess what it is. The builders represent the powers that be in the Jewish state at this particular time, and yet this stone turns out to be the chief stone in the architect's plan; it's the chief cornerstone or the capstone. Various ways have been suggested to handle that sort of thing. So was a christological parable, or the door of the sheep in John 10: Jesus is the way, the truth, the life; he's the way into the sheepfold or such. The Good Shepherd, also in the same passage; Jesus, the vine dresser—excuse me, the Father, the vine dresser in John 15:1 and 2. Those would all be examples of christological parables; they're mainly about who Jesus is, if you like.
There are the parables of lost and found: the lost sheep, found in Matthew 18, but also in Luke 15, and then also in Luke 15, the lost coin and the lost son. And they're all doing the same sort of thing. The Pharisees are complaining that Jesus is concerned about all of these wicked people and prostitutes and tax collectors and things of that sort, and Jesus basically says, "Well, if you owned a hundred sheep, wouldn't you be concerned if one got lost? And so, and wouldn't you—when you found it—wouldn't you want your friends and neighbors to rejoice with you?" So God is seeking the lost, and when he finds it, he'd like you to rejoice with him instead of complaining about, you know. And then the lost coin does the same sort of thing, but now using a woman, a lost coin, and then the lost son, and it's kind of sneaking up on the Pharisees, and all of these now brings in another character, and that is the non-lost son, and he has the Pharisees' attitude, and I think the attempt here is to get the Pharisees to see themselves as God sees them, whether they do or not—how many of them do, we don't know.
Parables of forgiveness and mercy: the unmerciful servant, Matthew 18:21-35, the one who has received all this mercy from his master and then doesn't have mercy on the person that owes him money; the day laborers who complain about the fact that they worked all day, but some of these worked just an hour, etc., and sort of the idea that "I want grace, but I don't want anybody else to have grace, and I certainly don't want them to have more than I have," okay, sort of thing is lurking there; the two debtors in Luke 7: which debtor would show more love for the money lender who forgave both their debts? Well, you think the one who owed the larger debt, and Jesus is basically saying, "Well, you know, you Simon, you think you've got a small debt, and you act like it, but the woman, she thinks she has a big debt, and she really acts like she's been forgiven a big debt; she really has been," etc. So the unprofitable servants in Luke 17: that they somehow expect to be treated as no longer servants, etc., because they've done these things, and trying to remind us that in some sense our relationship to God is that of slaves to a master; that that's what we owe the person—not perhaps appreciated much in a culture without slavery, but but it does picture a real feature of the relationship of God to man.
Parables on prayer: the son asking bread, Matthew 7, Luke 11; the friend at midnight, Luke 11; unjust judge, Luke 18—all on God giving us the gifts that we really need rather than perhaps the ones we think we want, and God will reward persistence in prayer, and if this widow persisted and got what she wanted even though the judge was unjust, how are we treating God when we give up in something? We're treating God as worse than the unjust judge, if you like.
Parables of transformation: the new patch on the old garment or the new wine and the old wineskins, etc., showing that something new has come here in the regeneration in the Gospel and that sort of thing. Lots of parables of stewardship: the parable of a lamp and the bushel: you know what a lamp is for; it's to lighten the room; you don't put a bushel over it. Crooked business manager who gives his master's debtors a break by reducing their indebtedness, etc., and we're to both resemble and to be different from the crooked business manager. Unfaithful upper servant who begins to lord it over the lower servants. Parables of the talent and the pounds, very similar: entrusted wealth to us and our responsibility to use it properly, and the dangerous temptation to play it safe, to hide it, etc., instead of actually working and risking with it. Parable of the day laborers—we had had up earlier there somewhere as well—was a parable of forgiveness and mercy, but also of stewardship. Parable of vineyard workers: these people who want to get the vineyard for their own and are ready to kill the heir, just as, in some sense, the Jewish leaders wanting to run Israel their way are ready to kill the Messiah when he shows up.
Parables of invitation and rejection: children in the marketplace and some stubborn, crabby children who won't play funeral and won't play marriage, etc., and Jesus and John the Baptist are like—John offering funeral and Jesus offering wedding—and they the crowds are the crabby kids who won't go either way. Parable of the two sons: the one who says he won't go work in the father's field but then repents and does, and the one who says he will but doesn't do it—contrasting the tax collectors and harlots who started rebellious but repent and the Pharisees and such who claim they're really doing God's will but they never do it. The great supper and the marriage of the King's son: we're going to look at the marriage of the King's son here by and by, so I'll not say further about that, but both of those are using a theme that parallels the Messianic banquet idea: the offer of the Gospel is like an invitation to a banquet, and the irrationality of some of the people invited in turning the banquet down.
Parables of the second coming: the vultures in the carcass: how do you tell where a dead body is out in the wilderness? Well, you can see the vultures circling overhead from a mile or two away, huh? You don't have to be near the carcass. So when Jesus returns, you'll know it; you don't have to be standing right where he comes. Fig tree heralds summer: signs preceding the end, like the new leaves and buds on the fig tree herald the coming of summer. Householder and the thief: importance of keeping guard, if you like; or Jesus' return will catch you unaware. The parable of the porter: the fellow who needs to be up to open the door when the master returns from the feast, etc., and the waiting servants in Luke 12, rather similar, and the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25, where the wise virgins have extra olive oil with them just in case things take longer than expected, and the foolish virgins don't take any extra with them, and it does take longer than expected, and they aren't ready when the time comes.
Well, there's a huge list of parables of warning and judgment: John the Baptist's parable: the axe at the roots—pictures a farmer about ready to cut down a tree, and he's taking a stance, and those of you who used an axe properly, at least, are aware that you set the axe edge against where you want to strike initially to get your stance right, your distance right, and everything, and then you draw it back and whack it, and Jesus said—is—the axe is already set at the roots, ready for the stroke, and you need to—you need to—John the Baptist says this—you need to be ready. John also gives us this one in Matthew 3:12 of the guy coming to winnow the grain, and his winnowing fan is in his hand, so he's about to carry out the judgment that separates the wheat from the chaff. We got the parable of the tasteless salt; parables of fire, salt, and peace; the advice of Jesus to settle out of court; the picture of the eye as the light of the body: the way that you see is when your eye is working, and so spiritually we need to be able to see spiritual things, etc.—somewhat similar: the idea of the blind leading the blind in Mark 4 and Luke 6, if you like. We want to make sure that whoever is leading us knows what's going on. The idea of doing your eye repair, taking the speck out if you've got the log in your eye already. The wise and foolish builders who—the foolish builders build without a proper foundation, and their work is washed away, and wise builders build on the rock, and this comes at the end of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount or sermon on...
The plane and basically Bally saying the people who take to heart what I've said and obey it, they're the wise builders, etc. Uh, the empty house in Matthew 12 and Luke 11, uh, about uh, uh, when a demon has been driven out of someone, it's like uh, uh, what should we say? Squatters have been driven out of a house; it's empty now. You need to fix it up and guard it so it doesn't get refilled by the guys.
And uh, I think a warning to the nation that uh, uh, the good things that have happened with the coming of Jesus, they need to respond to. Every plant not planted by my father will be rooted up, as another warning and judgment kind of parable. The barren fig tree as a parable in Luke 13, and you remember is an acted parable uh, elsewhere, uh, same sort of thing. Uh, uh, the tower builder uh, thinking in terms of what something's going to cost and taking a resolution and uh, looking for whether you got the resources in that situation as well.
Uh, the king going to war, very similar kind of parable. Uh, will a king with only 10,000 men uh, will he go to war against a king with 20,000? Well, he's got at least think it through, you know, whether he can do an ambush or something of that sort, perhaps that will turn the numbers and allow him to win anyway. And if he doesn't look any good, he better go uh, uh, try and make peace rather than uh, uh, fight the battle and get wiped out.
The uh, parable of the uh, wicked tenant farmers uh, who uh, don't want to pay the rent and uh, are going to kill the heir, if you like. Parable of the sheep and the goats uh, that just a shepherd separates his sheep and his goats uh, so God uh, Jesus at his return is going to separate uh, those who are really his from those who are not. We have parables of the kingdom uh, and uh, uh, the parable the sower, the tears, the growing seed, the mustard seed, the leaven, the treasure, the pearls, the dragnet, and then at the end of them uh, the old and new treasures that the householder brings out of his house.
These are telling us something about the nature of Jesus' kingdom, and I have a uh, a PowerPoint on that uh, that goes into some detail and suggests that uh, there appears to be a sequence in this whole thing that we're looking at a a planting, a growing, a harvesting, etc. That we're looking at something about the progress of the Gospel, probably typical progress of the Gospel in different societies and uh, what sort of things happen there.
The illustrative parables of Jesus, I've said just a word or two about already in connection with Luke, and I'll not say any more except list them for you again. Uh, the Good Samaritan, the rich fool, the lowest seats in the banquet, uh, the dinner invitations, who you invite to your banquet, the rich man and Lazarus, and the Pharisee and tax collector, all in Luke 10-18. Then we've got a category we haven't said much of anything about so far, and they're acted parables uh, where the person instead of saying anything might give a hint or two, he does something and something fairly unusual.
So most people think that Jesus cursing the fig tree is pretty unusual. What's that about? Is he impatient or something? Well, no, it's an acted parable. Okay, that doesn't mean Jesus wasn't really hungry and wasn't disappointed that there were no figs on the tree, but the fig but the tree did have leaves at the time of year that the presence of leaves should indicate that there should be some early figs on it; it didn't have it, and it's basically an acted parable of God's reaction to Israel professing to be righteous but not showing the fruits of it, if you like.
The cleansing of the temple is a very similar uh, parable, and in fact those are interwoven to some extent that uh, uh, the uh, cursing of the fig tree and its how it turns out overlaps with the cleansing of the temple. And the cleansing of the temple uh, Jesus is uh, expressing his uh, anger at the uh, uh, misuse of the temple and uh, enacted parable I think of God's attitude towards not only Israel's misuse of the temple but misuse of their privileges, if you like. And as I mentioned once somewhere back earlier in this uh, uh, series uh, that I think that picks up the Malachi idea of uh, the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his Temple, who can abide the day of his coming, etc.
Jesus at 12 in the temple is probably an acted parable of some sort. He's saying something about who he is uh, his father, his real father is God, and so you expect to see him in his father's house, etc. Jesus' baptism is a uh, probably an acted parable as well. John who uh, knew Jesus as a child and certainly knew something about his character said, I need to be baptized by you, and Jesus says uh, let's do this to fulfill all righteousness and uh, uh, uh, one of your uh, uh, yeah, one of the I think more uh, what you say? Imaginative uh, reformed theologians of the LA of this last century whose name has evaporated from my mind at the moment uh, basically suggests that baptism is a picture of judgment as well as of cleansing, of pouring out of wrath or uh, being overwhelmed by God's judgment, etc. And so Jesus is allowing God's judgment to come upon him to fulfill all righteousness, and so he doesn't need to be cleansed uh, but uh, God's wrath is going to be poured out on him, if you like.
Jesus healing on the Sabbath I think is uh, uh, a kind of uh, again and again enacted parable, and the remark in Mark uh, 3 1-6 uh, points in this direction that uh, uh, it's telling something about uh, uh, Jesus uh, well, telling something about what the Sabbath is about. The Sabbath is about redemption, and so healing is about redemption. The Father has been working on the Sabbath and so am I, and uh, the Son of Man illusion to the Daniel passage I think is Lord also with the Sabbath, even of the Sabbath, so uh, he's the one who's going to legislate on all of these things. The Ancient of Days has given him the commission to have an eternal universal kingdom.
Healing with clay, rather interesting one. You remember how the guy is is uh, the vision is healed by Jesus spinning and making clay and putting on his eyes uh, I think is an illusion to the making of Adam in Genesis where the Hebrew verb there is the verb from molding clay. He shaped him, it's say took the dust of the earth and formed Adam out of it, and the term formed there, King James uh, it's actually uh, the verb for uh, to make with clay and uh, pottery and that sort of thing. So I think we're looking at that there and something about who Jesus is.
Writing on the ground uh, is not explained for us in John 7:53-8:11, and although the textual there's textual question about that particular incident, I think it's a real incident that was known from oral tradition and got put in because was too good to pass up or something, and probably refers to a god writing with his fingers on the uh, on the stone uh, tablets, but that that's a guess, but uh, lot of these things are basically intended to make people think, just like the Proverbs are, you know, what's that about? Well, think about it a while and turn it around and look at it, and you'll learn something even if you don't figure out exactly what it's about.
Triumphal entry uh, I think is acted parable. Uh, the anointing of Jesus uh, which occurs several times in his ministry, he's the anointed one, so these people anoint him, though they're not even thinking about that. His foot washing uh, you know, something the lowest slave uh, would be assigned to do typically, and Jesus takes the place of the lowest slave because that's what he's going to do; he's going to take our punishment for us uh, coming up, etc. So uh, those are the uh, uh, kind of a tour of uh, how parables work and uh, uh, the uh, most of the parables I think I tried to get all the parables in the New Testament there in that particular list. Uh, I think we'll stop here and uh, come back and pick up on uh, a particular one we want to look at, the parable of marriage banquet in Matthew 22 verses 1-4, and you'll get a chance to kind of walk through and see how parables function there in this particular [Music] case. Dr. Robert Newman, Gos, Scct number on parables.