This page was updated 07/14/2008

Who could blame you if you thought it odd this morning to see that the sermon topic this week was going to deal with Jesus’ parables?  After all, so many of us UUs are what retired Episcopal Bishop Jack Spong calls "church alumni." We’ve spent much of our adult lives trying to rid ourselves of the rituals and conventions of traditional Christianity. We’ve had quite enough of that kind of Jesus talk, thank you very much, and we’d rather not have to put up with it any more.

We do, of course, maintain that we’re sincerely interested in learning more about the major world religions, including Christianity. It’s just that, well, frankly we’ve learned to mistrust the version of Jesus’ teachings that we’ve too often received from church pulpits. Then, too, the "Gospel Truth," with a capital G and a capital T, we’ve learned, is often a good deal removed from the truth. Unable to tell historical accuracy from church doctrine, we prefer to avoid the subject altogether.

Still and all, we here, at UUCFW ARE open to most new ideas … aren’t we? Let’s say we are, and see if it leads us to any new insights as Unitarian Universalists.

I was well into the preparation for this talk when I finally realized how didactic my script was beginning to sound. Far too much like a college lecture. I decided that I’d have to find a better way to cover the parables. The study group that meets here the third Thursday of each month during the year spent four months discussing the parables this spring, and had questions left over. We have twenty minutes to cover them today, not a college hour. So brace yourselves. We just need to cover a couple of things before we get started on some parables.

I was reading Letters to the Editor in the most recent issue of Atlantic Monthly a couple of weeks ago and I ran across some comments by a reader on an earlier article that seemed to me to typify how the parables of Jesus are commonly understood … or, rather, misunderstood … today, even by our cultural literati. In an earlier article on the decline of the English language, B.R. Meyers had observed that, "Prophets are always choosy about their followers: Jesus spoke in parables so the multitude would not be saved." (Meyers was, of course, drawing on the so-called Messianic Secret, a dominant theme in Mark’s Gospel, but I’ll keep that for another sermon or Adult RE class, if you’ll stand for it.) At any rate, a reader from South Boston took exception: "With all due respect," he wrote, "this is completely wrong: Jesus spoke in parables specifically to reach his largely illiterate audience. He compressed some fairly tricky (and often unprecedented) theological concepts into stories that every single one of his listeners could understand." So far, so good. But now he stepped ventured into more dangerous territory: "…[P]ick a parable at random," he speculated, "read it to a group of third-graders, and watch easy, unforced comprehension spread like sunlight." Well, yes. And no. Will third graders be able to assign a meaning to a given parable? More than likely. But will that meaning relate in any meaningful sense to how an audience of first century Galilean peasants might have responded? Expecting instant insight by a third grader into something that has puzzled theologians for two nearly thousand years is a considerable stretch. I’ll get back to that later.

Right now, let’s dispense with some definitions. Pay attention now. These are test questions. They’ll be on the exam.

What’s a parable? Well, a parable is not an aphorism or a proverb, of which there are plenty in the Old and New Testaments. Proverbs are like the well-worn "old ettard sayings" the kind we Hoosiers once grew up with. Proverbs are cultural artifacts. We have modern proverbs, too: "It takes a village to raise a child" was popular a while back. So was "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." It’s likely that Jesus used some of them, but impossible to tell which ones because they’re part of the cultural "background noise," in that anyone could have used them. They weren’t a sufficiently distinctive part of what we might call his voice print to be sure. Did he actually say, "Workers deserve their wages," or "each tree is known by its fruit"? He might have. But so might anyone else in his culture.

Aphorisms are different. Ben Franklin’s aphorisms are part of the lore of early America: "Spare the rod and spoil the child; … A stitch in time saves nine; an apple a day keeps the doctors away; God helps those who help themselves." Bob Funk was fond of quoting an aphorism of Oscar Wilde, to the effect that "we wouldn’t be so concerned about what people thought of us, if we realized how seldom they do." You heard some aphorisms attributed to Jesus a few minutes ago, in one of the readings. In contrast with proverbs, which tend to shore up cultural values, Jesus’ aphorisms tend to be more subversive of cultural givens … as when he told his listeners to "let the dead to bury their own; " or, that "the last shall be first and the first last;" or, "seek and you’ll find, knock and it will be opened to you." My favorite aphorism is his admonition in Mark (7:15) that, "What goes into your mouth will not defile you; rather it’s what comes out of the person that defiles." Think about it for a minute. What was he really talking about?

But enough about aphorisms. Let’s move on to parables.

The Welsh scholar, C.H. Dodd, tells us that "At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the listener by its vividness or strangeness – and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought." (Parables of the Kingdom, p.5) Not likely, it might be noted, to be instantly understood by a third grade student. Ed Beutner, another Jesus Seminar Fellow, noted that "During the parable … listeners [and] participants re-envision this actual world in wholly unaccustomed ways – even in ways that seem contrary to what we ordinarily take to be our better judgment." "Jesus’ parables," he goes on, "routinely frustrate our inherited expectations by means of narrative twists…." (Listening to the Parables of Jesus, p. 2.) We won’t take time to get into the parable of the Samaritan today, but I think you’ll agree that his listeners really were expecting the hero of the story to be a Galilean Jew, like themselves, and not a hated Samaritan. That was the whole point.

More to the point this morning, Robert Funk noted that the parable "is a speech form distinctive of the historical Jesus."* Another Seminar scholar, Lane McGaughy, observed that "…the words of Jesus that are commonly recognized as being the most authentic are [his] parables. [Funk, Honest to Jesus, 1996, p. 136.] Oddly enough, Funk notes that the study of Jesus’ parables "did not come to the center of [scholarly] attention until the late 1960s." The first serious modern study of the parables was in the 19^th century. At first scholars approached the parables traditionally as moralistic allegories or metaphors. More recently, Jesus’ parables have come to be regarded as extended metaphors with more than one possible interpretation.

Well, that clears up everything, doesn’t it? We’ll move on for now.

This is an appropriate moment to note what Jesus’ parables were, and what they were about. As we’ve noted, the stuff of his parables dealt with common aspects of everyday peasant life in rural Galilee, but their subject was the kingdom of God, or God’s realm. Imagine, Jesus was asking, imagine what would it be like if God ran the world? Not, we should note, the world in general, not the world if the Romans were gone (note that there’s not a single criticism of the Roman occupiers anywhere in the gospels), or if there were no temple in Jerusalem (although there’s a goodly amount of criticism of the temple authorities and their practices). Things like this were distant from the daily lives of his Galilean listeners. The parables as he used them tried to provoke his listeners into imagining what it might be like if God were really in charge of their lives, and how they might behave if that happened. But he never spoke about it directly. Instead, he compared the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God with something else, without telling his listeners precisely how the two were related. [Funk, Honest to Jesus, p 150] It was their job to make the connection and puzzle out what it meant. Along the way, he used hyperbole and humor to make his point with them … devices that have been obscured and often utterly lost as the stories passed from generation to generation, and across cultural lines from Palestine to Greece, Rome and beyond.

The traditional approach to the parables almost unfailingly obscured or distorted their original intent. This wasn’t deliberate. Not at all. It was just that the parables were so rooted in the warp and woof of everyday rural life in first century upper Galilee that their context soon became lost as the stories passed through the oral tradition to new generation and different cultures in the decades following the crucifixion. Think about the times you played the telephone game when you were kids. Next think about playing it with different people … Southerners, New Englanders, English men, Scottish women, French tourists … you get the idea … then imagine it going on for thirty or forty years, from the crucifixion around 30 C.E. to the end of the first century. Think the original might change? Just a little bit? I tried this with high school students in church school several years ago, using a non-canonical gospel story in which the child Jesus touched water and made it "pure." By the fourth iteration, Jesus had touched the water and made it "beer." Case closed.

Now it’s time for some illustrations. Prepare to be surprised. Perhaps even a little confounded. Think of a parable that you’re familiar with. We all grew up with them. Think of one that you liked … or perhaps one that you just didn’t get. Don’t be bashful. The Jesus Seminar tells us that while there are about 33 of them, in all, in several dozen versions, they could attribute only 21 of them with more or less certainty to Jesus. Only five of these received the coveted Red rating. They include the Good Samaritan, the Mustard Seed, the Dishonest Steward, the Vineyard Laborers and, finally, a parable about Leaven. We won’t have time to discuss all of them this morning, so I’ve chosen three of them for starters. We’ll save others for Adult RE next year if anyone’s interested.

Let’s pretend that you’re a group of peasants from around the Lake of Galilee, gathered to hear Jesus talk. (You don’t need to pretend that I’m Jesus … that would be a stretch.) Now settle back a moment, and listen. We’ll start with the parable of the Mustard Seed. (I’m using the New Revised Standard Version translation here.)

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches. [Matt 13. 31-32]

This must have been a knee-slapper to an audience of peasant farmers, and a riddle for anyone with rabbinical training. Mustard was known as a noxious weed … something that farmers didn’t want in their fields. Once it got started, you couldn’t get it out. It was preposterous that anyone would plant it deliberately. Then there’s the vision of the mustard plant, which actually becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches. You heard a clue about this earlier in the Book of Ezekiel (17:22ff). So, what’s it all about?

OK, next. Let’s talk about baking … something that families did every day, over a charcoal fire or in a clay oven. This one’s called the parable of Leaven, or yeast. (You need to know, in case you don’t, that leaven symbolized corruption and ritual uncleanliness in Jewish theology and culture.)

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in [hid] in three measures of flour until it was all leavened. [Matt 13. 33]

That’s it … that’s the whole thing. We have three elements in the story: yeast, fifty pounds of flour, and a woman who hid one in the other. You’re graduates of the third grade … what’s going on here? What does yeast have to do with God?

Finally … and I’ve saved the best for last, there’s the parable of the vineyard workers. Listen up:

For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market place, and he said to them, You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right. So they went. When he went out again about noon, and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, Why are you standing here idle all day? They said to him, Because no one has hired us. He said to them, You also go into the vineyard. When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first. When each of those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat. But he replied to one of them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? [Matt 20. 1-15]

[¹⁶So the last will be first, and the first will be last.]

We need to stop now. Time’s up. It’s getting dark, and it’s time to head back home and fix dinner. We haven’t yet really figured out what these three parables mean, have we? But that’s partly the point. Their meaning was always provocatively obscure. We have to work on their meaning over time, discussing them with one another. They were questions, not answers. The answers lie within ourselves, and within our common search. We’ll need more time for that than we have today. Shalom.

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