The Parables of Christ

The passage: The disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the crowds in parables. He answers that it is given to them to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven but not to the others. Whoever has will be given more, and whoever has not will lose even what he has. So he speaks in parables because the people see without seeing and hear without understanding, and in them Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled: their hearts have grown gross, their ears are dull, and they have shut their eyes, so that they might not see, hear, understand, be converted and be healed. But the disciples’ eyes and ears are blessed, for many prophets and righteous men longed to see and hear what they see and hear, and did not.

Many have answered the question why our Lord spoke in parables. One answer is that the limits of the human mind make it impossible for us to know divine and eternal things, which can reach us only through imperfect likenesses from nature or from human affairs. That reason applies to every human being alike. A second is special to Christ’s circumstances: he was teaching ignorant fishermen, and men of that class would be best reached through stories. A third asks whether the parables might be veils deliberately made to hide sacred truths from the profane multitude.

The Disciples were as perplexed as anyone since, and they took the simplest way out. They asked him, “Why speakest thou to them in parables?” He answered at once, in the passage I have read. Let us see how far his answer agrees with any of the answers we have invented.

I. “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.” He is speaking to the ignorant fishermen for whose sake he is supposed to have devised this teaching. Yet he tells them they can do without it, and that they are capable of high knowledge. He says it is given them to know, and we should not pass over that word. We set the Kingdom of Heaven against the Kingdom of Earth, the eternal against the temporal, and no one objects to that language. But people say that what is eternal is mysterious and inconceivable. Our Lord admits it, since he speaks of mysteries. But he speaks of knowing mysteries. He seems to mean what St. Paul meant when he said that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him. Yet he affirms that the Disciples, taken from the commonest order of men and sharing their ignorance, have a capacity for knowing these mysteries, these eternal things that cannot be conceived.

Perhaps you think I have neglected the force of the word “given,” and that it lifts these simple men out of the common roll of mankind and marks a privilege that had nothing to do with their race. “To you it is given; to them it is not given.” I admit the full value of the expression. It is of incalculable importance for understanding this passage and every passage in the New Testament. But before you decide it bears that sense, consider the next sentence.

II. “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.” A universal law is announced here as the explanation of the Disciples’ gift and of the difference between them and others. Whosoever hath; whosoever hath not. Is it not assumed, indeed affirmed, that every man has received certain things which the Giver will increase if he holds them fast, but which he may let go and be left utterly bare? And what are these things? If this verse has any connection with the one before it, they are the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. These are treasures not far from any man, to which the fishermen had not given up their claim. No one can give them up without abandoning his rights and renouncing his manhood.

III. He goes on: “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.” Seeing, hearing and understanding are admitted powers of human beings. They are gifts in the truest sense, to be owned as fresh gifts every morning, and those who have suffered temporary blindness, deafness or derangement feel them to be gifts. But they are gifts to men; to lack them is a fearful penalty, an exception to the rule, and to have them and not use them is wilfulness. Are we not being told that something corresponds exactly to these organs in the spirit of man? An eye is there, which may be opened or closed. An ear is there, which may be awake to a voice speaking to it or stopped. There is a capacity for profiting by the vision and yielding to the voice, and it may go on widening or go on narrowing.

Would you say this eye of the spirit is less truly human than the eye of the body? Would you not say it is far more so, that the bodily eye merely belongs to the man while this is part of his very being? The body’s eye might be put out and the man remain, and the loss might bring abundant compensation, as it certainly did to Milton; but for the spirit’s eye to be put out is for the man himself to perish. If this is what is meant, you will recall expressions of just the same kind: “The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” We all accept the truth of this when applied to the outer world. But have we never known that it must apply the other way too, and that the other application was the primary one? Have we never had to confess that the light of the sun cannot be the Light, the Light of the world and of men? There must be an older, more penetrating, more universal Light, because something in us has quailed before it and wished to quench it.

If there is this correspondence between the organs of the spirit and those of sense, and experience says there is, does it not explain the meaning and power of the parables? May not all sensible things, by their very nature, be testifying of what is nearest to us and most concerns us to know: the mysteries of our own life and of God’s relation to us? May it not be impossible to escape these witnesses? They can become insignificant through sheer familiarity, and we may forget there is any wonder in them. The change of seed into full corn in the ear may seem the dullest of phenomena. The differences in yield between soils, or between kinds of cultivation, and the relation of the produce’s quality to the seed, may interest us for their effect on the market and the money we make, and not at all as facts for meditation. The relation of landowner or farmer to workmen, of steward to employer, of shepherd to sheep, can likewise be judged by the pecuniary standard alone, and then they suggest nothing. So the universe becomes “as is a landscape to a dead man’s eye,” and all our business a routine to be got through so that we may have leisure to eat, drink and sleep. Can any language describe this state as exactly as our Lord does in the text? Seeing we see and do not perceive; hearing we hear and do not understand.

But is he not telling his disciples why he spoke in parables to the Jewish people, while I am speaking of parables that are not so much spoken as acted, acted before us as before them? I will not evade the question. St. Matthew says in this chapter: “All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake He not unto them: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.” Suppose it were true that nature’s hidden processes and the transactions of men had been, from the foundation of the world, the lesson-books out of which God instructed men and revealed himself. Suppose these lessons had been perverted and misunderstood and turned into excuses for idolatry, as if God were made in the likeness of natural things or of human caprice. Then what force the prophet’s sentence would have! Christ would truly fulfil it by drawing back the veil that had covered these common facts and showing what was behind them, and he would show that he knew the mind of the Father from whom he came, as one brought up with him. If this is not the meaning of the parables, does St. Matthew’s quotation not sound inflated? How did mere stories, meant to make truths livelier or to commend them to the ignorant (I say nothing of the other supposition, that they were meant to conceal), “declare things that had been kept secret from the foundation of the world”?

But the best resolution of our doubts, I think, comes from comparing this part of my text with the corresponding passage in the fourth chapter of St. Mark. His version of our Lord’s answer is: “Unto them that are without, all things are done in parables.”

To those who never dwell on what is within, on what concerns their own selves, and live only in the outward world, the things of the Kingdom of Heaven become only parables. “Become” is the most literal rendering of γίνεται, but I cannot think our translators wrong in the phrase they chose instead. Divine things are not merely spoken through parables; they are done in parables. The parables are all around us, and we fail to recognize them only because we lack a light coming from within.

IV. On this ground I cannot think any parable concerns one age less than another. But I do not deny that our Lord’s next words had a special reference to the last age of the Jewish commonwealth: “And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and by seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed: lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” These words show that the incapacity to discern anything not material or sensual was reaching its climax in the days of the Incarnation. Isaiah lamented it in the Jews of his day and was told it would make them heedless of all his warnings and consolations until the Assyrian armies laid the land waste and cities stood empty. Now all the divine discipline meant to correct it had itself been turned into a justification of it. In that day the coarseness, covetousness and pride that had been undermining the nation, without yet reaching its vitals, came to full maturity. There was no longer the consciousness of wrong-doing there had been in the days of hill-altars and temples to Baal. “Had we been in the days of our fathers, we would not have murdered the prophets” was the comfortable conviction of a people about to murder the Prophet of Prophets. Past lessons therefore did no good, for how could they concern men so free of their ancestors’ crimes? They had the Holy Book, which no heathen could claim. They knew all its sounds and letters, could repeat it, argue from it and comment on it, but they were mere sounds and letters. Hearing they heard and did not understand. No living voice came to them out of what was read every day in the synagogue, and no vision of a divine Presence or Deliverer shone through writings that testified of nothing else. So idolatry, which took no outward shape and was vehemently abhorred, crept inward and possessed the whole being of men who held idolaters accursed of God. The gold on the altar became the measure by which they judged the sacrifice offered on it, and the gold of the Temple was for them the Presence that dwelt in it. To a race bound in these chains our Lord spoke of a Shepherd who went into the wilderness after a lost sheep, and of a Father who ran and embraced the prodigal who, eating swine’s food, had thought of the house he left. These were parables of human duty and affection, speaking to open hearts of a divine Shepherd who might lay down his life for the sheep and a Father who might make a mighty sacrifice to bring his children home. They witnessed to a care as actual and personal as a human shepherd’s and a love as actual and personal as a human parent’s, only free of human limitations and partialities, and present in their daily walks and in every book they read. But suppose the shepherd was thought of merely as a hired servant seeing that certain merchandise was not lost to its owner, and they, the shepherds of the people, were hirelings of the same pattern. Suppose the tie of father and child had turned into suspicion on one side and dread on the other, with a calculation of worldly interest on both. What would these parables be to them? They would prove their truth even then, showing that the analogy between human and divine is no imaginary or artificial one but lies in the nature of things. For such shepherds and such fathers as they were, they would take God to be. They would worship a self-seeking tyrant under the name of the God of Abraham, and the true God of Abraham would show himself by casting them out as enemies of himself and his creatures, a spectacle and a byword among the nations.

V. This terrible test of the parables’ truth was not to be the only one. “Blessed,” says our Lord to the fishermen about him, “are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.” What was this blessedness that raised these poor, ignorant men above David and Isaiah? Was it that they saw the outward face of Jesus? So did Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate. Was it not that One had laid hold of them whom they confessed as Lord and Master of the spirit within them? He was speaking to that spirit and illuminating it, freeing them from their own miserable conceptions and from judgments of God drawn from the objects of sense, and teaching them to know him as he is. He turned away no questions, listened to every doubt and bore with every confusion, showing them it was no will of his Father that veils should lie over their hearts when they heard his words or contemplated his works. A sense of union between men and God was dawning on them through all the acts and discourses of him who called himself the Son of Man. Did that name not testify that he who spoke to them in the ear in closets must be the King of all human hearts, and that as such they were to declare him to all nations? Was this revelation of the actual glory of the unseen God in a man not what kings and prophets had longed to see? Was the message that he is Lord of Gentiles as well as Jews, and head of every man, not what they desired to hear?

So I think we find the explanation of a fact that has perhaps puzzled us. Why did the Apostles, trained in our Lord’s school, make so little use of parables when they went out among the hardened Jews and the idolatrous Gentiles? Why are there so few in their discourses and letters? I think that when they preached a Son of God and Son of Man, in whom God was reconciled to men and showing his glory to them, they were going to the very root of this teaching and enabling mankind to profit by it as they had. For once we receive God’s union with our race in the Person of a Mediator as the interpretation of all other facts, the kernel mystery of the universe, we cannot suppose we rise to conceptions of God through the things of time and sense. We can only suppose that through those things he speaks to us. The Apostles bore witness that a Spirit had been given to dwell among men because the Son of Man was glorified at God’s right hand, and that this Spirit testifies with men’s spirits that they are sons of God. They could not suggest that men must climb to the mysteries of the Kingdom by an earthly ladder. They had to invite everyone into the Kingdom as they themselves had come, through a deep sense of want and an infinite need of a Deliverer from their sensuality and darkness. They had to declare that their Deliverer and Illuminator was the Deliverer and Light of all, that none need walk in darkness, and that any man might wake from sleep and see the Light that will one day fill the universe. So far as this testimony was received, it turned all nature and all human acts from dead letters into divine hieroglyphics, and from instruments of idolatry into preachers of the unseen and eternal.

Such preachers they have been to the humble and meek, who have asked Christ, as the Disciples did, why he spoke by parables, and have asked him to interpret the parables found in every street and alley as well as in every hill and stream. We are told, brethren, that they have deceived themselves, that no real knowledge of the Eternal is possible because our conceptions are bounded by the finite and visible. My answer is that if that is the reason, no knowledge of the seen and temporal is possible either. As the teacher of experimental science has shown us, slavery to our own conceptions is the hindrance to any real acquaintance with nature’s mysteries. When we try to bind her with the forms of our intellect, she gives no faithful answers and only echoes our own voices. Here is another proof of the analogy between things sensible and spiritual: the same enemy blocks the entrance to both regions. The determination to measure everything by ourselves and bring it under the conditions of our intellect makes us exiles from the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth alike. In other days that determination was called Pride; in ours (words change their meaning so strangely) it claims to be owned as the profoundest humility. We dare not burst the shackles God has put on us or dream of rising above the world he has placed us in, and our not doing so is said to be the great sign that we accept Christianity with childlike submission. We prove our allegiance to the Gospel by affirming that it is not given us to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that Christ’s parables are not real revelations of it.

For this strange way of defending the faith and refuting its opponents, the venerable authority of Bishop Butler is sometimes pleaded. Some of us owe to him the first suggestion that there is a real analogy between the things of earth and of heaven, the seen and unseen, the temporal and eternal. He boldly took the words of Origen, whose mystical tendencies his cautious intellect could not share, as the text of his book and the exposition of its design. Because, through the coldness of his age, he gave his argument a somewhat negative form, using it to refute opponents rather than to establish a principle, he is now supposed to have used his clear logic chiefly to undermine the hopes he had himself raised. He is supposed to maintain the melancholy proposition that the general scheme of the universe is not much better or more intelligible than the particular scheme of Christianity, and that we should be no more ignorant and perplexed than we are if we had not been obliged, under terrible penalties, to believe in the Bible. I can never convince myself that this earnest and devout thinker meant to prove such conclusions. That admiring disciples have imputed that intention to him is one more proof how little we gain, and how much we may lose, by abandoning our own positions in order to dislodge assailants from theirs.

But whether we do justice or gross injustice to luminaries of our own is a comparatively light question. As the orator says, are we honouring them in their noonday, or bringing out our hymns and symbols at the moment of their eclipse? It is a very great and serious question whether our patronage of Christianity is subverting the revelation of Christ. It is most serious for ourselves whether the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal realities, are near to us all and may be known, or whether we may allege that they are far from us and that, by the very nature of our vision, even the divinest telescopes cannot discern them. It is very serious whether we have any message about those mysteries for people as poor as the fishermen of Galilee, or whether we can only appeal to their vague fears of a Kingdom of Hell. We would then be forbidden to tell them that its horror lies in the absence of all knowledge of God’s Righteousness, Truth and Love. These thoughts must press heavily on those who preach, and I trust they press also on some who hear.

Oh, let us desire for ourselves that we may, as humble men and as little children, receive the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let us not substitute an acknowledgment of the Scriptures for a study of their contents, or contempt of doubters for faith in Christ, and so become, as the Jews of old did from the same causes, deaf to the teachings of the Spirit within and blind to the parables of the world without.