Matthew xiii. 14-17.
“And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. 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. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and 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 they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men 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.”
Many have given their answer to the question why our Lord spoke in parables. Owing, it has been said, to the limitations of the human intellect, it is impossible for us really to know anything of divine, eternal things; they can only be presented to us through very imperfect likenesses derived from nature or the transactions of men. That is a general reason applicable to one human being as much as another. Then there is a special reason, drawn from the circumstances of our Lord’s life on earth. He was instructing ignorant fishermen. Such wisdom as it was possible for men of this class to receive might, it is said, be expected to reach them best through stories and apologues. Or thirdly: Why should not the parables be veils purposely contrived to hide sacred truths from the gaze of the profane multitude?
The Disciples were not less perplexed than any in later times have been on this subject. They took what appeared to them the simplest mode of freeing themselves from the perplexity. They said to our Lord, “Why speakest thou to them in parables?” He replied at once. The answer is contained in the passage I have read to you. Let us consider how far it accords with any of those we have invented for ourselves.
I. “To you,” He says, “it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.” I need not remind you to whom He is speaking. They were those ignorant fishermen for whose sake He is supposed to have devised this kind of teaching. They are told expressly that they can dispense with it, that they are capable of a high knowledge. Yes, knowledge. He says it is given them to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Do not let us dismiss that phrase till we have examined it. We oppose the Kingdom of Heaven to the Kingdom of Earth. We call the one eternal, the other temporal or transitory. That is ordinary language; none, whatever their theory may be, object to it. Only they say: What is eternal is mysterious, inconceivable. Our Lord admits that it is. He speaks of mysteries. But He speaks of knowing mysteries. He means apparently what St. Paul meant when he says, “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” But He affirms that the Disciples—taken from the commonest order of men, sharing in their ignorance—have a capacity for knowing these mysteries, these eternal things which cannot be conceived.
Does it strike you that there is a force in the word ‘given,’ which I have neglected? Does it seem to you to take these simple men out of the common roll of men, and to signify that they had a privilege altogether special, not the least appertaining to their race? “To you it is given; to them it is not given.” I admit all the value of the expression. It is of incalculable importance for the understanding of this passage,—and of every passage in the New Testament. But before you decide that it can bear that sense which has just been suggested, reflect on 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.” Here a Universal Law is announced as the explanation of that gift to the Disciples, and of the difference between them and others. Whosoever hath. Whosoever hath not. Is it not assumed in that universal statement—is it not affirmed—that every man whatever has received certain things which the Bestower will increase if he hold them fast; but which he may let go and be left utterly bare? And what are these things? If there is the least connection between this verse and that which precedes it,—between the difficulty and the solution,—they are mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. These are the treasures—not lying far from any man—to which these fishermen had not foregone their claim, which no one can relinquish without abandoning his rights, without renouncing his manhood.
III. For thus 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, understanding, these are admitted powers of human beings. They are gifts, in the truest, deepest meaning of that word; they should be owned as fresh gifts every morning. They are felt to be gifts by those who have suffered any temporary blindness, deafness, derangement of intellect. But still they are gifts to men; to be without them is a fearful penalty, the exception to a rule. To have them and not to exercise them is wilfulness. Is it not intimated to us that there is something exactly corresponding to these organs of sense in the spirit of man; that an eye is there, which may be opened or may be closed; an ear is there which may be awake to take in a voice that is speaking to it, or may be stopped; a capacity for profiting by the vision, for yielding to the voice, which may be continually expanded, or may continually become more contracted?
Would you say that this eye of the spirit was less truly and essentially human than the eye of the body? Would not you call it far more truly and essentially human? Would not you say that that appertained to the man, that this was a part of his very being? Would not you say that that might be extinguished and he still remain; nay, that the loss might bring with it, as it certainly brought to Milton, an abundant compensation; that for the other to be put out is for the man himself to perish? Supposing this were meant, you would recollect at once expressions which would illustrate it, and would appear to be of precisely the same character. Such as these:—“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!” The verity of this description, when we apply it to the external world, commends itself to us all. And oh! have we never thought—have we never known—that it must have the other application also, and that that application was the primary one? Have we never been brought to confess that the light of the sun cannot be the Light, the Light of the world, the Light of men,—that there must be an older, a more penetrating, a more universal Light than that, because there has been something in us which has quailed before it, which has wished to quench it?
But if there is this correspondence between the organs of the spirit and the organs of sense,—if experience assures there is,—does not that explain to us the meaning and power of the parables? May not all sensible things, by a necessity of their nature, be testifying to us of that which is nearest to us, of that which it most concerns us to know, of the mysteries of our own life, and of God’s relation to us? May it not be impossible for us to escape from these witnesses? They may become insignificant to us from our very familiarity with them; nay, we may utterly forget that there is any wonder in them. The transformation of the seed into the full corn in the ear may appear to us the dullest of all phenomena, not worthy to be noted or thought of. The difference in the returns from different soils, or from the same soils under different cultivation—the difference in the quality of the produce, and the relation which it bears to the quality of the seeds,—may be interesting to us from the effect such varieties have upon the market,—from the more or less money we derive from the sale;—not the least as facts in nature, facts for meditation. The relation between a landholder or farmer and those who work for him, between a steward and his employer, between a shepherd and his sheep, all in like manner may be tried by the same pecuniary standard; apart from that, they may suggest nothing to us. Thus the universe becomes actually “as is a landscape to a dead man’s eye;” the business in which we are ourselves engaged, a routine which must be got through in some way or another, that we may have leisure to eat, drink, and sleep. Can any language describe this state so accurately and vividly as that of our Lord in the text? Seeing we see, and do not perceive; hearing we hear, and do not understand.
But is He not declaring to His disciples why He spoke in parables to the Jewish people? and am not I alluding to parables which are not spoken so much as acted,—acted before us as well 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.”
Were it true that these secret processes of Nature, that the transactions of human beings, had been, from the foundation of the world, the lesson-books out of which God was instructing men, and revealing Himself to them,—were it true that these lessons had been perverted and misunderstood, changed into excuses for idolatry, as if He were made after the likeness of natural things or of man’s caprices—what force then would be in this application of the prophet’s sentence! How truly would Christ fulfil the words by withdrawing the veil which had been covering these common facts, by showing what was behind them! How wonderfully He would be proving that He knew the mind of the Father from whom He came,—that He had indeed been as one brought up with Him! If this is not the import of the parables, does not St. Matthew’s quotation sound inflated and exaggerated? How did mere apologues, intended to make truths more lively, or to recommend them to the ignorant (I say nothing of the other supposition, that they were intended to conceal truths), “declare things that had been kept secret from the foundation of the world”?
But the greatest satisfaction of our doubts upon this subject is derived, I think, from a comparison of this part of my text with the passage in the fourth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, which corresponds to it. “Unto them that are without”—this is his version of our Lord’s answer—“all things are done in parables.” To those who never dwell on that which is within,—upon that which concerns their own selves,—but live merely in the outward world, these things,—the things of the Kingdom of Heaven,—become only in this form of parables. I use the expression ‘become,’ as the most literal rendering of γίνεται, but I cannot think that our translators were wrong or unhappy in the phrase which they chose in preference to it. The divine things are not merely spoken through parables, they are done in parables,—the parables are about us, only, through the want of a light coming from within, we do not recognize them.
- But though on this ground I cannot look upon any passage as less really concerning one age than another, I do not for a moment deny that our Lord’s words in the next clause 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.”
Such words intimate very clearly that the incapacity for discerning anything not material or sensual, which Isaiah lamented in the Jews of his day,—which he was told would make them heedless of all his warnings and of all his consolations, till the armies of the Assyrians had laid the land waste, till there was great forsaking in the midst of it, and many cities were left without inhabitant,—was reaching its climax in the days of our Lord’s Incarnation; all the Divine discipline which had been used for the correction of it, having been turned into a justification of it. In that day was fulfilled (or had come to its full maturity) all the coarseness, the covetousness, the pride, which had been corrupting and undermining the nation in former times, but had not then reached its vitals. For now there was no more the consciousness of wrong-doing which there had been in the days of hill-altars and of 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 who were just about to murder the Prophet of Prophets. No past lessons, therefore, were of the least avail. How did they concern men so free from all the crimes and wrong tendencies of their ancestors? They had the Holy Book in their possession; no heathen could claim it; all its sounds and letters were familiar to them; they could repeat them, argue from them, comment upon them,—only they were mere sounds, mere letters. Hearing they heard, and did not understand; seeing they saw, and did not perceive. No living voice came to them out of that which was read continually in the synagogue. No vision of a divine Presence or a divine Deliverer shone through the writings that testified of nothing else. And so idolatry—taking no shape, protested against and vehemently abhorred—crept inwards, took possession of the whole being of those who held idolaters to be accursed of God. The gold upon the altar became the measure by which they judged of the sacrifice that was offered upon it; the gold of the Temple was really for them the Presence that dwelt in it. To a race bound in these chains, our Lord spake of a Shepherd who went into the wilderness to seek after a sheep that was lost, of a Father who ran and embraced the prodigal when, after eating his swine’s food, he had thought of the house from which he went out. These were parables of human duty, of human affection, witnessing to hearts that were open, of some divine Shepherd who might lay down His life for the sheep, of a Father who might make a mighty sacrifice to bring back His children to Himself. These were witnesses that a care as actual as the care of the human shepherd, that a love as actual and personal as the love of the human parent, only free from all their limitations and partialities,—was about them in their daily walks. But if the shepherd was regarded merely as a servant hired to see that certain articles of merchandise were not lost to their owner,—if they, the shepherds of the people, were hirelings after the same pattern,—if the ties of father and child were changed into suspicion upon the one side, dread on the other, a calculation of worldly interests and advantages on both,—what would these Parables be to them? They would prove their truth even in these cases. It would be seen that the analogy between the human and the divine is not an imaginary or artificial one, but exists in the nature of things. For even such a shepherd, even such a father as they were, would they 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 manifest Himself by casting them forth as enemies alike of Him and of His creatures, to be a spectacle and a bye-word among the nations.
V. This terrible test of the veracity of these parables was not however to be the only one. “Blessed,” says our Lord to the fishermen about Him, “Blessed 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 which raised these poor men, these 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 apprehended them, whom they confessed to be the Lord and Master of the spirit within them,—who was speaking to that, illuminating that, delivering them from their own miserable conceptions, raising them above any judgments of God deduced from the objects of sense, educating them to know Him as He is? Was it not that they were under the teaching of One who repulsed no questions, listened to all doubts, bore with all confusions, showing them that it was no will of His Father that there should be veils over their hearts when they heard His words or contemplated His works? Was it not that a sense of a union between men and God was dawning upon them, through all the acts and discourses of Him who called Himself the Son of Man? Did not that name testify to them that He who was speaking to them in the ear in closets, must be indeed the King of all human hearts, and that as such they were to declare Him to all nations? Was not this Revelation of the actual glory of the Unseen God in a man, that which kings and prophets had longed to see? Was not the message that He is the Lord of Gentiles as well as Jews,—is the head of every man,—what they desired to hear?
And so I think we find the explanation of a fact which has, perhaps, sometimes puzzled us. Why did not the Apostles, trained as they were in our Lord’s school, when they went forth among the hardened Jews, amongst the idolatrous Gentiles, make more use of Parables? Why do we find so few in their discourses or their letters? I apprehend that when they preached of a Son of God and a Son of Man, of One in whom God was reconciled to men, in Whom God was showing forth His glory to men, they were going to the very root of this teaching; they were enabling mankind to profit by it as they had profited by it. For if once we receive that fact of God’s union with our race in the Person of a Mediator as the interpretation of all other facts,—as the kernel mystery of the Universe,—we cannot suppose that we rise to conceptions of God through the things of time and sense, we cannot help supposing that through these things He is speaking to us. The Apostles who bore witness that a Spirit had been given to dwell among men, because the Son of Man was glorified at the right-hand of God, and that this Spirit testifies with the spirits of men that they are Sons of God, could not suggest the thought that men must ascend to the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven by an earthly ladder. They must invite all to enter into the mysteries of that Kingdom as they had done, through a sense of deep want, through the infinite need of a Deliverer from their sensuality and their darkness. They must declare that their Deliverer, their Illuminator, was the Deliverer and Light of all, and that none need walk in darkness,—that any man might awake out of sleep, and see that Light which would one day fill the Universe. But this testimony, so far as it was received, converted all Nature, and all human acts, from dead letters into divine hieroglyphics, from instruments of idolatry into preachers concerning the Unseen and the Eternal.
Such preachers they have been to the humble and meek, who have asked Christ, as the Disciples did, to tell them why He spoke by parables, and to interpret the parables which they have found in every street and alley, as well as in every hill and stream. We are told, brethren, that they have been deceiving themselves. No real knowledge of the Eternal is possible; our conceptions are bounded by the finite and the visible. My answer is:—If that is the reason, no knowledge of the seen and the temporal is possible. Slavery to our conceptions, as the teacher of experimental science has shown us, is the hindrance to any real, solid acquaintance with the mysteries of Nature. When we try to bind her with the forms of our intellect, she will give us no faithful answers; she will only return an echo to our voices. Here is another proof of the analogy between things sensible and spiritual. The same enemy blocks the entrance into both regions. The determination to measure all things by ourselves, to bring everything under the conditions of our intellect, makes us exiles from the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth. That determination in other days was called, Pride; in ours (words alter their meaning so strangely) it claims to be owned as the profoundest humility. We dare not presume to burst the shackles which God has imposed upon us; we dare not dream of ascending above the world in which He has seen good to place us; that we do not is 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; that the parables of Christ are not real revelations of it.
For this strange method of vindicating the faith and confuting its opponents, the venerable authority of Bishop Butler is sometimes pleaded. The man to whom some of us owe the first suggestion of the thought that there is an actual analogy between the things of Earth and the things of Heaven, between what we see and what we do not see, between the temporal and Eternal,—the man who courageously adopted the words of Origen, with whose mystical tendencies his cautious intellect could have no sympathy, as the text of his book and the exposition of its design, this man, because, through the coldness of his age, he gave a somewhat negative form to his argument, using it rather to refute opponents than to establish a principle, is now supposed to have employed his clear logical faculty chiefly for the purpose of undermining the hopes which he had himself raised, and of maintaining the melancholy proposition that the general scheme of the Universe is not on the whole much better or more intelligible than the particular scheme of Christianity, and that we should not be more ignorant and perplexed than we are, if we had not been obliged, under terrible penalties, to believe in the Bible. That it was the intention of this earnest and devout thinker to make good such conclusions as these, I can never convince myself; that such an intention has been imputed to him by admiring disciples, is one proof more how little in general we gain, how much we may lose, by abandoning our own positions that we may dislodge assailants from theirs.
But it is a comparatively light question, whether we are doing justice or gross injustice to luminaries of our own; whether, as the orator says, we are honouring them in their noonday, or bringing forth our hymns and symbols at the moment of their eclipse. It is a very great and serious question indeed, whether our patronage of Christianity is not subverting the revelation of Christ. It is a most serious question for ourselves, whether the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eternal realities, are indeed near to us all, and whether we may know them, or whether we may allege that they are far from us, and that by the very nature of our vision it is impossible for us even with the divinest telescopes to discern them. It is a very serious question whether we have any message or not concerning the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, to those who are as poor as the fishermen of Galilee were; or whether we can only appeal to some vague fears which are in them, of a Kingdom of Hell,—not being allowed to tell them that the horror of the Kingdom of Hell consists in the absence of all knowledge of God’s Righteousness and Truth and Love. These thoughts must press very heavily upon those who preach; I trust they press also upon some who hear.
Oh, let us desire for ourselves that we may, as humble men, as little children, receive the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven; that we may not substitute an acknowledgement of the Scriptures for a study of their contents, contempt of doubters for faith in Christ, and so become—as the Jews of old became from the same causes—deaf to the teachings of the Spirit within, blind to the parables of the world without!