Parable Training

Luke 8:4

It is one of his most famous stories, the Parable of the Sower. Jesus was talking mostly to common folk - not wealthy landowners, but the poor laborers who actually sowed the seed and harvested the crops. These were not urban cowboys who thought milk came out of plastic jugs. These were people who knew what growing grain actually looked like, up close and personal.

Parables were a common teaching tool of the day. Rabbis and itinerant teachers in Jewish society loved it as a unique story form that illuminated larger spiritual truths from everyday life. So Jesus was using something common to the culture where he found himself.

Parables are not allegories along the lines of "Pilgrim's Progress," in which the minutest of details has special meaning. With a few exceptions, parables are stories with but one single point. Where we know we have an exception to the rule is when the teacher or rabbi himself extrapolates or draws out those additional analogies, as is the case with this particular parable. Generally, though, the one-point rule applies. Otherwise parables could mean whatever the re-teller or listener wants them to mean.

Sometimes the main point is obvious in the parable itself. Other times the context helps us. And there are parables that have tended to lose meaning the farther we are from the culture in which they are set. Certainly knowing Jesus, his message and his earthly culture help us to understand his parables - and the parables in turn help us understand his message that much more fully.

Jesus loved to teach in parables because, while to the skeptic or closed-minded person the meaning was obscured, to the hungry hearer the good news came through plain, simple and straightforward. Any message or teaching is going to be more transparent to a responsive student. And this parable draws out this very idea that those who are open are the ones who will receive.

According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus has already been teaching in parables. His earlier ones, such as the "Wise and Foolish Builders" tend to call the listener to a response to the Good News. Now Jesus takes this a step further, concentrating on his followers themselves, those who have already responded to the Good News.

In chapter 8, we see him demonstrating and declaring his message in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, an area called the Decapolis (meaning "ten cities"). As he is going about, he has this flock of followers with him - observing, helping and themselves preparing to minister just as Jesus is now doing.

The disciples don't quite yet know that they are going to be declaring and demonstrating the Good News, or at least they don't know how or what all that means. And so as Jesus goes forth with one eye on the ripe harvest of people desperate to hear good news, he has his other eye on his followers who he is preparing to turn into workers to help even more people.

In sharing this parable, he is talking to his own disciples. Verse 4 explains that while a large crowd of people was gathering, Jesus told this parable to those already there. And who was already there but those who had already chosen to follow him?

Jesus wants his disciples, his followers, to understand what the task of spreading the Good News is going to look like. Not everyone will respond positively to the good news. Not everyone is going to be receptive. And so he is setting realistic expectations for those who will soon be doing just as he is now doing.

When I was a college student in Florida, I attended a large meeting of the healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman. Kathryn was unique among faith healers of the time because she didn't have a healing line, where she laid hands on the sick as they came forward. At least in the meeting I attended, she only had those come forward who were being healed right then and there in the meeting, generally at their seats.

Close by where we were sitting, an older gentleman suddenly realized he had been healed in a way that was at once obvious, at least to himself. His friends encouraged him to go forward and he did. After he shared with Kuhlman and the audience that he had been healed, he also mentioned that he was not a Believer in Jesus. When Kuhlman asked him if now that he had been healed he also believed, to everyone's amazement he said, "No." He went back to his seat a healed, yet still unbelieving man.

The Good News comes to all whether they accept it or not. Jesus went about blessing people regardless of whether or how they would receive it and he wanted his followers to share the Good News in the same way.