The first error many readers make is to believe that the parables are simplistic religious illustrations, almost spiritual folktales. In this erroneous reading, the parables are read superficially like moral lessons. The parables are of course fairly simple up there at the surface—some of them simpler than others—and there are clear moral lessons in the stories. But the parables are much more complex than that and certainly, in the context of Jesus’ direct teaching and ministry, do not belong in the category of vague moralistic fables.
The parables Jesus tells in the four Gospels are peculiar kinds of stories that too many readers read very wrongly. It’s important, then, to clear up some common misconceptions about these important stories. I want to share with you what the parables are, but first, it is helpful to establish what they are not.
Jesus’s Parables Are Not . . .
. . . Moral Fables
The first error many readers make is to believe that the parables are simplistic religious illustrations, almost spiritual folktales. In this erroneous reading, the parables are read superficially like moral lessons. The parables are of course fairly simple up there at the surface—some of them simpler than others—and there are clear moral lessons in the stories. But the parables are much more complex than that and certainly, in the context of Jesus’ direct teaching and ministry, do not belong in the category of vague moralistic fables.
On the other hand, there is another school of thought equally erroneous that would have readers poring over the parables like some kind of Magic Eye hidden picture painting.
. . . Secret Codes
It is definitely possible to overthink Jesus’s parables, by which I mean to read them with too much speculative scrutiny, ransacking every point and detail for every possible meaning it may have locked up, squeezing symbols out of symbols, long bypassing the primary intent of the story for some imaginative concoction of biblical connections.
The way some people read the parables simplistically is reminiscent of Aesop’s Fables, but the way others read them reminds one of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatles albums for that conspiracy about Paul’s having died in a car accident. The parables are both simple and complex, but they are not simple and complex like that.
. . . Allegories
At least, the parables are not allegories in the normal literary sense. Allegory is a form of literature in which material figures represent immaterial virtues or vices. So in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the character Timorous represents fear and Mr. Worldly Wiseman represents worldly wisdom. In our day, distinction of genres has been muddled a bit, so we tend to regard any story with symbolic elements in it as allegorical, but it was not always this way. C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, are not allegories, even as often as they are referred to as such, and Lewis himself said as much.
