Power of Parable

Power of Parable

Topic of Choice

April 7, 2016

Parables transcend space and time. Though these stories contain fictitious characters who operate within the constraints of space and time, the overarching message being revealed in parables raises these stories above these limitations. Because of their transcendental nature, the message of a parable is always timeless and timely. Contrary to being closed stories, parables are “open narratives in order to invite us to engage with them”(Levine p.1) Parables are wild, fluid, and dynamic texts and the need to systematize, tame, and objectify the meaning of such stories stagnates the flow their speakers intended for them to have. “When we seek universal morals from a genre that is designed to surprise, challenge, shake up, or indict and look for a single meaning in a form that opens to multiple interpretations, we are necessarily limiting the parables, and so, ourselves.”

Jesus used parables to keep the message of his teaching hidden from the proud and arrogant. Only the meek, humble, and childlike could receive his teachings. In the gospel of Matthew Jesus disciples ask him why he speaks in parables, to which he responds: “because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”(Matthew 13:13) Jesus is not denying that his audience has physical ears to hear what he is audibly speaking. What he is saying is that the ears of their hearts cannot hear and receive his teaching on a spiritual level. Their spiritual senses were dead. Jesus did not speak in parables so that everyone could easily and plainly understand what he was saying. He spoke in parables to conceal his message from the proud and arrogant. Those who understood Jesus’s parables realized that he used this literary tool to reveal his divine nature as the son of God.