A Word Before We Begin

I thought I knew the parables. That was the problem.

I was raised on them the way most of us were — as the friendly part of the Bible, the part with no hard edges. The mustard seed was about having a little faith. The prodigal son was about coming home. The good Samaritan was about being nice to people you'd rather not help. They came to me on felt boards in Sunday school, each one with a tidy moral pinned to the tail, and I filed them where you file a thing you've already understood: in the drawer marked settled. For forty years that drawer stayed shut. The parables were the easy stories. Everybody knew what they meant.

And then, going back through the life of Yeshua slowly — with the Hebrew Scriptures open beside me and that one old light I've written about in this series, the Memra, the Word, falling across the page — I tripped over a passage I had read a hundred times and never once stopped on. It sits right in the middle of Matthew 13, wedged between the parable of the sower and Yeshua's explanation of it, and almost every teaching I had ever heard skipped clean over it. The disciples ask Him a simple question: why do you speak to them in parables? And His answer turned everything I thought I knew upside down. He does not say to make hard things easy. He says the opposite. To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given… seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear. He says He speaks in parables so that some will understand and others, looking right at it, will not.

I read that and felt the floor tilt. The parables are not illustrations. They are not the easy part. They are code — kingdom code, Yeshua's own phrase for it as good as — stories built to open for the soft heart and lock shut against the hard one. The same words that fed a hungry disciple slid right off a hardened Pharisee, and that was not a failure of the teaching. That was the teaching working. The parable was a test, and your response to it was the answer.

That cracked the drawer back open, and I have not been able to close it since. Because once I started reading the parables as what He said they were — Jewish meshalim, riddle-stories soaked in the Torah and the Prophets, aimed at specific people in specific rooms — every one of them turned sharp in my hands. The good Samaritan stopped being a lesson about kindness and became a grenade thrown at a religious system that had put ritual purity above the Torah's command to love. The prodigal son turned out not to be mainly about the prodigal at all, but about his furious older brother — the dutiful insider who could not stand the Father's mercy. The mustard seed turned out to be smuggling in the nations. The leaven turned out to be, very possibly, a warning rather than a comfort. Story after story, the felt board fell away and underneath was something edged, something Jewish, something aimed — at the comfortable, at the religious, and, if I was honest, at me.

That is what this book is. It is the parables read the way He said to read them: as code, not cliché — in their own world, to their own audience, with the Tanakh they were carved from open beside them. I am not going to hand you forty-four nice morals. I am going to try to hand you back the parables themselves, with their edges on, the way the people in those crowds first heard them — some leaning in because something was opening, and some walking away hardened, looking right at the King and seeing only a man telling stories about farming.

And I am not asking you to take any of it on my say-so. I'm a lay teacher in a small Iowa town with a worn Bible and a stubborn habit of testing everything against the whole of Scripture. Read with the text open. Check every reading against the Law and the Prophets it grows out of. Where it holds, you'll be seeing it yourself, which is the only kind of seeing that lasts. Where it doesn't, drop it and keep walking.

But fair warning, because He gave the same one: these stories are a test. They were built to be. The question a parable asks is never really did you understand it? The question is what did your response reveal about your soil? So read slowly, and read honestly. The Kingdom is in here, in code — and the code opens for hearts like the one I hope you're bringing.

He who has ears, let him hear.