Why did Jesus speak in parables?

What the Bible says

Parables make up a large share of the teaching of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. Yet the disciples found this method puzzling. Matthew says they asked, "Why do You speak to the people in parables?" (Matt 13:10). Jesus' answer is not easy. In Mark it reads:

The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to those on the outside everything is expressed in parables, so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.’

Mark 4:11-12

Taken alone, this sounds as if parables were a device for hiding the truth. Later in the same chapter Mark says the opposite.

With many such parables Jesus spoke the word to them, to the extent that they could understand.

Mark 4:33

Privately he explained everything to his disciples (Mark 4:34). Read together, the two verses show what a parable is: a door to an open heart and a wall to a closed one.

You can see it work in the parable of the sower. The seed is the same, yet it fares differently on the path, rocky ground, thorns and good soil (Mark 4:3-9). Jesus explains that these are four conditions of the hearing heart (Mark 4:14-20). The parable asks the hearer, "What kind of soil are you?" Hence the closing call, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Mark 4:9).

A story pulls the hearer inside, and the Old Testament knew it. The prophet Nathan did not accuse David directly. He told of a rich man who took a poor man's one lamb. When David burned with anger and said the man deserved to die, Nathan answered, "You are that man!" (2 Sam 12:7).

Jesus' parables work the same way. Luke 15 gives the setting first: tax collectors and sinners were gathering to listen, and the Pharisees and scribes grumbled, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them" (Luke 15:1-2). The parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son are the answer. When the younger son comes home, this is how the father receives him.

But while he was still in the distance, his father saw him and was filled with compassion. He ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him.

Luke 15:20

The story does not stop there. The older brother hears the music outside and grows angry, and the parable ends with the father coming out to plead with him (Luke 15:28). We are not told whether he went in. That ending is a question to the listening Pharisees: will you go in?

The good Samaritan works similarly. A lawyer, "wanting to justify himself," asked, "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29). Jesus tells a story instead of giving a definition, and turns the question around: who proved to be a neighbour? (Luke 10:36-37).

That a parable can also judge shows in Luke 20. After the parable of the wicked tenants the scribes and chief priests "realized that Jesus had spoken this parable against them," and they sought to arrest him (Luke 20:19).

The church's witness

The church never turned away from the difficulty of Mark 4:11-12. On Matthew 13:13 Chrysostom insists that the saying is not about fate. If the blindness of these hearers were from birth, he says:

Had this been a natural blindness, He ought to have opened their eyes

Chrysostom

But they had closed their own eyes, he explains. He goes on: "For this reason He spake to them at first not in parables, but with much clearness; but because they perverted all they saw and heard, He now speaks in parables" Chrysostom.

Matthew Henry puts the same thought briefly: in parables "the things of God were made more plain and easy to those willing to be taught, and at the same time more difficult and obscure to those who were willingly ignorant" Matthew Henry.

The church has more than one tradition of reading parables. Many Fathers, reading all Scripture as pointing to Christ, sought a spiritual meaning in each detail. Origen and Augustine read the good Samaritan as a picture in which the wounded man is Adam, the Samaritan is Christ and the inn is the church. Calvin rejected that reading, and most scholars today look first for the main point in the story's setting. Many interpreters now use both. Jesus himself explained the sower with an element of allegory, and the setting, such as Luke 15:1-2 or Luke 10:29, tells us what a story is chiefly about.

In the original languages

The New Testament word for "parable" is parabole (παραβολή). It comes from the idea of "placing alongside": a familiar story is set beside the kingdom of God so that the two can be compared.

Its background is the Hebrew mashal (מָשָׁל), a broad word covering proverbs, sayings, taunts and stories with a riddle in them. Matthew 13:35 sees Jesus' parables as fulfilling Psalm 78:2, "I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden from the beginning." For Jews the parable was part of an old tradition of wisdom.

Finally there is mysterion (μυστήριον), "mystery." In the New Testament it does not mean a secret kept forever but something hidden that has now been disclosed. So "the mystery of the kingdom" is not a password for a few; it is what Jesus comes to make known.

Common objections

"Doesn't Mark 4:12 say Jesus deliberately hid the truth so that people would not be forgiven?" This is the heaviest question. The text uses a purpose clause, "so that." Interpreters take it in several ways. One is a judicial response, following the pattern of Isaiah 6:9-10, to people who have already hardened their hearts; in Isaiah's day too the people refused to listen first. Some see support in the fact that Matthew 13:13 says "because" where Mark says "so that." Another is that the Greek conjunction may express result rather than purpose. A third is that the same word is revelation to one hearer and veil to another. Christians understand predestination and free will differently, so emphases differ. What all agree on is that parables are not meant to deceive, and that even the disciples did not at first understand (Mark 4:13). Those who understood did so not by cleverness; it was "given" to them.

"A parable can mean whatever the reader wants." There is something in this: allegory has often been pushed until it draws lessons the text never gave. That is why it helps to ask first about the setting and main point. That the prodigal son concerns God's welcome of sinners can be checked from Luke 15:1-2, outside the story itself. Room for interpretation remains, but not every meaning is possible.

"Parables are just moral tales about being good." Many contain moral lessons, but they first say what the kingdom of God is like. The man who found treasure hidden in a field, "in his joy he went and sold all he had and bought that field" (Matt 13:44). That story says, before it urges any good work, that the kingdom is worth everything. In many parables the father, the shepherd and the sower point to what Jesus himself is doing. His eating with sinners is the shepherd finding the lost.

Going further

Jesus' parables do not let us judge the story; they let the story judge us. In Luke 15 we usually want to stand with the son who comes home, but the story leaves one more person outside the father's house.

You might ask yourself: In the parable of the sower, which soil is my heart closest to just now? In the prodigal son, am I the one returning from the far country, or the older brother hesitating at the door? When I do not understand a saying of Jesus, do I go to him, as the disciples did, and ask?

To read further, see What did Jesus teach? and How should we read the Bible?