Living Parables

Jesus had just stared down the ruler of the synagogue and his posse over matters related to healing on the Sabbath, and the ruler had flinched first. With all eyes on him, Jesus opened his mouth and asked those gathered that Sabbath, “What’s the kingdom of God like? What could I compare it to?”

Not having the custom of asking questions to which he didn’t already know the answer, Jesus went on to say something very surprising indeed. He said the kingdom of God was like a single mustard seed that a man took, planted in his garden, and watched grow into a tree big enough for birds to come and make their nests in its branches.

Then, as if that weren’t strange enough, he went on to give another comparison. He said that the kingdom of God was like yeast that a woman took and hid in some flour until all the flour was full of yeast.

After that, without a word of explanation, Jesus left the synagogue and started a teaching and preaching tour through towns and villages on his way to Jerusalem.

That is so Jesus.

The point here is not to go into a detailed analysis of what we can learn about the nature of the Kingdom of God from these two strange comparisons. (Though I would strongly recommend you take some time and ponder what on earth Jesus meant.) My point is to draw attention to how Jesus did his teaching.

Jesus’s teachings like these are called parables. At their heart, parables are metaphorical in nature, that is, they’re comparisons of one thing to something else. One of the two things is something very common and easily understandable, and the other thing is uncommon and usually difficult to understand. To Jesus’s hearers in the first century, mustard seeds and yeast were immediately understandable. They knew exactly what he was talking about. To them (and to us today) the kingdom of God is something a little bit harder to wrap one’s mind around. So Jesus taught in parables, using these comparisons, and for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, the nature of the one thing sheds light on the nature of the other.

The idea is that the common helps us understand the uncommon. What we can feel through our fingertips sheds light on what we can only feel with our hearts. The physical is often a picture of the spiritual. Once you start thinking like this, such comparisons seem to explode all over the place.

Jesus had the audacity to say that he was the bread of life. Because we understand what bread is and it’s relationship to our physical bodies, we can get a sense of what he was saying he was to our souls—specifically, that which we can not live without. In fact, I remember John Piper saying one time that he thinks God created bread and our dependence on it precisely so that when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” we’d have some idea of what he was talking about. To think in such a way supposes that what is real is the heavenly truth behind the parable, and the physical is only a shadow meant to drive us to the light. In other words, the reality of bread is not as real as the reality of Jesus as the ultimate source of life and sustenance and satisfaction. To help us understand that, God created these physical bodies in such a way that they were dependent on bread, thus allowing us to begin to grasp how dependent we are on Jesus.

If that’s true, then it’s not a stretch at all to think of practically all of life as what I would call living, interactive, participatory parables. Is that not how Paul describes marriage in Ephesians 5? Because we as human beings who get married understand something of the nature of the relationship that should exist between a married man and woman, we can understand something of the nature of the relationship that exists between Christ and his people. That’s why God thought of the idea of the human institution of marriage: so that we’d better understand much deeper realities. The main function of marriage, then, is to serve as a picture—or, as I’m calling it, a living, interactive, participatory parable—that illustrates realities about something far deeper and greater than marriage itself.

Is not all of life, then, filled with pictures that point to realities far beyond themselves? Fatherhood, motherhood, sonship, daughtership, birth, adoption, childlessness, work, slavery, death, famine, corruption, feasting, fasting, addictions, wedding celebrations, sex, holidays, birthdays, funerals, friendship, kings, kingdoms, gardens, seeds, weeds, fishing, disease, health, water, laws, justice, and so on—all of these common, earthy, natural things that we can all understand easily enough are, in fact, pictures—living, interactive, participatory parables, if you will—that can help us grasp aspects of the invisible reality around us, an invisible reality whose invisibleness makes it no less real and needful for us to understand. The question, of course, comes down to whether or not we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

On several occasions the disciples asked Jesus to explain to them the meaning of a parable he had told. And he did. He said to them the secrets of the kingdom of God had been given. And I’m under the very strong impression that Jesus is still in the business of opening eyes to see and ears to hear these very same mysteries. May God help us better understand the parables in which we find ourselves, the living, breathing, participatory parables we call our daily lives.

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What parables do you see in a snail scooting along on a garden hose? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.