📖 Parables of the Bible — Unit 1: How to Read a Parable

Orientation

"A parable has been described as an earthly story with a heavenly meaning." That is how I began a Baptism Sunday sermon on the parable of the soils many years ago, and it remains a good place to begin a course on the parables of the Bible. The definition is simple enough for a child and deep enough for a lifetime. A parable takes something from ordinary life — a farmer sowing seed, a woman sweeping for a lost coin, a potter bent over his wheel, a builder dropping a plumb line — and sets it beside a truth about God. The listener sees the familiar thing first, and only then realizes that the story has been about him all along.

That moment of recognition is what makes parables so powerful, and so dangerous. When the prophet Nathan told King David about a rich man who stole a poor man's only lamb, David was furious at the thief before he understood that he was the thief: "You are the man!" (2 Samuel 12:7). When Jesus told the chief priests about tenants who killed the owner's son, "they perceived that He was speaking of them" (Matthew 21:45). A parable slips past our defenses. It lets us judge a situation fairly before we discover that it is our own.

This course has fifteen units. This first unit lays the foundation, five units study parables from the Old Testament, eight study the parables of Jesus, and a final unit teaches how to preach the parables. Much of the material grows out of sermons preached over many years. Before we open any single parable, though, we need to ask how parables work, why Jesus used them so often, how the church has read them through the centuries, and what guidelines keep a preacher from making a parable say what it never meant.

I. What Is a Parable?

The English word comes from the Greek parabolē, which means literally "something thrown alongside." A parable places one thing beside another so that the first illuminates the second. Behind the Greek stands the Hebrew word mashal, which is much broader. A mashal can be a proverb (the book of Proverbs opens with the mishlê of Solomon), a taunt, a riddle, an allegory, or a story. The Greek Old Testament regularly translates mashal with parabolē, and the Gospels use the word with the same breadth. In Luke 4:23 Jesus calls the short saying "Physician, heal yourself" a parable. So when we speak of the parables of the Bible, we are speaking of a family of related forms rather than a single rigid category.

It helps to name the main members of that family. There are proverbs and figurative sayings, single vivid comparisons such as "You are the salt of the earth." There are similitudes, brief pictures of something that typically happens, such as leaven working through dough or a mustard seed growing into a tree (Matthew 13:31–33). There are story parables, narratives about a particular imagined event, such as the prodigal son. There are example stories, which present a model to imitate or avoid, such as the rich fool (Luke 12:16–21) or the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14). There are fables, in which plants or animals speak and act like people: Jotham's parable of the trees (Judges 9:7–15) and King Jehoash's reply about the thistle and the cedar (2 Kings 14:9) are the clearest biblical examples. There are allegories, in which several details stand for something beyond themselves, such as Ezekiel's two eagles (Ezekiel 17). And there are enacted parables, actions or visions that preach a sermon before any words are spoken. God told Jeremiah to "go down to the potter's house" and watch a sermon before he preached one (Jeremiah 18:1–6). Amos was shown a plumb line (Amos 7:7–9). Hosea's own marriage became a living picture of God's love for unfaithful Israel.

These categories overlap. Isaiah's Song of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5:1–7) is a song, a story, and an allegory all at once, and Jesus' parable of the tenants (Matthew 21:33–46) deliberately echoes it. The labels are tools for noticing how a parable works, not boxes to force it into.

II. Why Did Jesus Teach in Parables?

Parables were not decoration on Jesus' teaching; they were at its center. Mark says, "Then He taught them many things by parables" (Mark 4:2), and Matthew adds that "without a parable He did not speak to them" (Matthew 13:34). Roughly a third of the teaching of Jesus recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke comes in parable form. Why?

Part of the answer is plain. Parables are memorable. A farmer, a lost son, and a wedding feast stay in the mind long after an abstract argument is forgotten. For audiences who could not read, and for many congregations today, a story is the natural way truth travels. Parables also disarm. Like Nathan's story, they draw the listener into judging fairly before he realizes the judgment falls on himself. And parables demand a response. They seldom end with a neat moral; they end with a question hanging in the air. Will the older brother go in to the feast? Which of these three proved to be a neighbor? The listener must finish the story with his own life.

But there is a harder part of the answer. When the disciples asked why He spoke in parables, Jesus drew on Isaiah 6:9–10: the mystery of the kingdom had been given to them, "but to those who are outside, all things come in parables, so that 'Seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand'" (Mark 4:11–12). Parables reveal, but they also conceal.

Evangelical interpreters read this hard saying in different ways, and a student should know the main options. Readers in the Reformed tradition often see here God's sovereign choice to open some hearts and to leave others in their blindness. Readers in the Arminian and Wesleyan traditions usually see a judicial hardening: those who had already set themselves against Jesus heard stories they could not penetrate, while anyone willing to come and ask found the meaning opened. They point out that Matthew's account says Jesus speaks in parables "because seeing they do not see" (Matthew 13:13), placing the blindness before the parable, and that the teaching ends with an open invitation: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" (Mark 4:9). The disciples themselves did not understand at first. What set them apart was that they came to Jesus and asked. Whichever reading a pastor holds, both agree on this: parables separate the curious from the committed. They reward the listener who leans in, and they leave the indifferent with nothing but a story.

III. How the Church Has Read the Parables

For most of church history the parables were read as allegories, with nearly every detail carrying a hidden spiritual meaning. The most famous example is Augustine's reading of the Good Samaritan. The man going down from Jerusalem is Adam; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace; Jericho is our mortality; the robbers are the devil and his angels; the priest and the Levite are the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, which could not save; the Samaritan is Christ; the oil and wine are the comfort of hope and the call to fervent service; the inn is the church; and the innkeeper is the apostle Paul. Nearly everything in that reading is true doctrine, but almost none of it is what Jesus was teaching the lawyer who asked, "And who is my neighbor?"

The Reformers pushed back. Luther and Calvin, committed to the plain sense of Scripture, both warned against spinning the parables into elaborate allegories, even if they did not always avoid it themselves. The decisive modern break came with the German scholar Adolf Jülicher (1888–1899), who argued that each parable makes only one point and that allegorical details should be set aside. His correction was needed, but it went too far. Some of Jesus' own parables, like the soils and the wheat and the tares, come with explanations that assign meaning to several details.

In the twentieth century, C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias insisted that the parables be heard in their original setting in the ministry of Jesus, as announcements that the kingdom of God was breaking into history. Later evangelical scholars built on their work while rejecting some of their skepticism. Craig Blomberg argued that a parable usually makes one main point for each main character, so that the story of the prodigal son teaches something through the father, the younger son, and the older brother. Kenneth Bailey, who spent decades teaching in the Middle East, showed how village culture illuminates details a Western reader misses. A father running down the road, for example, was an undignified act no respectable man would perform. Klyne Snodgrass called the parables "stories with intent," stressing that each was told to move its hearers to act.

The lesson of this history is balance. A parable is not a code in which every detail must be cracked, nor is it a flat moral that ignores its details. It is a story with a purpose, told to particular people, and it means what Jesus or the prophet intended it to mean for them.

IV. Guidelines for Reading a Parable

Out of that history come practical guidelines a pastor can carry into his study.

1. Read the setting. Ask who was listening and what provoked the story. Luke 15 begins with the grumbling of the Pharisees: "This Man receives sinners and eats with them" (Luke 15:2). Without that verse, the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son become sweet stories. With it, they become a defense of Jesus' mission and a challenge to the older brothers in every congregation.

2. Identify the main characters. Look for the central figures and ask what each one teaches. Most parables have two or three.

3. Listen for the surprise. Parables usually turn on something unexpected: the despised Samaritan is the hero, the workers hired last are paid first, the shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one. The shock is where the meaning lives.

4. Watch the ending. The weight of a story usually falls at its close, what scholars call "end stress." Pay attention to the last words and the last question.

5. Let Scripture interpret Scripture. When Jesus explains a parable, His explanation governs ours. When a parable echoes the Old Testament, as the tenants echo Isaiah's vineyard, the echo is part of the meaning.

6. Do not press every detail. Ask whether the text itself signals that a detail matters. The inn in the Good Samaritan is simply an inn.

7. Keep the kingdom at the center. Most of Jesus' parables are about the reign of God: its coming, its surprising grace, its demands, and its final judgment.

8. Respond. A parable is not finished until the hearer answers it. The goal of study is not merely to understand the story but to see ourselves in it and obey.

V. Common Mistakes in Preaching Parables

Three errors appear again and again. The first is over-allegorizing: making every detail a symbol, so that the preacher's imagination replaces the text. The second is moralizing: reducing a parable to "be nice to people" and losing the gospel at its heart. The Good Samaritan does teach love for our neighbor, but it was told to a man "wanting to justify himself" (Luke 10:29), and it exposes how far all of us fall short of the love the law requires. The third is ignoring the original audience: preaching the prodigal son without the Pharisees of Luke 15:2, or the tenants without the chief priests of Matthew 21:45. A parable torn from its setting loses its edge. The cure for all three is the same: slow, careful reading of the text in its context, and a willingness to let the story say what it says, even when it cuts.

VI. The Old Testament Roots

Jesus did not invent the parable. He stood in a long line of prophets who used stories and object lessons to confront Israel. Nathan's ewe lamb broke a king's heart. His story belongs to a small group sometimes called juridical parables: a prophet brings the king a case to judge, and the king pronounces sentence on himself. The wise woman of Tekoa (2 Samuel 14:1–20) and the wounded prophet who confronted King Ahab (1 Kings 20:35–43) used the same method. Isaiah's vineyard, lovingly planted but yielding only wild grapes, exposed a nation's injustice. Jeremiah watched a potter reshape a marred vessel and learned that God could remake a nation that repented, or reconsider the good He had planned for a nation that turned to evil (Jeremiah 18:7–10). Amos saw the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line, measuring His people against His own straight standard. Hosea lived a parable, buying back an unfaithful wife as God would buy back Israel.

These prophetic parables share a pattern. They begin with something the listener already understands — farming, pottery, building, marriage — and they end by placing the listener before God. They also show that the Old and New Testaments speak with one voice. When Jesus told of a vineyard owner who sent servant after servant and finally his own son, His hearers knew Isaiah's song. The parable of the tenants is Isaiah 5 brought to its climax in the rejection of the Son.

VII. The Plan of This Course

The next five units study the Old Testament parables: the Vineyard (Isaiah 5), the Potter's House (Jeremiah 18), the Plumb Line (Amos 7), the Ewe Lamb (2 Samuel 12), and the Unfaithful Wife (Hosea 1–3). The next eight units study the parables of Jesus: the sower and the soils; the kingdom parables of the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, the leaven, the hidden treasure, and the pearl; the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son; the unforgiving servant; the Pharisee and the tax collector and the laborers in the vineyard; the Good Samaritan; the wicked tenants; and the talents and the wise and foolish builders. The final unit brings everything together and teaches how to preach the parables.

Throughout the course you will meet illustrations drawn from years of pastoral ministry, because parables were made to be preached. Jesus did not tell stories to entertain scholars. He told them to farmers, fishermen, tax collectors, and religious leaders, and He expected them to go home changed. As you study each parable, ask three questions. What did it mean to those who first heard it? What does it reveal about God? And where do I stand in the story?

Closing

A parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, but it is also a mirror. Nathan's lamb, Isaiah's vineyard, the potter's clay, the plumb line, the soils, and the prodigal son all hold up a glass in which we see ourselves. The pastor who learns to read the parables well will find that they read him first. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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