Introduction to Parables

Jesus loved to tell stories—perplexing, yet revealing stories. “To the others I speak in parables,” he once confided to his disciples, “so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’” (Luke 8:10b). Jesus’ parables teach us, spiritually blind and self-deceived as we are, to see reality beyond ourselves and to know God’s love and loving demands on our lives. With their two levels of meaning—a story and the divine reality that the story reveals—the “parables are imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Kline Snodgrass has observed.

Yet they also lead us to acknowledge the darkness in ourselves. “Parables invite the hearer’s interest with familiar settings and situations but finally veer off into the unfamiliar, shattering their homey realism and insisting on further reflection and inquiry,” Ron Hanson reminds us. Thus, “we have the uneasy feeling that we are being interpreted even as we interpret them.”

From Robert B. Kruschwitz, Christian Reflection, 2006 The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University

Photo above by Madison Murphy.  It is one in a series of images telling the Parable of the Sower.  See her Flickr Photostream Here.