Lecture 9: Parables: True to Life, Told in the Storm, and Struck for a Verdict

The lecture, section by section

1. Cast alongside: what a parable is

   The word itself means to cast one thing alongside another for comparison: the sowing of seed, known to every Palestinian farmer, laid beside the sowing of the word in the soil of human hearts. Rosscup's definition stacks five marks: a story, true to life, adapted and crafted by the speaker, conveying a representation from one realm to another, and centered, in every one of Jesus's thirty to forty parables, on the kingdom, the very kingdom the prophets promised and John and Jesus heralded as at hand.

2. A brilliant scholar's one wrong move

   A. M. Hunter of Aberdeen had an uncanny knack for the kernel of each parable, and Rosscup commends him warmly. But Hunter belonged to the realized eschatology school, which relocated the great crisis of the parables, the separation of wheat and tares, good fish and bad, back into the first advent rather than the second coming. The points were right; the placement was wrong: even excellent scholarship must be weighed.

3. Parable against allegory

   Three differences. A parable is true to life; an allegory may be deliberately fantastic, as Ezekiel's two great eagles carrying treetop branches across hundreds of miles, explained in the passage as the kings of Babylon and Egypt. In a parable not every detail carries meaning, like the backdrop dressing a shop window's one dress, while in an allegory every detail means something and says so: the breastplate consists of righteousness, the vine and branches name their own referents. And a parable's interpretation stands apart from the story, before it or after it, while an allegory carries its interpretation inside itself.

4. Do not make it walk on all fours

   Of Matthew 13's eight parables, Jesus explains exactly two, the soils and the wheat and tares, detail by detail. For the rest, the interpreter must find the central point and hold his imagination on a leash, refusing to assign meanings to details the story never loads. The old warning stands: do not make a parable walk on all fours.

5. The craft of the storyteller

   The parables use the rules of powerful popular storytelling. Repetition and buildup: one sheep of a hundred, one coin of ten, one son of two; traveler after traveler passing the wounded man. Contrast of virtue and vice: wise and foolish virgins. A small cast, two to five characters, from the two groups of virgins to the five hirings in the vineyard. And end stress: the bomb dropped at the close, the bridegroom arriving, the door barred, the father pleading with the elder brother.

6. Told in the storm

   The parables were not composed at a desk; they were provoked spontaneously in living encounter, the cut and thrust of conflict, what one fine study calls the eye of the storm. Luke 15's three lost things answer the grumbling of Pharisees scandalized that Jesus receives sinners; the stories strike for a verdict, calling hearers to embrace sinners in love without compromise. Preaching aims at the same thing: a verdict on the message, not the messenger.

7. Why parables? Concealing and revealing

   Asked in Matthew 13 why he now spoke in parables, Jesus gave a cluster of reasons: to fulfill Isaiah's prophecy of two kinds of hearers, to conceal kingdom truth from the closed, and to reveal it to the open, the pattern of 1 Corinthians 2 where the natural man cannot discern what the spiritual man receives. Truth is imparted to open hearts. And the parables seize attention: Scripture, rightly met, is never boring; only its readers are.

8. The problem is the key at the front door

   The first principle for interpreting any parable: determine the specific problem or occasion in the context that made this story necessary. Rosscup learned it under J. Dwight Pentecost at Dallas and then proved it himself, working through every parable to peg its problem. Sometimes the key hangs before the story, as when Luke notes the crowd supposed the kingdom would appear immediately; sometimes after, as when Jesus explains privately; always, the context holds it.

9. Matthew 13: eight answers to one crisis

   The wider context is Matthew 12, where rejection explodes in the unpardonable sin, raising the question how there can ever be a kingdom. That very day Jesus answers with eight parables: soils, where the fourth soil guarantees fruit despite three failures; wheat and tares and the good and bad fish, promising the separation at the end of the age; mustard seed and leaven, the outward growth from tiny to great and the inward permeation to the whole; treasure and pearl, the kingdom's surpassing worth; and the householder scribe, bringing out things old and new. By the chapter's end, gloom has become confident hope: the enterprise will succeed.

10. The Good Samaritan in its own right

    The occasion is a lawyer's two questions in Galilee, distinct from the similar exchange at Jerusalem in Matthew 22, two events, not one garbled account. Asked who is my neighbor, Jesus tells of the road that drops steeply from Jerusalem toward Jericho through robber country, the priest and Levite who pass by, and the Samaritan who stops. His answer reverses the question: your neighbor is anyone to whom you can be a neighbor. It is your move. Even the oil and wine are true to life: oil to soothe, wine to cleanse, exactly as ancient sources prescribe.

11. The allegory that buried the Samaritan

    The church fathers read the parable as a code: the wounded man humanity, the robbers the devil, the priest the law, the Levite the prophets, the Samaritan Christ, the oil and wine grace, the donkey Christ's body, the inn the church, the innkeeper the apostle Paul. Ingenious, and unfounded at every point: the passage itself commands go and do likewise, making the hearer, not christology, the story's target. The literal sense makes beautiful sense; no other sense is needed.

12. Guarding the gospel in the parable

    What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Snatched alone, the parable could be twisted into salvation by works. The analogy of the faith guards it: justification is by faith, a free gift, and the fruitful love the parable pictures is manifestation, not merit, the pathway of the righteous in Psalm 1 and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, where those practicing the works of the flesh will not inherit the kingdom. Scripture as a whole informs each passage's intent.

13. Finding the main point

    Three signals mark the central idea: a prompting question in the context; a direct conclusion appended, as after the rich fool, so is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God; or an answer to a request, as the friend at midnight follows Lord, teach us to pray. There the rare word for the sleeper's motive, weighed by the journal literature and the great commentaries, points to his care for his blameless name, and the argument lands: if such a man rises to give, how much more will the God whose character is perfectly good answer those who ask.

14. Rome was not built in a day

    Rosscup closes pastorally: diligence, prayer in the spirit of Psalm 119, open my eyes to behold wondrous things, purity of life, and patience. Interpreters improve by trying again and again, never arrive, and stay honest: better to say I will look it up than to fudge an answer and give a bum steer.

1. The parables were told in the storm, aimed at a verdict. When Scripture has confronted you with a verdict, embracing sinners, releasing wealth, readiness for the bridegroom, what did you do with the story's end stress?

2. It is your move: the Samaritan makes neighborliness my responsibility, not a boundary to define. Who, this week, is the person on your Jericho road?

3. Matthew 13 turned the disciples' gloom into confidence that the kingdom enterprise will succeed. Where does our own church need the mustard seed and the leaven, patient confidence in small beginnings?