Thursday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Scripture Readings
I have wondered for a very long time why Jesus speaks in parables. After all, Jesus is God and knows all. Jesus is incarnate and lives among human beings as a human being. While he is on earth, he has this incredible opportunity to tell us humans who God is, what God wants, how to follow him, and so forth. Surely, he wants to make all that clear.
And sometimes he does. I am thinking of the Sermon on the Mount. And then other times, as the text before us makes clear, he chooses not to. Why?
I love the parable of the prodigal son. But it’s not like I got it on my first read. Or second read. Or 20th read. It took reading Henry Nouwen’s book on the parable (more than once). It took facing my own existential crisis. Only then did I begin to have some idea what Jesus was saying.
In case we are over confident in our understanding of what Jesus’ parables mean, he makes sure to tell us that we don’t know. And then he goes on to explain them to us mere mortals.
So, again, why does Jesus speak in parables that he knows we’re not going to get—at least not readily. Why make it so hard?
I had lunch the other day with a friend of mine who talked about a Sunday school session she recently attended at her church in which the leader of the class gave something of a lecture on the virtues of the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible. His argument was that the ESV translation is simply literal—word for word. Unlike other translations, the ESV is actually not a translation. It is simply the Word of God put into English. By contrast, he asserted, all other translations were interpretations. They always added or took away from God’s Word.
So, why did Jesus speak in parables?
To keep us humble, perhaps? Maybe to remind us that while we’d love to know God’s Word—some of us even want to claim it for ourselves—we actually don’t know it. It confounds us, if we’re honest.
Who am I in the parable of the prodigal son? Am I the very naughty son? Am I the ticked off super righteous brother? Surely, I am not the father full of grace. Or, could I be?
“This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.”
I will go to my grave without certainty about what Jesus is trying to teach me through his parables. The one tiny credit I can claim, perhaps, is that I know that.
-Sue Trollinger