A Summary of the Public Parables (Mt. 13:34-35)
34 Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. 35 This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.”
We now come back to the question of Protestant theology raised in the introduction, “The Purpose and Meaning of Parables.” Is God absolutely and utterly in control of the whole process of salvation? Is the kingdom of heaven actually an expression of God’s absolute sovereignty at work in history? Well, yes; God is God, after all. But when we say it in such a way we manage to miss the point of the kingdom as taught in these parables. To say it in such a way is to deny the inherent uncertainty of the kingdom (the first two parables) and to let humans off the hook, ultimately denying the significance of the responsibility of personhood and the glorious fact that we are created in the image of God (with all the responsibility that entails). To say it in such a way also takes God’s stated means of operation (mystery, in the second two parables) and through human re-shaping and re-formation, turns them into means of operation based on absolute power and divine right. These attributes are common in the gods of other religions, but foreign to the Gospels. In essence, they are human attributes of power, strength, and control applied to God by us so that we are comfortable with the God-ness of God. They are not, on the other hand, the attributes that Jesus applies in the parables.
In the summary of these four public parables, Matthew quotes Psalm 78.
1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our ancestors have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might,
and the wonders that he has done.
English translations of this passage have tended to translate it in light of Matthew, especially the idea of a secret, the “dark sayings from old” of v. 2. In that phrase you hear echoes of what Jesus says about the meaning and purpose of parables. They’re “dark secrets;” they’re designed to reveal to those prepared to hear and hide from those who are not. The problem is that this is not what Asaph says in this psalm. A more accurate rendering of Psalm 78, or at least a rendering that does not interpret it in light of Matthew 13, can be found in the Tanakh, the recent Jewish translation published by The Jewish Publication Society. Their translation does a much better job of rendering the text at face value.
1 Give ear, my people, to my teaching,
turn your ear to what I say.
2 I will expound a theme,
hold forth on the lessons of the past,
3 things we have heard and known,
that our fathers have told us.
5 We will not withhold them from their children,
telling the coming generation
the praises of the LORD and His might,
and the wonders He performed.
This is the sense of Psalm 78 that Matthew would have had, having gone to Synagogue School as a child. If we are to understand what’s happening in the parables, we need to see this Hebrew sensibility, so that we can in turn see the subtle shift in meaning which highlights Jesus’ rather radical shift in his sensibilities about God.
Psalm 78 is a recitation of the mighty acts of God. This psalm (along with psalms 105, 106, 135, 136) has a very public character. Current scholarship believes that these five psalms were composed for various public festivals and were used to remind the people of God’s merciful favor toward them. Psalms such as this were important tools in teaching the people about who God is and how he works.
In his teaching ministry, Jesus remolds the Tradition, presenting a rather different view of God than was popularly held when he was teaching. Jesus often used a compare and contrast method of teaching: “Your teachers told you this, but I say unto you . . .” The parables, by both hiding and revealing his teachings, fit into this same category. What Jesus is doing in the process is introducing us to the mystery of the kingdom. Things are not as they seem precisely because God’s ways are not as they seem. What we expect from “the mighty acts of God” are rather different from what we get.
When Asaph wrote his psalm as a public recitation of God’s mighty acts, he was passing on the same story that had been told for generations. There was nothing hidden about it. When Jesus told essentially the same story of God’s character in the parables, he was adding a new, unexpected dimension. This new dimension that we might call the path of mystery was also a path of weakness, suffering through persecution, and ultimately death. Even Peter rebuked Jesus when Jesus spoke openly of this mystery of the kingdom of heaven. If Jesus’ closest disciples could not grasp it, how would the unprepared and untaught masses respond to the mystery?
In the parables, Jesus passes on the same story as Asaph did, but in mercy he veiled it, so that the message would not create a stumbling block for those not yet ready to hear. In turn, when Matthew presents us with Jesus’ parables, he concludes the public portion (the first four parables) by referring back to Asaph and subtly changes the emphasis of Asaph’s opening strophes by inserting into it Jesus’ new and mysterious understanding of what a parable is: not just a “theme,” a “lesson from the past,” but word which both hides and reveals, and in the process reveals a God’s whose ways are radically different from the supposed gods who supposedly used absolute power and relied on divine right in order to get their divine way.
In the end, the message is the same. The message is the same because God is the same God. The message is the same because truth remains truth. And yet, Jesus adds a twist, and that twist creates a tear in the fabric of physicality, as it were, so that we get a deeper glimpse of the God who was always there, but suddenly seems radically different. And in this manner, Jesus proclaimed “what has been hidden from the foundations of the world” (Mt. 13:35).
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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