What we learn about parables from Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Introduction: Why Parables?

In this post, I discuss parables to remind us—yet again—that Jesus is a first century, Torah-observant Israelite whose instruction must be read within its historical context.

“Sure, Adam,” I hear you saying, “we know what you’re up to.”

Here is my contention, let me zoom out to see the forest for the trees: I sincerely believe that the mainline Protestant church in America is undergoing reformation and the soil is fertile to re-imagine what a Jesus movement looks like in the wake of sex abuse scandals, religious trauma, Christian Nationalism, and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. Like the parable of the sower that is today’s assigned gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary, “as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it.” Is there a place for radical re-imagining of a life informed by the gospels that builds solidarity with the poor, the despised, the incarcerated, and the oppressed?

Jesus’s parables seem to call us toward such solidarity. I do not want to read into the text what is not there. But I don’t see anyway around the fact that Jesus’s setting was this. Rome was an empire, Rome was militarized, Rome did occupy Israel-Palestine, Rome did violently oppress revolutionaries, Rome did demand compliance from the Priestly class to create a precarious balance of autonomy and governance during the Second Temple Period, Rome did execute Jesus, Rome did destroy the Temple and slaughtered thousands, and the Jesus movement was scattered and dispersed in the transjordan and Galilean territories. The gospel writers did view Jesus as the anointed one by God to save God’s people, the gospel writers were all drawing from the Scriptures of Israel, including the Torah and the prophetic tradition, that yearned for a messianic age of peace, justice, and nonviolence. Jesus is reported as engaging in legal debates about proper law observance, and Jesus did travel to areas and in so doing, he broke with societal norms.

When engaging in debates, traveling, and teaching, the gospel writers told stories about him and his instruction that spoke against power, military might, and economic injustice, and to accomplish many of these rhetorical aims, Jesus used parables.

What Are Parables?

Surely we’re all familiar with the idea of parables, and if you’re reading here, you are probably also confident saying that Jesus often taught using parables. This is almost certainly the case! Simply for illustrative purposes, this article lists 37 parables from within the canonical gospel texts and another 15 from non-canonical sources. The parables address a variety of themes, including:

• Kingdom of Heaven

• Love and Redemption

• Love and Forgiveness

• Prayer

• Eschatology

As the commentary in the Jewish Annotated New Testament (hereafter, JANT) explains, “Because of their prominent place in the first three Gospels, parables are, as scholars have argued, among the most likely teachings to go back to the historical Jesus” (JANT, 68).

In short, the method of employing parables to convey a lesson is both popular and historically significant with respect to the literature of the gospel accounts. From the many fallible conclusions scholars draw from historical Jesus and New Testament scholarship, we may assert with, I think, a high degree of confidence that this was a primary method of Jesus’s instruction.

In an essay appearing in the resources of the JANT discussing parables, contributor David Stern writes, “What today seems clear to nearly all scholars is that neither Jesus nor the rabbis invented the parable. Both drew upon a widespread genre of oral traditional literature that goes back to the Bible (see, for example, Nathan’s parable in 2 Sam 12.1-14” (JANT, 567). What is this oral tradition? They are related to sayings and short stories called, in Hebrew, mashalim (plural):

The most common form of these wise sayings, which were intended for oral instruction, especially in the schools run by the sages for the young men at the court, was the mashal (Hebrew: “comparison” or “parable,” although frequently translated “proverb”) … Other forms of the mashal, such as parables, riddles, allegories, and ultimately full-scale compositions developed later. The word mashal was derived from a root that meant “to rule,” and thus a proverb was conceived as an authoritative word (source).

And more, “Talmudist Daniel Boyarin has recently defined משל [mashal] as a process of ‘exemplification,’ seeing it as the sine qua non of Talmudic hermeneutics” (Boyarin 2003, 93, quoted in this article).

I want to pause on this point of authoritative word and exemplification. I think it reminds us that whatever else Jesus was doing, teaching, interpreting Torah, and exemplifying proper conduct was a significant component of his work.

A Preoccupation with Soteriology

When it comes to understanding parables, we can think about the content, metaphor, and symbolism within specific parables, but I want to do something a little different, I’d like to think about the method of parabolic storytelling itself. I want to ask the question, What does it mean for our understanding of Jesus that he taught in parable form? This question delineates the project here from other approaches to “Bible study.” You may think this question is a little obvious, clearly the gospels present Jesus teaching in parables, so what? Or maybe not “so what?” but rather, of what major significance is it that this form of instruction was favored by Jesus?

I want to suggest that the general understanding of Jesus is preoccupied with matters of soteriology, a fancy name for the study of religious doctrines of salvation. Amy-Jill Levine said something like, “The one thing we know for sure about Jesus is that he was killed,” and given centuries of Christian doctrine, the significance of the cross—death and resurrection—these matters of salvation are treated by many as the central thing to know about Jesus. Certainly a Christian apologetic view, I think the popular understanding of Jesus is couched within this framework.

While the stories about Jesus and the disciples, the feeding of the multitudes, the healing of the ill, the giving of sight, these stories are often used in service of securing Jesus’s status in relation to the Godhead, or as the Son of Man imbued with the authority of the Ancient of Days, no doubt the gospel writers themselves are employing these stories to that end, but I contend that too often modern readers treat the stories themselves as window dressing for what readers perceive to be the real message: Jesus was killed and on the third day, he rose from the dead to wipe away our iniquities and offer eternal life to all who believe in him. This is what I mean by a preoccupation with matters of soteriology. Is this why we read the gospels?

To adopt the salvific view of Jesus as the ultimate end to Bible study creates at least two limitations for readers of the gospels: First, this view centers the believer. In other words, the gospels become documents to teach individuals how their personal salvation is informed by the text. If one’s personal relationship with Jesus is center-stage, Jesus’s actions and instruction are assumed to apply equally as well to the 21st century as the first. Heaven and hell, sins and redemption, interactions with “religious authorities” become uncritically applied to contemporary contexts. We see this plainly when people assert, “Jesus wasn’t political” or “we don’t want politics in church.” This view is only tenable if we imagine the gospel accounts do not speak to, with, and for a people for corporate deliverance but to individuals, whether you are saved. This reading of personal salvation limits the transformative vision of the Jesus of the gospels to one’s individual ultimate fate while eschewing a cosmic vision of justice. Jesus as savior for individuals deprives the gospel message of its transformative call.

And second, reading the gospels with salvation in mind prioritizes Christian doctrine over and above the traditions of Israel that are integral to understanding what the evangelists are relaying to their audiences. The “true meaning,” if such an objective meaning exists—maybe better to say the meaning in context—requires working knowledge of the original setting, and even then, it is difficult to say with any confidence approaching certainty what the messages were. Again, from JANT:

Ironically, however, their elusive quality has not yielded a consensus as to what they meant for Jesus or his first followers, [Greek] parabolè (lit., “throw alongside,” that is, talk about one thing in terms of another) and Heb mashal (from a verb meaning “compare”) referred to any figurative comparison, from clear proverbs to obscure riddles. The rabbis also told many parables of God’s relation to Israel (eg. Gen. Rab. 31; Lam. Rab, 1.1) (68).

See, to understand something that is “thrown alongside,” or a “comparison,” requires knowledge of the thing that was being compared in the original setting. And original setting is not merely the immediate setting for Jesus, or the immediate setting for the gospel writers who constructed narratives to contextualize Jesus’s preserved teaching, but the setting also demands the exegetical setting of first century Judaism and its attitude toward the Scriptures. For example, Matthew’s author has Jesus describing his use of parables by appeal to a passage in Isaiah:

¹⁴ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:

‘You will indeed listen but never understand,
    and you will indeed look but never perceive.
¹⁵ For this people’s heart has grown dull,
    and their ears are hard of hearing,
        and they have shut their eyes,
        so that they might not look with their eyes,
    and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart and turn—
    and I would heal them.’

¹⁶ “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. ¹⁷ Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it and to hear what you hear but did not hear it (Matthew 13:14-17).

Here the complicated transmission becomes obvious: Jesus likely taught in parables, drawn from his knowledge of the Scriptures of Israel, told decades later by the anonymous evangelists, and these evangelists relied on preserved stories about Jesus, exegetical engagement with the Scriptures, addressed to different audiences in a post-Temple setting, to achieve not Jesus’s rhetorical aims, but the rhetorical aims of the gospel writers.

Reading Jesus as salvation narrative for the 21st century believer demands that all of these complicating factors are addressed and somehow resolved. The points I’ve tried to make in this section is that a preoccupation with soteriology distracts from the work of encountering the gospels on their own terms and imposes two limitations on the text: First, that personal salvation undermines the politically transformative nature of the texts, and second, that divorcing salvation from its complicated historical setting lures us into thinking that we know with confidence Jesus’s intended message.

The Text

I’ve made the substantive conclusions for my argument above, so I will limit my discussion of today’s text. I wanted to address parables broadly, not the content of one in particular, but I did think sowing on fertile ground is a good comparison (a mashal) for this discussion of where the Jesus movement may be moving in the 21st century. Let me present today’s assigned text, in light of what we’ve discussed.

Matthew 13:1-9, 13:18-23

13 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 If you have ears, hear!”

18 “Hear, then, the parable of the sower. 19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, 21 yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

A few verses later, we are told who the sower is: “He answered, ‘The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man’‘ (Matthew 13:37). This parable has several parallels, and they are worth reading, too, before I conclude with more contextual passages about sowing from throughout the Scriptures. of Israel.

Mark 4:2-9

He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3 “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell on a path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8 Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!”

Luke 8:4-8

When a large crowd was gathering, as people were coming to him from town after town, he said in a parable: 5 “A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed some fell on a path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered for lack of moisture. 7 Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. 8 Some fell into good soil, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!”

Gospel of Thomas Saying 9

Jesus said, “Now the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered them. Some fell on the road; the birds came and gathered them up. Others fell on the rock, did not take root in the soil, and did not produce ears. And others fell on thorns; they choked the seed(s) and worms ate them. And others fell on the good soil and it produced good fruit: it bore sixty per measure and a hundred and twenty per measure.”

On Sowing

If an attempt to understand the original meaning requires engagement with the Scriptures of Israel that were familiar to Jesus, the evangelists, and the Jewish audience of the gospels, we finally turn to a selection of thematic passages from canonical and noncanonical texts.

Hosea 2:21-23 

Dated to the eighth century BCE, this minor prophetic book includes some of the oldest material in the Hebrew Bible and discusses the fall of the Northern Kingdom.

On that day I will answer, says the Lord,
    I will answer the heavens,
    and they shall answer the earth, 

and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil,
    and they shall answer Jezreel, 

    and I will sow him for myself in the land.
And I will have pity on Lo-ruhamah,
    and I will say to Lo-ammi, “You are my people,”
    and he shall say, “You are my God.”

Jeremiah 31: 27-28

A prophetic text with three major literary divisions that may include a core component of original authorship from the historical prophet, with significant later redaction and editing, taking its final form in the second century BCE (two hundred years before Jesus):

27 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. 28 And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.

Ezekiel 36:9

A prophetic text that may include some authentic authorship by the prophet Ezekiel, writing during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE that underwent later revision and composition”

See now, I am for you; I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown

2 Esdras 9:31

A Jewish apocalyptic book written between 70 CE and 200 CE, placing this work within the period of authorship for the gospel accounts.

For I sow my law in you, and it shall bring forth fruit in you, and you shall be glorified through it forever.’

2 Baruch 32:1

An anonymous Jewish text written in the late-first, early-second century, again, within the period of composition of the gospels:

But as for you, if you prepare your hearts, so as to sow in them the fruits of the law, it shall protect you in that time in which the Mighty One is to shake the whole creation. 

1 Clement 24:5

An anonymous (pseudepigraphic) letter written to a group of Christ-followers in Corinth, likely dating to the time of Roman emperor Domitian (81-96 CE), late-first century:

Let us behold the fruits [of the earth], how the sowing of grain takes place. The sower goes forth, and casts it into the ground; and the seed being thus scattered, though dry and naked when it fell upon the earth, is gradually dissolved. Then out of its dissolution the mighty power of the providence of the Lord raises it up again, and from one seed many arise and bring forth fruit.

Conclusion

We’ve done a lot in this post. I’ve presented evidence that we can reliably claim that Jesus taught in parables, that it is a mistake to be too preoccupied with personal salvation at the expense of meaningful engagement with the original setting, that understanding that context is central to understanding Jesus’s instruction, that this engagement with the original setting is difficult but necessary work, and that pursuing an understanding of Jesus as teacher (rabbi, with less focus on “savior”), may help us till the fertile soil of the Jesus movement in the 21st century.

What would it mean to be a follower of Jesus rather than a believer of doctrine? Is this a false choice, or are these distinct pathways? How might we strive toward political transformation for a cosmic justice that is less concerned with personal salvation? What are the parables we can tell to help us realize these aims?