PARABLES: Do You Get the Point? from Chapter 8 of Fee and Stuart, How To Read the Bible For All It's Worth

 Excerpts below  from Chapter 8 of Fee and Stuart, How To Read the Bible For All It's Worth. Note: full book can be read on PDF HERE

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PARABLES: Do You Get the Point?
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It should be noted at the outset that everything said in the preceding chapter about the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels holds true for the parables. Why then should the parables need a chapter of their own in a book like this? How could these simple, direct little stories Jesus told pose problems for the reader or the interpreter? It seems that one would have to be a dullard of the first rank to miss the point of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. The very reading of these stories pricks the heart or comforts it. Yet a special chapter is necessary because, for all their charm and simplicity, the parables have suffered a fate of misinterpretation in the church second only to the book of Revelation....

...It is this “call for response” nature of the parable that causes our great dilemma in interpreting them. For in some ways to interpret a parable is to destroy what it was originally. It is like interpreting a joke. The whole point of a joke and what makes it funny is that the hearer has immediacy with it as it is being told. It is funny to the hearer precisely because they get “caught,” as it were. How a joke ends is not what one instinctively expects from how it began. But it can only catch someone if they understand the points of reference in the joke. If you have to interpret the joke by explaining the points of reference, it no longer catches the hearer and therefore fails to capture the same quality of laughter. When the joke is interpreted, it can then be understood all right and may still be funny (at least one understands what one should have laughed at), but it ceases to have the same impact. Thus it no longer functions in the same way.

So it is with the parables. They were spoken, and we may assume that most of the hearers had an immediate identification with the points of reference that caused them to catch the point — or be caught by it. For us, however, the parables are in written form. We may or may not immediately catch the points of reference, and therefore they can never function for us in quite the same way they did for the first hearers. But by interpreting we usually are able to understand what they caught, or what we would have caught had we been there. And this is what we must do in our exegesis. The hermeneutical task lies beyond that: How do we recapture the punch of the parables in our own times and our own settings? 

Finding the Points of Reference Let us go back to our analogy of the joke. The two items that capture the hearer of a joke and elicit a response of laughter are the same two that captured the hearers of Jesus’ parables, namely, their knowledge of the points of reference, which in turn caused them to recognize the unexpected turn in the story. The keys to understanding are the points of reference — those various parts of the story with which one automatically identifies as it is being told. If one misses these in a joke, then there can be no unexpected turn, because the points of reference are what create the ordinary expectations. To put it bluntly, an explained joke is no joke at all. Similarly, if one misses the points of reference in a parable, then the force and the point of what Jesus said is likewise going to be missed...

For many of the parables, of course, the audience is given in the Gospels. In such cases the task of interpretation is a combination of three things: (1) sit and listen to the parable again and again, (2) identify the points of reference intended by Jesus that would have been picked up by the original hearers, and (3) try to determine how the original hearers would have identified with the story, and therefore what they would have heard...

Let us try this on two well-known parables: the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25 – 37) and the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11 – 32). In the case of the Good Samaritan, the story is told to an expert in the law who, wanting to justify himself, Luke says, had asked, “And who is my neighbor?” As you read the parable again and again, you will notice that it does not answer the question the way it was asked. But in a more telling way it exposes the smug self-righteousness of the questioner. He knows what the law says about loving one’s neighbor as oneself, and he is ready to define “neighbor” in terms that will demonstrate that he piously obeys the law.

There are really only two points of reference in the story — the man in the ditch and the Samaritan — although other details in the parable help to build the effect. Two items in particular need to be noted: (1) The two who pass by on the other side are priestly types — the religious order that stands over against the rabbis and the Pharisees, who are the experts in the law. (2) Almsgiving to the poor was the Pharisees’ big thing. This was how they loved their neighbors as themselves.

Notice, then, how the teacher of the law is going to get caught by the parable. A man falls into the hands of robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, a common enough event. Two priestly types next go down the road and pass by on the other side. The story is being told from the point of view of the man in the ditch, and the teacher of the law has now been “set up.” Of course, he would think to himself, who could expect anything else from priests? The next person down will be a Pharisee, and he will show himself neighborly by helping the poor chap. But no, it turns out to be a Samaritan! You will have to appreciate how contemptuously the Pharisees held the Samaritans if you are going to hear what he heard. Notice that he is not able even to bring himself to use the word “Samaritan” at the end. This outsider is merely “the one who”!

Do you see what Jesus has done to this man? The second Great Commandment is to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The expert in the law had neat little systems that allowed him to love within limits. What Jesus does is to expose the prejudice and hatred of his heart, and therefore his real lack of obedience to this commandment. “Neighbor” can no longer be defined in limiting terms. His lack of love is not that he will not have helped the man in the ditch but that he hates Samaritans (and looks down on priests). In effect, the parable destroys the question rather than answering it...

...The hermeneutical task posed by the parables is unique. It has to do with the fact that when they were originally spoken, they seldom needed interpretation. They had immediacy for the hearers, inasmuch as part of the effect of many of them was their ability to “catch” the hearer. Yet they come to us in written form and in need of interpretation precisely because we lack the immediate understanding of the points of reference the original hearers had. What, then, do we do? We suggest two things:

1. As always, we concern ourselves basically with the parables in their present biblical contexts. The parables are in a written context, and through the exegetical process just described we can discover their meaning, their point, with a high degree of accuracy.

What we need to do then is what Matthew did (e.g., 18:10 – 14; 20:1 – 16): translate that same point into our own context.

With the story parables one might even try retelling the story in such a way that, with new points of reference, one’s own hearers might feel the anger, or joy, the original hearers experienced. The following version of the Good Samaritan is not defended as inspired! Hopefully it will illustrate a hermeneutical possibility. As an audience it assumes a typical, well-dressed, middle-American Protestant congregation:

A family of disheveled, unkempt individuals was stranded by the side of a major road on a Sunday morning. They were in obvious distress. The mother was sitting on a tattered suitcase, hair uncombed, clothes in disarray, with a glazed look to her eyes, holding a smelly, poorly clad, crying baby. The father was unshaved, dressed in coveralls, a look of despair on his face as he tried to corral two other youngsters. Beside them was a run-down old car that had obviously just given up the ghost. 

Down the road came a car driven by the local bishop; he was on his way to church. And though the father of the family waved frantically, the bishop could not hold up his parishioners, so he acted as though he didn’t see them. 

Soon came another car and again the father waved furiously. But the car was driven by the president of the Kiwanis Club, and he was late for a statewide meeting of Kiwanis presidents in a nearby city. He, too, acted as though he did not see them and kept his eyes straight on the road ahead of him. 

The next car that came by was driven by an outspoken local atheist, who had never been to church in his life. When he saw the family’s distress, he took them into his own car. After inquiring as to their need, he took them to a local motel, where he paid for a week’s lodging while the father found work. He also paid for the father to rent a car so he could look for work and gave the mother cash for food and new clothes.

 One of the authors presented this story once. The startled and angry response made it clear that his hearers had really “heard” the parable for the first time in their lives. You will notice how true to the original context this is. The evangelical Protestant was thinking, of course, about the bishop and the Kiwanis president. Then, surely one of my own will be next. After all, we have always talked about the Good Samaritan as though Samaritans were the most respected of people. But nothing would be more offensive to the good churchgoer than to praise the actions of an atheist, which, of course, is precisely where the expert in the law was at the original telling.

 This may be a bit strong for some, and we insist that you make sure you have done your exegesis with great care before you try it. But our experience is that most of us are a bit high on ourselves, and the retelling of some of Jesus’ parables would help to get at our own lack of forgiveness (Matt 18:23 – 35), or our own anger at grace when we want God to be “fair” (Matt 20:1 – 6), or our pride in our own position in Christ as compared to the “bad guys” (Luke 18:9 – 14). We did not know whether to laugh or cry when we were told of a Sunday school teacher who, after an hour of excellent instruction on this latter parable in which he had thoroughly explained the abuses of Pharisaism, concluded in prayer — in all seriousness: “Thank you, Lord, that we are not like the Pharisee in this story”! And we had to remind each other not to laugh too hard, lest our laughter be saying, “Thank you, Lord, that we are not like that Sunday school teacher.”

2. Our other hermeneutical suggestion is related to the fact that all of Jesus’ parables are in some way vehicles that proclaim the kingdom. Hence it is necessary for you to immerse yourself in the meaning of the kingdom in the ministry of Jesus. In this regard we highly recommend that you read George E. Ladd’s The Presence of the Future (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).

 The urgent message of the kingdom as present and soon to be consummated is still needed in our own day. Those who are trying to secure their lives by possessions urgently need to hear the word of impending judgment, and the lost desperately need to hear the Good News. Joachim Jeremias eloquently put it this way (Rediscovering the Parables [New York: Scribner, 1966], p. 181):

 The hour of fulfillment has come; that is the keynote of them all. The strong man is disarmed, the powers of evil have to yield, the physician has come to the sick, the lepers are cleansed, the heavy burden of guilt is removed, the lost sheep is brought home, the door of the Father’s house is opened, the poor and the beggars are summoned to the banquet, a master whose kindness is undeserved pays wages in full, a great joy fills all hearts. God’s acceptable year has come. For there has appeared the one whose veiled majesty shines through every word and every parable — the Saviour.