How do we interpret biblical parables?

Question 1162

The parables of Jesus are among the best loved and most quoted parts of the Bible. The lost sheep, the prodigal son, the good Samaritan and the sower have shaped the imagination of believers for two thousand years. Yet for all their familiarity, the parables are often badly handled. People squeeze meanings out of every small detail, or they reduce a rich story to a flat moral lesson, and in doing so they miss what the Lord was actually teaching. Learning to read the parables rightly is one of the most rewarding skills a Christian can gain.

A parable is a story drawn from ordinary life that carries a spiritual truth. The word in Greek is parabolē, which means something laid alongside, the picture of one thing set next to another so that the second is understood through the first. Jesus took the familiar world of farming, fishing, baking and family life and laid it alongside the deep realities of the kingdom of God, so that those with ears to hear would understand.

Why Jesus Taught in Parables

Before we ask how to interpret the parables, we should notice why Jesus used them at all. When his disciples asked him this very question, he gave an answer that surprises many. He said that to them it had been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to others it had not been given, so that seeing they would not see and hearing they would not understand. The parables both revealed and concealed. To the humble heart that wanted to know God, they opened up truth in a memorable and vivid way. To the proud and hardened heart that had already rejected him, they remained a closed story about seeds and fields.

This double purpose tells us something important about how to read them. The parables were never meant to be solved like riddles by clever minds working alone. They were meant to be received by hearts willing to be taught. We come to the parables not as detectives but as disciples, asking the Lord to open our understanding as he opened the understanding of the twelve who sat at his feet.

Look for the Main Point

The single most helpful rule for reading a parable is to look for its main point. Each parable was told to make one central truth land in the heart of the hearer, and the details serve that one truth. When we ask what the parable is chiefly about, we are usually able to find the answer either in the story itself or in the words around it. The parable of the lost sheep is about the joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, and Jesus tells us so plainly at the close. The parable of the persistent widow is about the need to pray and not lose heart, and Luke tells us this at the very start.

Once the main point is found, the rest of the story falls into place around it. The details are the colour and the texture that make the truth vivid and unforgettable, but they are not each carrying a hidden message of their own. When the father in the story of the prodigal runs to meet his returning son and falls on his neck, we are being shown the eager love of God for the sinner who comes home. We are not meant to find a secret meaning in the ring, the robe and the fatted calf, as though each were a code to be cracked.

Parables Are Not Allegories

One of the oldest mistakes in reading the parables is to treat them as allegories in which every part stands for something else. In the early centuries some teachers read the parable of the good Samaritan as a coded account of the whole plan of salvation, where the inn stood for the church, the two coins for the sacraments, and so on. The story became a puzzle box of hidden meanings far removed from anything Jesus actually said. The trouble with this approach is that it makes the meaning depend on the cleverness of the interpreter rather than on the plain intent of the Lord, and it can produce almost any meaning the reader wishes to find.

This does not mean that no parable ever contains explained elements. There are a few parables where Jesus himself tells us what the parts represent. In the parable of the sower he explains that the seed is the word of the kingdom, the path is the hardened heart, and the good soil is the one who hears and understands. In the parable of the weeds he tells us that the field is the world, the good seed are the sons of the kingdom, and the harvest is the end of the age. Where the Lord himself supplies the meaning of the details, we follow him gladly. Where he does not, we should be slow to invent meanings he never gave.

Read in Context and in Culture

The parables were spoken into real situations, and the surrounding context often holds the key to their meaning. The parable of the good Samaritan was told in answer to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself by narrowing the question of who his neighbour was. The parable of the two debtors was told to Simon the Pharisee who despised a weeping woman. When we read the parable alongside the conversation that prompted it, the point becomes clear and we are kept from wandering off into meanings of our own making.

It also helps to understand the world from which Jesus drew his pictures. His hearers knew the shame of a Samaritan being the hero of a story, the scandal of a father running to greet a son who had disgraced the family, and the cost of a shepherd leaving the flock to seek one stray. Some of the force of the parables is lost on us until we feel what the first hearers felt. A little knowledge of the customs and assumptions of that time brings the stories back to life and lets them strike us as they were meant to strike.

Let the Parable Do Its Work

A parable is not only meant to inform the mind but to move the will. Many of the parables end with a turn that catches the hearer and presses for a response. The story of the rich fool who built bigger barns ends with the man losing his soul that very night, and the warning lands on every heart that trusts in possessions. The story of the two builders ends with one house standing and one house falling, and we are left to ask which foundation our own life is built upon. The parables were designed to get past our defences and to confront us when a direct rebuke might have been brushed aside.

This is why the right reading of a parable always ends in self-examination and not only in understanding. Nathan told David a parable of a rich man who stole a poor man’s one little lamb, and when David burned with anger at the injustice, the prophet turned the story upon him with the words, “You are the man.” A parable read rightly will often do the same to us, drawing us in and then showing us our own hearts.

So, now what?

When you come to a parable, slow down and ask what one truth Jesus was teaching, and look at the situation in which he told it. Resist the urge to find a hidden meaning in every detail, and let the main point carry the weight. Where the Lord explains the parts, follow his explanation. Where he is silent, be content to let the story do its work without forcing it.

Above all, do not let the parables remain stories you admire from a safe distance. They were told by the Saviour to change those who heard them, to call sinners home, to warn the careless and to comfort the seeking. Read them as a disciple sitting before your Lord, asking him to open your ears and to press the truth into your heart, so that you do not only understand the parable but are changed by the one who told it.

“This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” Matthew 13:13

For Further Study

For a sound and readable treatment of how to handle the parables, the chapter on parables in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart is a fine starting point. Roy Zuck’s Basic Bible Interpretation gives careful guidance from a conservative and dispensational standpoint, and the older work of G. Campbell Morgan on the parables of Jesus remains warm and faithful to the text.