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  THE MESSAGE OF THE PARABLES
  by Joseph F. Mcfadyen
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McFadyen's comprehensive study of Jesus's parables including the Sower, the
Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Talents, and many others, analyzing
Christ's teaching methods and the spiritual truths communicated through these
stories.

  Chapters: 36

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 000 - Preface
    2. 0000 - Content
    3. 01 - Chapter 01
    4. 02 - Chapter 02
    5. 03 - Chapter 03
    6. 04 - Chapter 04
    7. 05 - Chapter 05
    8. 06 - Chapter 06
    9. 07 - Chapter 07
   10. 08 - Chapter 08
   11. 09 - Chapter 09
   12. 10 - Chapter 10
   13. 11 - Chapter 11
   14. 12 - Chapter 12
   15. 13 - Chapter 13
   16. 14 - Chapter 14
   17. 15 - Chapter 15
   18. 16 - Chapter 16
   19. 17 - Chapter 17
   20. 18 - Chapter 18
   21. 19 - Chapter 19
   22. 20 - Chapter 20
   23. 21 - Chapter 21
   24. 22 - Chapter 22
   25. 23 - Chapter 23
   26. 24 - Chapter 24
   27. 25 - Chapter 25
   28. 26 - Chapter 26
   29. 27 - Chapter 27
   30. 28 - Chapter 28
   31. 29 - Chapter 29
   32. 30 - Chapter 30
   33. 31 - Chapter 31
   34. 32 - Chapter 32
   35. 33 - Chapter 33
   36. 34 - Literature

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  CHAPTER 1: 000 - PREFACE
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To MY BROTHER, JOHN EDGAR

’There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, And there is a brother
that sticketh closer than a friend.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

PREFACE THE Bruce Lectureship, the object of which is to foster a love of New
Testament study, was founded in memory of Professor A. B. Bruce, of the Free
Church College, Glasgow, whose exegetical work on the New Testament, especially
on the Gospels, has been an inspiration to many, far beyond the bounds of his
class-room, of his Church, or of his country. One of the bestknown works of
Professor Bruce is ’ The Parabolic Teaching of Christ.” The author chose as the
subject of his Bruce Lectures ’ The Teaching Methods of Jesus with Special
Reference to the Parable.” The lectures as delivered have now been revised, and
enlarged by the addition of an exposition of the individual parables. The author
tenders grateful thanks to the editors of The Speaker’s ’Bible for permission to
use, in abbreviated form, his contribution on “ The Prodigal Son,” and to the
editors of The Expository Times for permission to use, in abbreviated form, his
contribution on; The Unjust Steward’ in the number for September, 1926; also to
his wife for help in correcting the proofsheets.

J. F. McFADYEN.

Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire.


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  CHAPTER 2: 0000 - CONTENT
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CONTENTS I. The Teaching Methods of Jesus II. The Teaching Methods of Jesus III.
The Parable as Secret Teaching IV. The Parable as Allegory V. Parable
Interpretation VI. General View of the Parables VII. Questions Raised by the
Parables

VIII. The Sower IX. The Darnel Among the Wheat X. The Great Supper XI. The Man
Without the Wedding Garment XII. The Wicked Vinedressers XIII. The Barren
Fig-Tree XIV. The Hidden Treasure and the Pearl XV. The Mustard Seed XVI. The
Seed Growing of Itself XVII. The Leaven XVIII. The Fishing Net XIX. Tthe Lost
Sheep and the Lost Coin XX. The Pharisee and the Publican XXI. The Prodigal Son
XXII. The Two Debtors XXIII. The Unforgiving Creditor XXIV. Tower and the
Threatened King XXV. Rich Man and Lazarus XXVI. Good Samaritan XXVII. Rich Fool
XXVIII. Talents and the Pounds XXIX. Unjust Steward XXX. Workers in the Vineyard
XXXI. Midnight Petitioner XXXII. Importunate Widow XXXIII. Bridesmaids

Literature


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  CHAPTER 3: 01 - CHAPTER 01
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CHAPTER I THE TEACHING METHODS OF JESUS THE parables of Jesus are among God’s
best gifts to men; yet men have treated them as perversely as they have treated
so many other precious gifts of God. For long periods these pictorial
sermonettes of Tesus have been to the Church little better than insoluble
riddles. It has almost seemed as if the Church had been bent on fulfilling the
purpose of parable teaching ascribed to Jesus in Mark’s Gospel: “ that seeing
they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand.”
The parables of Jesus are only part of his teaching, and the parabolic method is
only one of his teaching methods. There has been a very great deal of
misunderstanding of the teaching of Jesus through failure to appreciate the
pedagogic methods he adopted. It is curious that until quite lately
comparatively little attention seems to have been given to this most interesting
and important subject. So far as the writer knows, the first systematic attempt
to study, on a scale of any magnitude, the teaching of Jesus from the teacher’s
point of view was Jesus the Master Teacher by H. H. Home, a book to which this
chapter is deeply indebted. As a teacher, Jesus had certain handicaps, or what
in others would have been handicaps. He suffered from all the prejudice that a
Galilean upbringing would arouse in the minds at least of the dwellers in the
capital; not the least part of this being due, if modern experience is any
guide, to his provincial accent. Apparently he had no professional training. He
wrote nothing, nor is there any certainty that during his ministry notes were
taken either of his formal teaching or of his table talk.

Yet, meagre as the records are in point of bulk, there is no reason to doubt
that they include everything that is essential, and little reason to hope or
fear that any new discoveries that may be made will vitally change in any
respect our conception of the Gospel of Jesus. The effectiveness of Jesus’
teaching methods is witnessed by this, that after nineteen hundred years, after
it has seemed again and again as if the influence of the Gospel of Jesus were
languishing to the point of collapse, not only are there more professing
Christians in the world to-day than ever before, but never has there been an
effort, so wide-spread and so determined, to understand the message of Jesus. In
the non-Christian world never has the name of Jesus been more deeply reverenced.
The popular apologetic of Hinduism, for example, largely takes the form of an
attempt to show that there is no essential difference between Hinduism and
Christianity; and in India increasingly it is the Christian standard by which
all character is judged and all progress tested.

We are accustomed to think of Jesus as instinctively lighting on the most
fitting methods of teaching. This is part of our inheritance from a traditional
theology which, with exaggerated reverence, surrounded him with a halo of
impenetrable mystery. But a close study of the records reveals him as such a
master of pedagogy that it is surely more natural to think of him as carefully
pondering the subject in the long and silent years of preparation,

If Jesus had certain handicaps as a teacher, he also had certain natural
advantages. As the eldest son in a large family, he had a thorough knowledge of
children and of young men and women before he began his work as a teacher. The
marvellous simplicity of his language was learned in daily conversation with his
younger brothers and sisters, in which simplicity was the necessary condition of
being understood. The use he makes of metaphors from the family, his thought of
God as Father, of those who do God’s will as a great brotherhood and sisterhood,
were no doubt the flower of a happy home life. His genius for story-telling
would find plenty of scope in the family circle; and his unfailing championship
of women, springing from the chivalry of his own nature, had been his daily
practice in his relations with his mother and his sisters, before it was
revealed in his public ministry and became the great humanising influence it is
to-day.

Further, he had long experience of village life. For the work of Jesus it was
essential that he should know human nature, in its depth as well as in its
breadth, know it in its nooks and crannies as well as in its open spaces. In
villages men know each other with an intimacy which is hardly possible in the
crowded, self-centred life of the town. The town-dweller has acquaintance with
men; the villager knows men.

One of his great assets as a teacher was that he obviously loved teaching. There
are those who teach because they cannot help teaching, because it is essential
to their happiness that all around them should share whatever knowledge they
possess, whatever accomplishments they have acquired. Watch a crowd of bathers
in the sea on a summer dav. There are those who have no thought but to get as
much enjoyment as possible out of their exercise and to exhibit their aquatic
prowess; but here and there is one who looks round to see if there is any
unfortunate who cannot swim and who gives up his own pleasure till the beginner
can share it. Is not this just one form of unselfishness? In every aspect of his
life Jesus was the Giver, not least in this, that he imparted richly of his
knowledge. There is a certain type of person in whom the sight of a crowd rouses
no feeling but contempt and the desire to say smart things at their expense.
When Jesus saw the multitude, he wanted to shepherd and to teach them. If at any
time he shrank from contact with the crowd, it was only that later he might
reach them more effectively.

We do not always fully realise the extent to which modern pedagogical science
follows the teaching methods practised by Jesus. His use of the Old Testament,
for example of the passages from Deuteronomy that he quotes at the Temptation,
is a lesson in the proper use of memorising, in the distinction between learning
by rote and learning by heart. (Deu 8:3; Deu 6:16; Deu 6:13.) New Testament
writers are frequently satisfied if the words of a quotation are relevant: in
our Lord’s quotations the sense is also relevant.

Jesus insisted as much as any modern teacher on the importance of each person
learning to think for himself or herself. “ He that hath ears to hear, let him
hear: ’ that is what ears were meant for. Most of us use our ears, not to listen
to what we do hear, but to hear what we expect to hear. ’ Have you never read? ’
he asks (Mark 2:25), read with your understanding as well as with your eyes? The
passage is one which shows how our Lord read with his mind. If Scripture had
been silent on the subject, it would have been interesting to conjecture what
aspects of the career of David would have most interested our Lord. In the
Gospel records the only incident in the life of David to which Jesus refers is
that in which David showed his capacity for original and truly religious
thinking, his realisation that the claims of humanity come before those of
ceremonial.

Conventionality was the vice of the priest and the Levite in the parable, as it
was also of the five thoughtless bridesmaids who would not enter the marriage
procession without the conventional torch.

Jesus acted on the principle that the highest truths of all, men must find out,
each for himself. In Mark’s Gospel Peter’s confession of the Messiahship of
Jesus is the climax to which the earlier part of the story has been leading up.
As Professor Bradley says of the forest of Arden, Shakespeare gives no hint of
the way thither. If we are ever to find it, each must find it for himself. But
there are other truths that can be imparted; and so in Mark, when the disciples
have learnt that Jesus is the Christ, he immediately begins to correct their
conception of the nature of Messiahship. Ascertained truth is made a
stepping-stone to the acquisition of new truth.

Jesus distinguished between preaching and teaching. Some of the greatest pulpit
ministries of the last generation took the form of systematic exposition of
books of the Bible. In our day desultory preaching on casual themes has so
largely usurped the place of regular and continuous teaching as to explain much
of the prevalent ignorance of the Bible and of the nature of the Christian
religion.

Jesus adapted his language to his audience. In this he stands in marked contrast
to the apostle Paul, who did not fully appreciate the importance of lucidity as
a Christian grace.

Dr. Denney once warned his students that the Christian preacher is apt to
underestimate the capacity of a congregation to understand his thought, to
overestimate their capacity to understand his language. Very few of us are
likely to have thoughts which will take an average congregation out of its
depth; many of us are likely to have certain words in our vocabulary which, at
least to a section of our audience, will be in an unknown tongue. The thought of
Jesus is of fathomless profundity, his language is simplicity itself. The points
he makes are all points that are worth making. Nothing he said would be liable
to the criticism one has heard of a sermon that “ it is a good road, but does
not lead anywhere.” Our Lord made constant and effective use of the principle of
contrast, the principle that a learner does not really know a thing until he
knows what is excluded as well as what is included. In a significant passage he
contrasts his own healthy acceptance of the world of men and things with the
Baptist’s ascetic fear of the world.

(Mat 18:11 ff.) At the end of Mat 25:1-46 he elaborates the contrast between
those on the right hand and those on the left. The picture of the son who
repented of his disobedience is supplemented by the picture of the son who
repented of his obedience. The Pharisee stands out in relief against the
tax-collector, the good shepherd against the thief, the faithful shepherd
against the hireling, the elder brother against both the father and the younger
brother. The man with the one talent is placed against the background of the man
with the five and the man with the two talents. The story of the crops that
failed is supplemented by the story of the abundant harvest. The folly of the
five careless bridesmaids becomes all the more reprehensible when they are
placed beside the five thoughtful companions who looked ahead.

Jesus’ whole life was a commentary on the theme: ’ Other men have said... but I
say unto you.” A principle of scientific teaching is to reach the unfamiliar
through the familiar. Every preacher is conscious of the often astonishing
impression made on an audience by a reference to a familiar even if unimportant
fact or incident of their everyday life. The parables of Jesus are the classic
example of the marvellous effect with which this principle may be employed in
teaching. In his teaching Jesus made large use of the question method. A teacher
should be * an animated question point.” Jesus asked questions to stimulate
thought. “ What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he? ’ “ Who do men
say that I am? ’ A striking example of this method occurs in the passage (Mat
11:7 ff.) in which Jesus asks the crowds to reflect on the drawing power of the
Baptist. It illustrates not merely the pedagogical principle of teaching by
asking suggestive questions, but also the method of elimination, of reaching the
right answer by first discussing various possible alternatives.

Jesus led the people to the discovery that they flocked to hear John’s preaching
because he was a rock-like man and an ascetic; but most of all because he was a
prophet with a message straight from the heart of God.

Jesus, again, asked questions to guide inquirers in answering their own
questions: on the keeping of the Sabbath: You hypocrites, does not each of you
on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, lead it off and water
it?’ (Luk 13:15); on the question of passive resistance to the foreign and
heathen ruler: ’ Whose are this image and superscription? ’ (Mat 22:20); on the
limits of the claims of neighbourliness: ’ Which of these do you suppose showed
himself neighbour of him who fell among the robbers? “ (Luk 10:36); on the duty
of his followers to pay the temple-tax: ’ What do you think, Simon? From whom do
earthly kings take customs or tax: from their own children or from foreigners?”

(Mat 18:25); on the source of his own authority: ’ I too will put a question to
you.

What about the baptism of John: was it a purely human institution, or had it
divine sanction? ’ (Mat 11:24 f.) Nor was this last a ’ catch ’ question; Jesus
did not ask ’catch” questions: it was Jesus’ contribution towards an answer to a
question that still vexes men’s minds, the seat of authority in religion.


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  CHAPTER 4: 02 - CHAPTER 02
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CHAPTER II THE TEACHING METHODS OF JESUS (continued} JESUS discouraged foolish
questions. ’ Lord, are there few that be saved? “ (Luk 13:23).

Jesus’ answer is apposite to many of the futile speculations which occupy the
time and energy of multitudes in our day, and have become in some parts of the
world a formidable menace to the effectiveness of the Church: the possibility of
communication with the dead, the date and manner of the Second Coming, the
proper day of the week for the public worship of God, the whereabouts of the “
lost ten tribes.” “ We are living,” says Jesus in effect, “ in a serious world
where only strenuous work and the grace of God can save anybody.” Our Lord was
practising one of the great principles of pedagogy when he varied his methods to
suit individual cases. He did this in all his intercourse with men, in the
healing ministry for example. The ostracised leper he touches; to the despairing
paralytic his words are: ’ Courage, child; ’ the prostrate daughter of Jairus he
takes by the hand. His methods of dealing with potential disciples are well
illustrated by the passage Luk 9:57-62. The man who has a dilettante interest in
the Gospel but has never counted the cost is reminded that there is a kind of
intellectual enthusiasm even for Jesus which is speedily disillusioned by the
stern experiences of actual discipleship. To the man who will come by-and-by,
who will follow “ when the old man dies,” Jesus urges that now, while
discipleship is still a living force, is the time to preach to the living men
who are dying for want of the good news; as in war, the living and the dying
come before the dead. The ploughman who tries to face both ways gets the message
that straight furrows are not made in that way. The Gospel records preserve
traces of the way in which Jesus used the personal name, sometimes repeating it
with peculiar impressiveness.

“ Simon, I have somewhat to say unto you ’ (Luk 7:40). “ Martha, Martha, you are
anxious and worried about many things ’ (Luk 10:41). ’ Simon, Simon, lo! Satan’s
prayer has been granted that he might sift you all like wheat” (Luk 22:31).
Three verses later, as Plummer has pointed out, Jesus, for the only time in the
Gospel records, addresses Simon by the name he had himself given him, Peter, the
Rock, to remind him how far he was falling from his rock-like character. In the
fourth Gospel, on the resurrection morning, when Mary was in despair because
they had taken away her Lord and she did not know where they had placed him, it
was the sound of her name, in the same accents as had pronounced it once before
on a well-remembered day, that roused her to the consciousness that she was in
the presence of the Master. “ Jesus saith to her * Mary ’ (John 20:16). The
educational system in the public schools of Great Britain has made wide use of
the educational value of personal intercourse between pupil and pupil, between
pupil and teacher. In recent years the Church in her foreign work has made large
and increasing use of this factor in education. Everywhere we see residential
colleges, hostels, and boarding-schools being founded or developed. In this we
are only rediscovering one of the teaching methods of Jesus. Mark tells us that
the first object of the call of the twelve was “ that they might be with him ’
(Mark 3:14); that in daily and hourly intercourse with him they might absorb
something of his spirit, something of his thought of God and of men, of the
things and events of life.

Much of the impressiveness of Jesus as a teacher lay in his manner: his way of
speech, his gestures, his look, his whole appearance.

We have seen the effect produced by the repetition of the name of the person he
was addressing, “ Simon, Simon,” “ Martha, Martha.” His use of the repeated “
Verily ’ to introduce some memorable saying was so characteristic that
apparently the early Church felt it must be reserved for him alone. When he
looked on Peter after the cock-crowing, we gather that the memory of that look
haunted Peter long years afterwards. His thanksgiving at the time of the feeding
of the multitude was so unforgettable that, generations after the event, the
scene of it was described as “ the place where they had eaten bread after the
Lord had given thanks ’ (John 6:23). When he spoke in the synagogue at Nazareth,
he had the congregation spell-bound before he began. Something in the occasion,
his appearance and manner, the reputation he had already acquired, the passage
he read, his opening sentence, the closing of the book with its halfunderstood
significance, all contributed to the atmosphere of expectancy which is one of
the preacher’s greatest assets.

One characteristic of educational work to-day is the extent to which, where
climatic conditions permit, it is conducted in the open air. Might we not have
guessed, even if we had never been told, that much of the teaching of Jesus,
with its breezy freshness, its contact with reality and its sense of the divine,
its big views and far horizons, w’T as given by the lake-side and in the field;
that some of the most characteristic teaching was given on a hill, a hill where
one breathes the pure air of God and sees things in their perspective, the big
things in all their bigness, the little things in all their littleness? Our Lord
made the disciples collaborate in the work. At the feeding of the five thousand
it is one of the disciples who discovers a possible source of supplies. The
disciples count and arrange the people, distribute the food and gather up the
fragments. They are expected to carry on their Master’s work (Luke x. i6ff.) and
even to rise to achievements impossible within the limitations of his earthly
life (John 14:12). The teacher crowns his work by handing on the torch to his
disciples. From Jesus, again, we learn the place of the common table in
education. In India the common meal is one of the bonds of the caste, and this
is only an extreme example of the sacred relations which so many people have
understood to exist among those who have eaten together.

Until lately one of the difficulties of establishing friendly social relations
between Indians and Europeans was that caste regulations forbade the Hindu to
eat with the foreigner. In many cases he would take from the hands of the “
unclean ’ European only those kinds of fruit which have a thick rind, as in that
case the defilement was confined to the rind, which is thrown away. To partake
of a common meal is to establish an intimacy not easily reached by any other
means. Some of Jesus’ most memorable teaching was given at feasts, and the last
meal which he shared with his disciples obtained a significance for all time.

Jesus did not regard his work as finished till his pupils understood (Matt,
18:51). ’ Have you understood all these things? ’ ’ They say to him ’ Yes.’ “

One of the tests of a successful educational institution is the extent to which
esprit decorps is established among the pupils. ’ The twelve ’ was something
more than a title. Whatever jealousies and rivalries there may have been among
them, “ the twelve “ were a brotherhood with a common spirit. The camaraderie of
the pupils had its source and life in their common devotion to the teacher.
“.Lord, to whom else shall we go? Thou hast words of eternal life.” Their
enthusiasm was for the teacher even more than for the teaching; or rather the
two were inseparable. Every record we have of the ministry shows us Jesus not
only leading men to God, but leading them to God through him. In one important
point the attitude of Jesus to study was poles apart from that of the modern
educationalist. No maxim is now more persistently inculcated on the student than
that he must approach every subject in a scientific spirit, which is understood
to mean, among other things, without bias or presuppositions of any kind. With
regard to the biggest things in life, it seems clear that Jesus would hardly
have understood what this demand meant. To him the whole world is God’s world;
men are God’s children.

One does not approach without presuppositions the question of his father’s
existence or of his mother’s character. Nor does one reach judgments on such
questions by conscious reasoning.

We cannot even imagine Jesus facing theological questions in what is now known
as the scientific spirit. To Jesus all study has but one end and aim, what it
can tell us about God. The birds, the flowers, the rain, the sunshine, what we
call accidents and disasters, the physical constitution and needs of man: there
are many points of view from which we can study them; but to Jesus they all tell
the same story of the love and the care and the large-heartedness of God.

It is a reasonable inference from the records of his ministry that Jesus would
have attached high importance to the training of the emotions. His indignation
is repeatedly recorded, excited by official misrepresentation of God’s love and
goodness and God’s desire for the welfare and happiness of his children: in the
matter of the Sabbath for example. In the story of the ten lepers he gives a
lesson on gratitude. Our Lord knew that generous emotion which does not issue in
generous action is not only negatively valueless, but is positively hurtful.

One has read of Russian ladies in the theatres of St. Petersburg weeping over
the fictitious sorrows of a stage heroine while their own coachmen were freezing
to death outside. After leading the lawyer to sympathize with the Samaritan’s
treatment of the wounded traveller, Jesus added the admonition: “ Go, and do you
likewise.” The last of Jesus’ teaching methods to which it seems necessary to
refer is his habitual use of figurative language. 1 The Western mind has a 1
This is discussed in the author’s Jesus and Luk 6:1-49. conviction which seems
ineradicable that metaphorical language is less “ true ’ than the language of
prose; but abstract language is ’ abstracted “ from the truth of things.
Figurative language is at least suggestive of the truth, presents the truth not
merely more vividly but more fully and therefore more accurately.

One of the tasks before the preacher of to-day is to convince men that the
sayings of Jesus do not cease to have a meaning the moment they are understood
to be figurative. The fires of Gehenna, which seemed to Jesus fit emblem of the
torture of a lost soul, forfeit all their terrors for most the moment they are
seen to be spiritual fires.


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  CHAPTER 5: 03 - CHAPTER 03
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CHAPTER III THE PARABLE AS SECRET TEACHING

IT is in the study of the parables that we reach the heart of the subject of the
teaching methods of Jesus. There are various reasons why the parables must
always occupy a large place in any study of the mind of Jesus. For one thing,
they are perhaps the longest connected utterances of Jesus that we possess.

If other sections of the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels reproduce continuous
discourses or parts of discourses, at least we can feel no certainty of the
fact. The more we study the formal instruction of Jesus, the more doubtful we
become whether we can ever, in any considerable number of cases, know the
historical context.

Again, in the parables we find embodied an essential part of our Lord’s
teaching. Our conception of his message would have been greatly impoverished if
we had been deprived of the parables. Moreover, while the parable was no new
thing among Jewish teachers, Jesus made it peculiarly his own. The early Church
seems to have felt instinctively that the parable was a method of teaching
sacred to Jesus, a province on which no other was to intrude.

Further, in the parables, we have the advantage, not only of the direct teaching
of Jesus, but also of the indirect insight into his mind that we get by noting
the themes he chose to illustrate, the spheres of life from which he drew his
illustrations, the language he uses and the way in which he tells the story. As
for the influence of the parables it is not too much to say that some of them
are better known, and are inspiring more men and women to noble endeavour, than
almost any other sayings of Jesus. The lasting and universal appeal made by the
parables as a body of teaching is the best witness to the wisdom of our Lord in
adopting this method of teaching, and the strongest claim on our continual study
of them. In our study of the parables our generation has some advantages over
our predecessors. In the last half century much work has been done on the Jewish
use of the parable and on the history of the interpretation of the parables.

It is, however, from the department of New Testament criticism that our chief
gain has been obtained. When there are two, or, as in some cases, three versions
of the same parable, we know that that sometimes means, and sometimes does not
mean, that the Gospel writers had two or more independent accounts of it. When
there are divergencies between the accounts, we can sometimes explain how these
arose. In our interpretation of a parable, we no longer feel bound by the
literary context in which we find it, nor altogether by the explanation of it
given by the Gospel writer. If there are expressions in a parable that seem
repugnant to the life and the general teaching of Jesus, we consider the
possibility that these may have come, not from Jesus but from the Church. In
particular we feel ourselves at liberty to use our own judgment about the object
of the use of the parable method which Mark ascribes to Jesus. The question why
Jesus employed the parabolic method might seem hardly worth raising were it not
for the curious passage, Mark 4:10-12 (and the parallels, Mat 13:10-15 and Luk
8:9-10), in which it seems to be suggested that Jesus spoke in parables that he
might conceal from the crowd the truths of the Kingdom that were revealed to the
disciple circle. 1

Apparently this section of Mark early became a puzzle to the Church. Mark
himself a few verses later gives the same explanation of the parable method as
we should now give, namely that Jesus was adapting his teaching methods to the
capacity, spiritual and intellectual, of his hearers (Mark 4:33). Matthew gives
a turn to the words which makes them mean that Jesus uses figurative language
because the multitude is unable to understand spiritual truth conveyed in plain
prose (Mat 13:13); while he alone of the three evangelists makes it clear that
the saying is taken from Isaiah.

Yet the fact that the Gospel writers represent 1 This question is discussed in
the author’s Jesus and Life, pp. 62 ff. the disciples as being puzzled and
surprised when Jesus began to speak in parables, as inquiring why he adopted
this method of teaching, suggests that when the Gospels were written there was
much discussion about the meaning of at least some of the parables, and possibly
that there was unwillingness in some quarters to accept the official
interpretation. We note also that in the fourth Gospel, which is believed to be
the latest of the four, the persistent misunderstanding of the figurative
language of Jesus is one of the leading motives of the book.

’ Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up “ (John 2:19); ’ You
must be born from above” (John 3:7);; The living bread which has come down from
heaven “ (John 6:51); Abraham’s exultation at seeing the day of Jesus (John
8:56); “ Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep “ (John 11:11); these are only a
few examples out of many.

It seems a reasonable inference that there was an early Christian tradition that
Jesus used figurative language which not only was liable to be misunderstood,
but which, in its deeper and more significant application, was intended to be
misunderstood by those outside the immediate circle of the disciples; and that,
by the time the fourth Gospel came to be written, the idea had crystallized
until we see Jesus perpetually puzzling his hearers with phrases of double
significance, of which, as a penalty for their spiritual obtuseness, they fail
to comprehend the true significance. Light had come into the world, but the
darkness that was in them prevented them from opening their eyes to the light.

How did this curious idea arise? It is sometimes said that in the time of Christ
the parable, under the influence of the scribes, had become an enigma. Buzy,
however, writing in reply to hilicher and Loisy, after a somewhat thorough study
of the question, denies this. There was no mystery element in the Old Testament
parables; there was no mystery element in the Rabbinic parables of the end of
the first Christian century; there is no good reason to suppose that in the
interval the parable changed its nature; all through its course, it was a method
of teaching, not of mystifying. Yet somehow the idea arose that some at least of
the parables of Jesus were meant to conceal from most the truth they revealed to
a chosen few.

While the subject is one of which comparatively little is known, it is
reasonable to suppose that some of the leading ideas of the ’ Mystery ’
religions had become common property. One of these ideas was that of a circle of
initiates to whom alone was revealed the inner meaning of the ceremonies of the
cult, while this was concealed from the outsiders. The actual phrase, “ the
outsiders,” is used in Mark’s Gospel in the discussion about the object of the
parables (John 4:11).

Further, the tradition was that Jesus, not only once, but several times, in
connection with the parables used the phrase: ’ He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear.” This would suggest that the meaning of much that he said did not lie
on the surface.

Moreover, in the Synoptic tradition, the parable of the Sower occupies a
position of special importance. It is round it that the discussion of the object
of the parabolic method centres. But the parable of the Sower was of special
interest to teachers and evangelists, since it analyses the conditions of
successful propaganda and points to various causes of failure. Nor is this the
only parable of which it may be said that it is of far more importance to the
leaders of the movement than to the general body of hearers or even to the rank
and file of the followers of Jesus. In the case of these parables Jesus would
naturally take special care that those who were to be leaders should understand.

Thus the idea might seem to receive authoritative sanction that there was an
inner circle of instructed “ initiates,” while the “ outer “ circles saw, and
were meant to see, without perceiving; heard, and were meant to hear, without
understanding.

Certain facts would help to strengthen the idea that in the teaching of Jesus
there was much that was deliberately enigmatic. The tradition was that Jesus had
foretold his death and resurrection, and that the disciples had failed to take
in the message. Further, we have abundant evidence in the New Testament, not
least in Paul’s epistles, that the early Church expected the speedy return of
the Master in bodily form. They must have thought they got the idea from Jesus
himself, yet their expectations were disappointed. What explanation of these
misunderstandings could be more natural and more satisfactory than that the
words of Jesus contained a deeper meaning than appeared on the surface? Special
importance would then be attached to certain parables (such as the Talents and
the Ten Bridesmaids) which spoke of the departure of the central figure and his
return after a long delay. These parables would then be interpreted of the
Second Coming.

Yet, while the suggestion that Jesus was deliberately trying to obscure his
meaning for any section of his hearers is fantastic, this need not blind us to
the element of truth in Mark’s theory. We to-day are familiar with the dictum
that our Lord’s teaching was sometimes beyond the comprehension of those who
reported it for us. It may well be that even in the first two Christian
generations, the idea had dawned that there was a deeper significance in some of
the sayings of Jesus than was recognized by those who handed down the tradition.
In this connection, there is a striking remark by Dr. Baudert in an article on
Zinzendorf, ’ Zinzendorf shares with other great men the fate that his ideas,
which were far ahead of his age, were understood by few during his lifetime, and
were completely neglected for decades after his death. Partly also they were
purposely concealed because people were afraid of their boldness and shrank from
drawing the logical conclusions arising out of them.” 1 Our Lord must have been
well aware that much of his teaching was falling on deaf ears; and it was
natural that, before very long, some of his followers with a high conception of
his person should believe and teach that his failure to impress, where he did
fail, was not only foreseen but intended.

Further, one can hardly help noticing how many of the parables may be
interpreted as teaching a practical moral lesson, while they are susceptible
also of a deeper spiritual interpretation. The Barren Fig Tree has usually been
regarded as typifying the spiritually dead Jewish people, or at least their
leaders. Yet so recent an interpreter as Mr. J. Cyril Flower gives a more
ethical, and less distinctly religious flavour to the parable by taking the tree
to represent any institution worth cherishing. ’ What we need in Europe and all
the world to-day is not the people who can only hew down corrupt trees.

We want gardeners who know how to cultivate good ones truly and well.” 1 Very
many preachers to-day would expound the Talents as inculcating the dedication to
God of all one’s endowments, physical, intellectual, social. Indeed it is in
this sense that the word ’ ’ talents ’ ’ has passed into the English language.
Yet, from the 1 International Review of Missions, July, 1932.

2 The Parables of Jesus Applied to Modern Life, p. 19. position in which Matthew
places the parable, it seems clear that he believed it had a reference to the
Last Judgment, probable that he interpreted the talents as spiritual gifts. The
parable of the Ten Bridesmaids has on the face of it the practical lesson that
the best excuse for being late is never quite the same as being in time, that
the most specious explanation of a neglected duty is never so satisfactory as
the performance of the duty, that the most convincing apology for absence is a
poor apology for presence. Are we to say that those are wrong who find in the
picture something of more consequence than a rustic wedding, in the midnight cry
a more thrilling announcement than the coming of the peasant bridegroom, and in
the fate of the five luckless ones something more tragic than exclusion from
village festivities? The Prodigal Son would have been a story abundantly worth
telling if it had been meant to illustrate nothing more than the quenchless love
of a father for a wayward son and his infinite readiness to welcome the first
sign of repentance; yet the Church from the beginning has believed that our Lord
meant that our thoughts should be carried up to the heavenly Father. On the
other hand, in the case of the Good Samaritan, while the theological
interpretation long held the field, we now believe that Luke is right in saying
that the parable was Jesus’ answer to the question: ’ Who is my neighbour? ’
That need not prevent us realizing that, as an exposition of neighbourly
conduct, the story owes all its force to the knowledge that he who told it was
the Prince of Good Samaritans. In connection with the whole question of the
interpretation of the parables there is a significant section in Luk 14:1-35. In
Luk 14:12 ff. Jesus tells one of his hosts, when he gives a dinner or supper,
not to invite his friends or brothers or relatives or rich neighbours. The
reason is that they may invite him in return, and then the dinner, instead of an
exercise in hospitality, will become a business proposition, a mere matter of
give and take. The only feast God recognizes as given in his name is one at
which the invited guests are “ The poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind; ’
those who, it is quite certain, cannot repay in kind. In Luke’s account Jesus
immediately proceeds to tell the parable of the Great Supper to which the host
invited his rich friends and neighbours. When they refused to come, he invited “
the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame; ’ exactly the same phrases, though in
a slightly different order.

It is clear, then, that by the time Luke wrote, there were two versions of this
saying of Jesus. In one version he gives the advice, meant to be taken quite
literally, that there is far more true religion in entertaining outcasts who can
never return our hospitality, than in those social junketings in which a man is
alternately host and guest. In the other form, which immediately succeeds in
Luke’s narrative, the piece of practical advice has become a parable: the host
is obviously God, the blind and the lame are invited, not on principle but
because the well-to-do guests for whom the feast was intended refused to come.
In view of all this, the suggestion is worth considering that, at least in the
case of some parables, Jesus intentionally adopted a form of story which was
capable of a double line of interpretation; of what, for want of better terms,
we may call a lower and a higher interpretation. This view, put forth in the
sixteenth century by Salmeron, 1 deserves more attention than it has received,
in spite of the ludicrous ways in which Salmeron himself applied it.

1 hilicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, 1:171.


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CHAPTER IV THE PARABLE AS ALLEGORY As the result of nearly nineteen hundred
years of parable study, we can now say with confidence that certain popular
methods of parable interpretation are definitely wrong, that they lead not to
the understanding but to the misunderstanding of the mind of the Master. At one
of these we have just looked: the theory, for which Mark is supposed to vouch,
that the parables are hidden mysteries, intended to conceal from most the truth
that they reveal to a chosen few. We have seen how such an idea could arise: as
a key to the interpretation of the parables, it is worse than valueless. The
method of parable exegesis which has prevailed longer than any other, and has
more than any other blinded Christians to the lessons taught in the parables, is
the allegorical method. By the allegorical method we mean the method according
to which every person, every object and every incident mentioned in the story
has its counterpart in the spiritual world. In an allegory there is no argument,
no inference from one sphere to another. The story told need have no
significance, even no probability, in itself. The spiritual truth is the only
truth, but it is given in enigmatic or symbolic form. A very valuable section of
hilicher’s great book on the parables records the history of their
interpretation. This section abounds in illustrations of the foolish meanings,
sometimes the almost incredibly foolish meanings, found in the parables all down
through the ages by distinguished teachers of the Church following the
allegorical method. According to Tertullian, the father of the Prodigal
represents God, the father’s wealth is the knowledge of God one has by nature,
the citizen to whom the prodigal attached himself is the Prince of this world,
the swine are demons, the best robe is the position from which Adam by
transgression fell, and the Welcome Home supper typifies the Lord’s Supper. In
later ages, Erasmus, who really represents the new spirit in parable
interpretation, improved on this by teaching that the hired servants were the
Jews who kept God’s laws only through fear or through hope of reward. In the Two
Debtors (Mat 18:23 ff.) Origen claimed that we must find the counterpart of the
king, the slaves, the man who owed ten thousand talents, his wife, his children,
his going out, and of the one hundred shillings. In the four classes of seed in
the Sower, Hugo of St. Victor (twelfth century) found the angels in the empyrean
who fell because they claimed to be like Christ; Adam, who went astray when the
sun of the devil’s temptation rose upon him; the Jews in the Holy Land who were
corrupted by the infection of the thorns, that is, the heathen, and were
scattered throughout the world; and lastly, the Lord himself, planted in the
land of the Virgin, in the land of the Cross, and, through the teaching of the
apostles, in the hearts of the faithful.

Naturally, the nobler the parable, the more terrible the devastation wrought by
interpreters, and no parable has suffered more from the allegorizers than the
Good Samaritan. The allegorical misinterpretation is at least as old as
Augustine; it was continued by Erasmus, in spite of the fact that hilicher calls
him the “ morning star “ of the new principle of parable interpretation. But it
was left to Cardinal Wiseman boldly to make the claim that only the Catholic
allegorizer can understand the latter part of the parable, which unrolls the
history of the world. The oil is the emblem of all consecration or sacramental
grace. The story of the wounded man represents the rescue of sinful man from
complete destruction. The Saviour, until he returns to bring home his redeemed,
has entrusted them to the care of loyal representatives, who have already
received part of their reward, and will receive yet higher reward hereafter. On
the allegorical interpretation, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the Church,
the two pence may be (for Protestants) the two sacraments, and the inn-keeper
represents the apostles and their successors. One can hardly help paying a
tribute to the perverted ecclesiastical ingenuity, one had almost said genius,
which has succeeded in divesting of all its meaning the story which, with one
exception, is the most beautiful and important ever told. Where numbers occur in
the parables, they provide a special field for the joyous exercise of the
allegorizer’s talents. In the Labourers in the Vineyard (Mat 20:1-34) the number
of hours mentioned (1, 3, 6, 9, 11) makes a total of 30, which, according to the
schools of Valentinus and Marcus, provides a striking confirmation of the
Gnostic theory of the thirty asons which separated God and his world. For the
Valentinians the Five Foolish Virgins represent the five senses. In the Leaven
the three measures of flour are the pneumatic, the psychic and the materialistic
classes of men, the leaven being the Saviour and the woman Wisdom. In their
spiritual interpretation of figures the British Israelites have a long line of
predecessors.

We must not suppose that no one before our own age had a glimpse of the beauty
or the true meaning of the parables. After the first age of darkness there was
progress, though by no means a steady progress, towards the recovery of this
priceless treasure. Tertullian, for example, saw that the story in its natural
sphere must have a truth of its own before it could be transferred to the
spiritual sphere; but he was too much a child of his age to make much use of his
recognition of this fact.

It is from the sixteenth century that Julicher traces the new spirit in parable
exegesis.

Erasmus was a classical scholar: he knew the light that could be shed on the
parables of Jesus from the pages of Pliny, Plutarch and Seneca.

Like Origen he believed that there is one governing thought in every parable.
Yet Erasmus is only the morning-star, not the full-orbed sun, of the new system
of interpretation. For him, as for his predecessors, the parables are
allegories, though he exercised more restraint than some of them in interpreting
the details.

Luther was also an allegorizer: for him the woman who lost her piece of silver
typified the Church or the bride of Christ; the lamp which illumined her search
was the Law or the Word of God. But the new wine of the Reformation was bound to
inspire students of the Bible to a new wisdom in this branch of Bible study.

Old traditions had been broken down, ancient prejudices overcome; an historical
sense was being developed and languages were being studied. Calvin, for whom the
way had been prepared by Butzer, is regarded by Julicher as the greatest parable
exegete in the first sixteen centuries. It is true that he sometimes fell back
into old allegorical errors. For example he regards the Vineyard of Mat 21:33 as
typifying the Church of God; the hedge, winepress and tower as representing the
adjuncts to God’s Law, such as sacrifices and other ceremonies, meant to develop
the faith of the people. He clearly saw, however, that the material of a parable
must be grasped as a whole and the details studied in relation to this whole.

Yet the time was not ripe for this advance; and the Protestant Church speedily
sank back into, and for two more centuries remained in, the allegorizing
position which the Roman Church had never left. hilicher claims that, in the
seventy years before he wrote, the parables had suffered more from perverse
interpretation than in the previous seven centuries. This he regards as a reflex
effect of the rise of the Higher Criticism of the Gospels and of a rationalising
theology. In its zeal to resist the new theology and to preserve the old Gospel,
the new orthodoxy felt constrained to find a deep sense in every word of
Scripture. The allegorizing, and even the prophetic, method of interpretation,
returned in all their old force. It was B. Weiss in Germany, and men like Bruce
and Dods in our own country (and earlier, in a measure, Trench) that blazed the
trail to a new and better method. (Trench grumbles against Calvin because he
will not allow the oil in the vessels of the Wise Virgins to mean anything, nor
the vessels themselves, nor the lamps.)

Why is it that we feel so sure that the allegorical interpretation is a complete
misunderstanding of the mind of Jesus? For one thing, there is the point which
hilicher makes, and with which most will agree, that though this theory has held
sway for nearly two thousand years, it has given us no new insight into the
meaning of one single parable. Few would now agree with the judgment of Irving
and others, with which Trench sympathizes, that the more we empty a parable of
allegory, the more its peculiar beauty disappears and the less interest it has
for us. But there is more than that. The allegory is not intended to teach. It
may give us new insight into truth which is already familiar, but it is not a
vehicle for imparting new truth.

Trench, for example, while partly rejecting allegorizing methods, frankly says:
’ The parables may not be made first sources and seats of doctrine. Doctrines
otherwise and already established may be illustrated, or indeed confirmed by
them; but it is not allowable to constitute doctrine first by their aid.” Now it
may be taken as certain that for Jesus the parable was not only a teaching
method, but one of his most important teaching methods, for some classes of
hearers perhaps the most important. He did not only speak in parables; he taught
the people in parables. In the parable he sought to lead them, more effectively
than he could in any other way, into the truth about God, about themselves,
about the spiritual world.

If Jerusalem represents the state of primal innocence and the descent to Jericho
the fall of man, if the robbers are sin, the priest and the Levite the moral and
ceremonial law, the Good Samaritan Jesus, if the inn is the Church, the
inn-keeper Church officials and the two pence two sacraments, then to the people
who first heard the parable it meant nothing at all, and to subsequent
generations, when a theology had been developed, it only put in pictorial form,
a form moreover which required a key to its interpretation, teaching with which
they were already familiar in abstract form. It is unthinkable that Jesus so
misused a form of teaching capable of applications so much nobler.

One of the main objections to allegorical interpretations is that there can
never be any finality about them. Exegesis becomes purely arbitrary and one
teacher has as much right to his opinion as another, while all will find in the
parables the meaning which they wish to find. The number of possible
applications becomes literally infinite. Over two hundred years ago Vitringa
suggested that the three loaves of Luk 11:5 represent the three parts of
Scripture (Law, Prophets, Psalms) which gave a prophetic picture of the
petitioner, Jesus, who therefore needed them; but he made the further suggestion
that they represented the three parts of the then known world, since the heathen
of these parts (typified by the friend arriving at midnight), if they were to be
converted, would need the grace of Christ as the bread of life. If the five
foolish virgins are the five senses, the five wise virgins may be the five books
of the Pentateuch. If the swine are demons, the fatted calf may be
Mahommedanism. We are, in short, in a world in which anything may mean anything.

If we do not feel that the parables of Jesus have a significance of their own
and shine in their own light, we shall never understand the teaching of Jesus at
all.

If the parables are not allegories, how did the idea arise and so long prevail
that they were allegories? hilicher has argued powerfully that, so long as a
parable is intelligible and selfconsistent, it must in the first place be
understood as meaning what it says. To ignore the obvious meaning of the stories
and to transfer each character and incident to the spiritual sphere is to take a
wrong path which can end only in a complete misunderstanding of the lesson of
the parables. For the most part the parables of Jesus, even in the form in which
we have them, are so vivid and so satisfying as stories, that it is in the
highest degree unnatural to regard them as series of algebraic formulae for
truths in another and higher sphere. Yet this unnatural idea not only arose, but
was for centuries the conception that governed the interpretation of the
parables, a conception which can hardly be said to be entirely abandoned even in
our day. How did the idea arise? In part the explanation is to be found in the
theory that the parables were hidden mysteries; but the main part of the answer
lies in the interpretations of the Sower, the Darnel among the Wheat, and (in a
less degree) the Draw-net, ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. These
interpretations are all allegorical; they suggest that the stories had no
significance in themselves, that there are no lessons to be drawn from the
parable regarded as a whole, and that they become intelligible only when the
hearer grasps the hidden spiritual meaning behind each character and incident.
In the Sower Jesus is represented as giving the key to the seed, the birds, the
rock, the sun, the thorns, the good soil and the harvest. (As has been pointed
out, Jesus, who loved the birds, is here supposed to make them stand for the
devil. We note also that the seed which fell on the hard road would have borne
no crop even if the birds had not picked it up.) Most mechanical of all is the
explanation of the Darnel among the Wheat ascribed to Jesus, in which he appears
as giving the counterpart of the sower, the field, the good seed, the darnel,
the enemy, the harvest, the reapers, the gathering and burning of the darnel.

(We note also that the Son of Man is at once the earthly Jesus in Mat 13:37 and
the exalted Son of Man who sends forth his angels at the end of the world in Mat
5:41.) In the Draw-net we are given the clue to the fishermen, the good fish,
the bad fish, the separation, and the throwing away of the inedible fish. This
raises the question whether Jesus ever gave these interpretations. The critical
question has been discussed so often that perhaps there is little new to be said
about it; and in the end the attitude of most readers will depend on the extent
to which they accept the results of the literary criticism of the Gospels. One
or two points are obvious. In all three Synoptists, the explanation of the Sower
comes after the very difficult section in which it seems to be suggested that
the object of the parable method was to puzzle the hearers, all except a
favoured few. In Matthew the interpretation of the Darnel among the Wheat is
separated from the parable itself by the Mustard Seed, the Leaven, and another
short section about the use of the parable method. These facts may suggest that
the interpretations do not belong to the same strain of Gospel tradition as the
parables themselves. To say nothing of the distressingly mechanical nature of
the interpretation of the Darnel parable, for all its fullness it misses what
seems to be the whole point: the suggestion of the farmer’s men that they should
weed out the darnel, and his reply that no separation must be effected till the
harvest is ripe. With regard to the Draw-net, we note only that the
interpretation given is the same as in the case of the Darnel, partly even in
the same words, though in this case the furnace of fire explains nothing in the
parable itself.

It was natural that great importance should be attached to the three allegorical
parable interpretations ascribed to Jesus. In Mark the Sower is the first
parable recorded. In Matthew the three parables allegorized are in his first
great parable collection. Both in Matthew and in Mark Jesus is represented as on
this occasion adopting in the parable a new kind of teaching which called for an
explanation.

Almost from the beginning these considerations seem to have obscured from view
the very important point that they are by no means the only parables of which
interpretations are given in the Gospels; sometimes ascribed to Jesus, sometimes
from the pen of the evangelist himself. So recent a writer as Mr. Balmforth says
of the Sower*: “ In St. Luke’s Gospel it is the only parable which has appended
to it an explanation of its meaning.” Apparently he means it is the only parable
which has an allegorical explanation appended. In fact, it is the rule rather
than the exception that a parable should be accompanied by some kind of
interpretation; and in no case, except the three mentioned, is that
interpretation of an allegorical nature. The point is so important and has been
so persistently overlooked that it is only with great reluctance that, owing to
considerations of space, one omits to elaborate it. Any reader can verify for
himself the fact that in the case of many parables an interpretation is given,
either ascribed to Jesus, or coming frankly from the pen of the evangelist, or
both; that, except in the three parables mentioned, the lesson is always
confined to a single point, briefly and * Saint Luke in the Clarendon Bible p.
175. pithily expressed; and that in every case it is of the same kind as an
intelligent reader would draw to-day. It is particularly noticeable that in the
case of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has suffered as much at the
hands of the allegorizers as the traveller did at the hands of the robbers, the
violence that has been done to the story is in direct contradiction to Luke’s
own account of it. He tells us that Jesus gave this parable as a reply to the
question: “ Who is my neighbour? “ and that he himself pointed the moral: ’ Go
and do thou likewise ’ (Luk 10:37).

We are not suggesting that all the interpretations of the parables ascribed to
Jesus by the Synoptists necessarily came from his mouth; nor is it necessary to
assume that in every case the lesson drawn from a parable, whether ascribed to
Jesus or coming frankly from the pen of the evangelist, is the lesson that Jesus
intended to be drawn. Even if the parables in Luk 15:1-32 were called forth by
the mission to the taxcollectors and outcasts, the Church has rightly given them
a far wider interpretation. ’ The last shall be first and the first last “ (Mat
20:16) is hardly a lesson one can draw from the Labourers in the Vineyard. The
point of the story is not any reversal of their original position, but the
equality of treatment of workers whose contribution, on a superficial view,
seemed very unequal. The saying: ’ To him that has shall be given,” etc. (Mat
25:29) points the lesson of the fate of the man with the one talent and the man
with the ten talents; and emphasizes, what may indeed have been the intention of
Jesus, that the man with the one talent is the central figure of the story. Yet
it is difficult to believe that this lesson exhausts, or comes anywhere near
exhausting, the significance of the parable. The moral drawn from the Ten
Bridesmaids: “ Be on the watch “ or “ Remain awake ’ ’ (Mat 25:13) is not one
that would naturally follow from the story. All the bridesmaids fell asleep, nor
were they reproved for doing so. The point was that some made their preparations
before they fell asleep: others did not.

However this may be, it is now abundantly clear that the allegorical
explanations of the Sower, the Darnel and the Draw-net given in the Gospels, far
from being typical of the parable exegesis of the early Church, were entirely
exceptional. In some cases no explanation is offered, apparently because it was
felt that none was needed. Of the large number of interpretations given, only in
the three just mentioned is there any hint of allegory. In every other case the
parable is an illustrative argument.

Whether it is Jesus himself or the evangelist that draws the moral, the parable
is treated as a story, natural and intelligible in itself, that leads up to some
outstanding lesson which follows from it simply, naturally, convincingly. The
point is so obvious, the evidence for it so abundant, it is amazing that for so
many centuries the allegorical and the “ mystery ’ conceptions dominated the
interpretation of the parable, and were supposed to represent the mind of Jesus.
To the rule that the parables are not allegories there is one exception: the
Wicked Vinedressers recorded by all three Synoptists (Mat 21:33-46, Mark
12:1-12, Luk 20:9-19). This parable is hardly intelligible except on the
supposition that it is an allegory. We know what the vineyard was and what was
the fruit expected; we know who were typified by the owner, the tenants, the
messengers, the Son, the new tenants. We know the spiritual counterpart of the
fate of the Son and of the doom of the vinedressers. If this is a genuine
parable of Jesus, and there seems no serious reason to doubt it, it shows that
our Lord had no bias against allegory when it suited his purpose. As a rule he
avoided it, because he found the story, complete in itself but with a spiritual
lesson involved in it, a more effective teaching method. But he treated
figurative language with the same freedom with which he treated the Law of
Moses.

If he spoke even one allegory, we need not be surprised if we find that we
sometimes know whom he meant by a character in a parable, or what he meant by
some incident in a parable.

Unless we know at whom or what the parable was aimed, it would be
unintelligible; but that does not turn the parable into an allegory. In any
case, what we are arguing against is the idea that allegory provides the key to
the interpretation of the parables. This idea is destructive of any possibility
of finding their real meaning.


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CHAPTER V PARABLE INTERPRETATION

IF we reject the theory of the parable as allegory, it does not follow that we
must go to the other extreme, as Julicher does at least when he is treating the
general theory of the parable, and insist that in each parable there is only one
lesson.

We may grant that in each parable there is only one central message, and we have
seen that all the parable interpretations given in the Gospels (except the three
that are allegorized) take the form of a single message expressed briefly and
pithily. Yet just as in a picture the details are significant, so it is with the
picture stories of Jesus. A distinction has been drawn between the exegetical
and the homiletic significance of the details; but if these details have a
message for us, it is gratuitous to suppose that Jesus did not see, or did not
intend, that significance. Is it not just one of the marks of great literature
or great art that, the more we study it, the more does it become for us lit up
with meaning; and that as the significance of the work unfolds itself to us, we
feel sure that we are entering more fully into the mind of the author or the
artist? Thus, in the Prodigal Son we refuse to look for any spiritual
counterpart of the swine or the fatted calf; we insist on seeing the
significance of every word, every act, every experience of the father, the
younger son, the elder son. If the Good Samaritan is an allegory, the robbers
may represent the theological concept of sin; if it is a parable, they represent
the robber spirit or greed. As allegory the two pence may be two sacraments; as
parable, they mean that the Samaritan was willing to give his money as well as
his time and his skill. It cannot be too often repeated that a parable has a
meaning in itself and the lesson is drawn from the story; an allegory is a
series of symbols, of no significance in themselves except as giving the clue to
the interpretation, which is the real story. No interpretation of the parables
can be satisfactory which does not recognize that their message was in the first
place to the people to whom they were addressed. The Church has constantly
forgotten the teaching of Tertullian that the interpretation of the parables
must have reference to their matter, to the conformity of things, and to the
instruction of the disciples.

If these principles rule out allegorical interpretations, they equally rule out,
for the most part, prophetic intepretations. Tertullian saw, as very many of his
successors have not seen, that no interpretation of the Good Samaritan could be
accepted which involved a knowledge of the Christian Church, which was not then
in existence. The same principle rules out the exegesis which finds in the
Darnel, at least as the primary reference, heresies which did not arise in the
Church till long after the time of Christ. The parable of the Labourers in the
Vineyard cannot, in the first place at least, have been intended to answer
questions about the reward of Christian workers in the far-off ages.

Yet in the exercise of this principle it is necessary to exercise common-sense.
It is often said, for example, that any reference by Jesus to the persecution of
his followers (as in Mark 4:17) cannot be authentic, since he could not have
foreseen such persecution; that such references must therefore be later
additions, due to the experience of the early Church. But unfortunately no
supernatural knowledge was needed for the anticipation of hostility to the
followers of Jesus. Jesus knew life, and he knew the history of his own people.
He was well aware that any earnest man who tries to fulfil the will of God will
run counterto men’s greed and ambition and love of money, and to that
conservatism which leads even good men to think that they are doing God service
when they are destroying God’s servants. In his own experience he had the bitter
opposition, not only of the priests and religious leaders of Jerusalem, but of
the pious folk of Nazareth, Capernaum and Bethsaida. The prophecy of persecution
on account of the Word would have been a safe and simple forecast of the future,
based on a knowledge of the past. The parables then, speaking generally are not
allegories, not ’ mystery ’ utterances, and not prophecies; and while they may
sometimes yield, and be intended to yield, simple morals for the guidance of
practical life, that never exhausts their meaning. Speaking generally, a parable
is a story, complete and significant in itself, from which may be learnt as an
inference some deep spiritual truth, which in every case is related to Jesus’
teaching about the Kingdom of God. There is, however, no point in defining the
term ’ parable ’ too closely, for Jesus did not, in fact, adhere rigorously to
any one conception of the parable; and this fact, far from being a
stumbling-block in the way of the general reader, is usually not even noticed.
The Rich Fool, for example, is a discussion of the relation between a man and
his possessions, a discussion made practical by being conducted with reference
to a particular case. The Pharisee and the Taxcollector is an analysis of
Religion conceived as Law, the analysis, again, referring to a particular
exponent of such religion. The Good Samaritan is a story of a kindly neighbour.
In none of these cases is there any inference from one sphere to another. The
Mustard Seed and the Leaven can hardly be called stories at all; they are little
more than metaphors.

Even when there is an inference, in some cases it is not the likeness but the
unlikeness between the illustration and the truth to be illustrated that Jesus
wishes to make clear. Conduct that seems eminently reasonable in the sphere of
spiritual things would be recognized by all as the height of absurdity in the
ordinary affairs of life. Attention has often been called to the so-called
improbabilities in the parables. Thus Buzy 1 refers to the criticism of Loisy
(following Julicher) of the Darnel among the Wheat. The inference which M. Loisy
draws from these incongruities is that the parable is not authentic. The farmer
is obviously a wealthy man, with a retinue of servants; yet he sows his field
with his own hands (but surely this is not necessarily the meaning of Mat
13:24): this is true of Jesus in the spiritual sphere, but of no earthly farmer.
The devil may sow weeds among good seed; but no one does this on an earthly
farm. In the parable the darnel is invisible till the grain is fully formed: in
a community, heresies do not appear till the community has a certain maturity of
development, but in a field grain and darnel would grow together. The farmer’s
men do not know how to deal with the disaster that has befallen the field: there
was a time when heresy in the Church was a new problem, the method of dealing
with which called for deep and earnest consideration; but surely the Palestinian
farmers of Jesus’ time had enough experience of weeds to know what to do with
them.

All this may be very clever, if not always convincing; but it is beside the
point. Many of the parables begin with the implied formula, “ It is as if.” The
sequel to this “ It is as if ’

1 Introduction aux Paraboles vangeliques, p. 205. may be something which men do
every day, or it may be something which, in the ordinary affairs of life, men
would never dream of doing. If we wish to understand the parables, we must
carefully distinguish between these two cases. The question whether a farmer and
his men ever did have such an experience and deal with it in this way, does not
arise. In either case the story is perfectly intelligible and the lesson is
clear. “ It is as if, after a farmer had sown wheat in his field, someone else
were to sow darnel in it; and after the presence of the noxious growth were
discovered, the men were to consult the farmer about the best way of dealing
with the weeds.” The Wicked Vinedressers contains a double set of
improbabilities. No human landlord would treat such impossible tenants with the
patience and forbearance of the owner in the parable. This improbability is
inherent in the parable method; for there is no human analogy to the patience
and forbearance of God in his dealings with his wayward children. But the other
difficulty is greater, and seems, on a superficial view, a real weakness in the
story. We cannot imagine tenants anywhere treating their landlord with the
hopeless folly of the vinedressers of the parable. But the incredibility of the
supposition is the whole point of the story. In the oriental way, Jesus tells
the story as if the thing had actually happened. We must read it with the
introduction ’It is as if.” Your response to the care God has taken of you and
the good gifts he has showered on you is as if cultivators were to hire a
vineyard, and, when the time came for paying the rent, were to maltreat, insult
or slay the landlord’s messengers, finally putting his son to death,” a
ludicrous absurdity in the economic world, a tragic reality in the spiritual
world.

We need the same reminder in the Great Supper. Again there is the implied
introductory formula: ’ It is as if.” To allow such trivial things as we do
allow to stand between us and participation in the great feast of God is as if
the friends of a nobleman, invited to a feast on some joyous occasion, were not
only to scorn the invitation, but were to send excuses insulting in their
flippancy. In other words, sometimes the story is told for the wisdom it
displays, sometimes for its unutterable folly. Some parables illustrate a
religious truth; others a religious untruth.


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  CHAPTER 8: 06 - CHAPTER 06
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CHAPTER VI A GENERAL VIEW OF THE PARABLES CERTAIN general points in connection
with the parables may now be regarded as more or less established.

(i) In many cases we do not know the historical context of the parable; that is,
the people to whom, and the circumstances in which, the parable was spoken. It
seems clear that, while collections of the sayings of Jesus were being made, the
parables were also being grouped.

Thus all that Mark has to tell us about the parables (except the Wicked
Vinedressers in Mark 12:1-44.) he gives in Mark 4:1-41, which partly coincides
with Matthew’s larger parable group in Mark 13:1-37.

Luke records five parables in Luk 15:1-32 and Luk 16:1-31, while Matthew groups
two parables and three quasi-parables between Mat 24:43-51 and Mat 25:1-46. The
fact that the literary context, the position in a Gospel in which a story is
placed, is not necessarily the same as the historical context, the occasion on
which the parable was spoken, has often been overlooked. It was natural, for
example, that Luke should attach the Prodigal Son to the Lost Sheep and the Lost
Piece of Silver, since all three deal with the joy of finding the lost. Yet the
Prodigal begins with the phrase: ’ and he said,” the regular formula which
introduces any remembered saying of Jesus. It need have no historical connection
with the preceding parables; and we are at liberty to let the story speak for
itself without being prejudiced by the neighbourhood in which we find it.

Again, the position of the Ten Bridesmaids and the Talents, towards the end of
Matthew’s Gospel and just before the picture of the Last Judgment, almost
inevitably creates the impression that their primary significance relates to the
return of Jesus, an impression which is strengthened by the presence of the
Bridegroom in the former (cf. Mark 2:19). Yet the position in which we find
these two parables need mean no more than that, at the time when “Matthew”
wrote, the Church interpreted them with reference to the Second Coming. We are
entitled to study the parables for ourselves.

We are accustomed to think of the Sower as the first parable spoken by Jesus,
and this has given increased importance to the ’ mystery ’ theory with which
Mark connects it. It is true that Mark gives a very definite historic occasion
for this parable (Mark 4:1 ff.), but we shall see reason to doubt the accuracy
of this. The other parabolic sayings in this chapter are introduced by “ And he
said,” the regular phrase used in beginning a saying of Jesus of which the
context was not known. In Luke’s Gospel the Sower is not the first parable given
(the Two Debtors is in Luk 7:1-50), and in Matthew it is preceded by many
parables or quasi-parables (Luk 7:24-27; Luk 11:16 f.; Luk 12:11; Luk 12:25; Luk
12:29; Luk 12:43-45)- To recognize, then, that we seldom know the circumstances
in which a parable was spoken frees us from certain limitations in our
interpretations, limitations which may help to obscure the true meaning. Yet our
ignorance of these circumstances is by far our most serious handicap in our
study of the parables. In the case of those whose meaning has been most
disputed, it seems certain that the story would be illuminated if only we knew
what called it forth. The Unjust Steward would not have been to the Church the
problem it has been if only we had known what class of stewards Jesus had in
mind, what precisely was the nature of their fraud, and what their method of
escape from its consequences. If we knew to whom and why Jesus spoke the parable
of the Labourers in the Vineyard, then presumably all controversy as to its
meaning would cease. Could we see the audience to whom Jesus told the story of
the Rich Man and Lazarus and know what led up to it, then might we know for
certain whether Dives was rich in this world’s goods or rich in spiritual
privilege, and whether Lazarus was a social outcast or a moral and spiritual
outcast. But we have not this knowledge. In all such cases we are left to
interpret the parables as best we may in the light of our general knowledge of
Jesus’ life and teaching.

(2) The parables as we now have them are in the form they took after being used
by Christian preachers for many years. That this is so is evident from a
comparison of the forms taken by the same parable in different Gospels.

Perhaps the most suggestive comparison is that between Matthew’s account of the
Great Supper (Mat 12:1-14) and Luke’s (Luk 14:16-24). The first Gospel is
specially interested in the Jews and in the rejection of Jesus by the religious
leaders; the first Gospel is also the ’ royal ’ Gospel.

Thus in Matthew the feast is given by a king, representing God according to the
conventional symbolism of the Rabbinic parables. The feast is given in honour of
the marriage of the King’s Son, evidently Jesus. In Luke it is not a wedding
feast but a “ supper “ and the host is not a king. After the rejection of the
invitation by the guests for whom the feast was intended, in Matthew the host
sends out only one Mission to procure fresh guests: in Luke he sends two
(Matthew’s second mission to the guests originally invited seems to indicate
that a second mission had become part of the tradition). In the first Gospel the
one mission in search of fresh guests is evidently to the tax-collectors and
outcasts in general. In Luke’s Gospel with its broader outlook the second of the
two missions for new guests presumably typified the presentation of the Gospel
to the Gentiles. In Matthew, before the Mission is sent out at all, there is a
military interlude in which an army goes out to attack the guests who would not
come and to burn down their city; all this while the Supper was getting cold! We
may safely assume that the story was thus spoiled by Christian preachers after
the fall of Jerusalem.

Again, Luke with his offer of a free Gospel says nothing of the wedding robe
which, to the more theologically-minded “ Matthew,” was an essential of the
story. In Matthew’s parable of the Talents (Mat 25:14-30) there are three
servants who receive each a number of talents differing according to their
capacity: five, two, one. In Luke (Luk 19:12-27) there are ten servants each of
whom receives one mina (pound). But the chief difference is that, while in
Matthew no explanation is given of the master’s departure and absence, Luke
intimates that he went off to receive his appointment as king. This leads to a
secondary story, which intermingles with the main story, of the unsuccessful
plot of his subjects to refuse to acknowledge his royal authority, and of their
fate. A tempting explanation is that, when telling the story of the nobleman who
left his country for a time, Christian preachers, trying to make the story
concrete, remembered how Archelaus, the son of Herod, went to Rome in 4 B.C. to
have his royal power confirmed by the emperor, and how a deputation of Jews
followed him to protest against the appointment. It was then an easy matter to
connect the story with the question that so greatly interested the first
generation of Christians, why the Jews rejected Jesus. It will hardly be claimed
that the complexity thus introduced into the parable is an improvement.

There are some interesting differences between Matthew’s parable of the Lost
Sheep and Luke’s. In Luke (Luk 15:3 f.) the story is Jesus’ apology for his
attitude to the tax-collectors and ’ sinners.” In Matthew the reference is to
the ’ ’ little ones ’ whom men must not despise and every one of whom it is
God’s will to save. In Luke there is a more splendid optimism than in Matthew.
Luke’s shepherd searches for the wandering sheep ’ until he finds it “; and that
this feature is deliberate is clear from the other two parables in the chapter:
the woman who seeks her lost drachma till she finds it and the father who waits
for his errant son till he comes home. In Matthew the result of the search is no
foregone conclusion: the shepherd rejoices ’ if he succeeds in finding the
sheep.” But there is another, perhaps more important divergence. Matthew’s
shepherd is a lonely figure; his joy in finding the sheep that had strayed is a
solitary joy, and the God who will not have his little ones perish is thought of
as the One and the Alone. But Luke’s shepherd invites his friends and neighbours
to share his joy, and this feature is of the essence of Luk 15:1-32. The social
joy on earth at the finding of the lost in each of the three parables is but the
replica of the joy ’ in the presence of God’s angels over a repentant sinner”
(Luk 15:10). In view of the fact that the parables had been repeated countless
times by Christian preachers of different antecedents to widely varying
audiences scattered through the world, before they were committed to writing in
our Gospels, it would not have been surprising if in some versions they had been
considerably transformed.

While there is no slavish adherence to any common document or common tradition,
the similarity between different versions of the same story, where these occur,
suggests, what we should otherwise have expected, that the parables had in
themselves sufficient vitality, and the reverence for the words of Jesus was
sufficiently great, to preserve them substantially intact. In comparing the
different versions of the Wicked Vinedressers (Mat 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luk
20:9-19), besides some unimportant differences such as would naturally arise as
the story was told and re-told, we find other differences to which more
significance may be attached. Both in Matthew and in Mark, some of the
rent-collectors are killed. Luke, taking these servants to represent the Old
Testament prophets, silently corrects this: the servants are ill-treated, but
not killed, for no actual murders of prophets are recorded in the Old Testament.
1 Perhaps also it is not too finical to see deliberate purpose in the way in
which the fate of the Son is recorded. In Mark they slay him and cast him out of
the vineyard. In Matthew and in Luke they cast him out of the vineyard and slay
him. Clearly the vineyard was not Jerusalem, but Israel; but Israel was
concentrated in and typified by Jerusalem, and we know that Christian thought
found significance in the fact that Jesus was crucified “ outside of the gate “
(Heb 13:12).

John specifically mentions, what the other Gospels suggest, that the place where
Jesus was crucified was “near,” not ’in’ the city, (John 19:20)

(3) The parables are an essential, and an important, part of the teaching of
Jesus. The determination to find in the parables only teaching that was already
familiar apart from the parables has been a fruitful source of inability to see
their true meaning. Moreover, it is surely a mistake to regard the parables as
just a series of pious reflections. Jesus was never just a philosopher: nor was
he even, in the strictly technical sense, a theologian. Abstract speculation
about the nature of God had no interest for him, at least as a teacher. His aim
was to lead men to God; he would teach men only those truths about God that made
it easier for them to come to Him.

1 Unless we except Uriah (Jer 26:20-23).

Consequently the parables of Jesus are not the studies of a thinker, but the
trumpet calls of a prophet, calls to rouse ourselves and take action. At the end
of each, spoken or implied, is his “ Go and do thou likewise; “ “ Go and be thou
likewise; ’ “Go and be thou not likewise.” Even the parables that illumine the
nature of God are intended also to lighten the path of men. The father’s arms,
wide open for the son, invite the prodigal to reach those encircling arms. The
boundless forgiveness of God is for those who in turn forgive. If the queen
pearl is worth the sum total of all our possessions, let us sell them all and
buy it. The Leaven and the Mustard Seed are a call to that faith and hope that
are among the abiding things of life, a call to be co-workers with God in the
leavening influence of his Kingdom and in tending the plant that he has planted.

(4) Not least in the parables do we see our Lord’s attitude to the world and to
life. If it would be too much to say that Jesus enjoyed life, it would not be
too much to say that he was thoroughly at home in the world. To him it was
always his Father’s world, and the only foreign element was the sin in the heart
of man.

It is not only from the parables we learn that every sight and sound brought to
him a message from his Father: the sunshine, the rain, the storm; the flowers,
the birds, the beasts. He had the true shepherd’s love and pity for the sheep;
he saw with a kind of envy the foxes going to their holes in the earth. To him
the mother bird with outstretched wings typified his own brooding love, which
was the divine love, for the sacred city of his people. The cock-crow was the
herald of a new day with its possibilities of victory or tragic defeat. His
heart had bled with the bullocks as they struggled along, weary and heavy-laden,
under the crushing load. Without the help of his trusty horse or mule, the Good
Samaritan could never have carried through his immortal work; and a humble colt
shared with our Lord the glory of his entry into Jerusalem. The fact that in his
parables Jesus uses the things and occupations of earth to illustrate the things
of the Kingdom is his testimony to the reality, the eternal significance of our
life and its concerns. Just as the resurrection is God’s testimony to the
abiding significance of the personality of man, of what Paul calls his “ body,”
so the parables are Jesus’ witness that the world in which man has to live is
not a world of fleeting shadows. Just as the resurrection gives an eternal ’ No
’ to those who say that what we do with our bodies is a matter of indifference,
so do the parables rebuke for ever any suggestion that men can be indifferent
to, or contemptuous of, this life and its interests. In one group of parables
Jesus teaches that the same God who watches over the farmer’s seed in the field
watches over the spiritual seed in the heart of man; that the life that is in
the seed is the life of God, even as is the life in the heart of the man who
responds to divine teaching. In the farming parables and in the Leaven we can
see how deeply Jesus was impressed with the mystery of life, with the
inscrutable working of God in what we now call the natural processes. He is not
illustrating a mystery by something we can all understand; he is comparing two
mysteries. To Jesus every new harvest was a new mystery, and the housewife’s
leaven was a mystery, even as the growth of God’s kingdom was a mystery.
Particle by particle, slowly, irrevocably, the dough comes under the influence
of this all-conquering power; even as man by man, sphere by sphere, the world
comes under the influence of this new power of God.

Incidentally some of these parables illustrate Jesus’ faith in the “ energy ’ of
God. The life that is in the seed may find obstacles such as rock, or rivals
such as thorns or darnel. Unless in these exceptional cases, the life that is in
the seed will always be victorious; and when it gives fruit, it gives fruit
abundantly; the little mustard seed becoming a great tree, the grain seed
multiplying thirty, sixty, a hundred fold, the leaven leavening the whole lump.
It is because this miracle of nature’s prolific abundance is with us every day
that for us, though not for Jesus, it ceases to be a miracle. Are not the
farming parables, also, Jesus’ tribute to the dauntless courage of man? The soil
of Palestine made its demand for grit and the farmer had responded. There were
rock and thorns and weeds lying in wait to choke the seed, but the farmer had
persevered. These parables take us back to an earlier day when it had seemed as
if a curse rested on the ground, so that only by the sweat of his brow could man
earn his bread; but man had sweated and earned his bread. The earth had produced
thorns and thistles, but the persevering energy of man had triumphed over the
thorns and thistles. Is not the difference in the point of view between Genesis
iii. and Jesus a tribute to the noble qualities of man? The sacrifice of the
farmer Cain was rejected; the sacrifice of the shepherd Abel was accepted. It
has been suggested 1 that that idea marks the stage when the work of a shepherd
is an old and venerable occupation which seems to have the blessing of God
resting upon it; while the tilling of the ground is still in the experimental
stage, and is the preserve of bold adventurers. May not the belief that God’s
face is against the new occupation have been due in part to the ill-luck that
attended the first ventures of the inexperienced farmers of that inhospitable
soil? But man had conquered, and now Jesus can use the spoils of his sturdy
persistence and his ingenuity as symbols of truths of the Kingdom.

(5) The aspect of the world which interests our Lord most is the world as the
abode of 1 Dr. J. E. McFadyen in the Hibbert Journal. July, 1921. men and women;
the aspect of men and women which he finds richest in spiritual truth is their
work. The characters of Jesus’ parables are working men and women: farmers,
vinedressers, labourers, fishermen, traders, a shepherd, a pearl-merchant, a
steward, a governor of a province, housewives. If bridesmaids are introduced to
teach a lesson, it is not bridesmaids as sharing the joy of the bride, but as
women on whom has been imposed a task: a joyful task, doubtless, but still a
responsible duty, that of bearing the torches to welcome home the bridal couple.
The idle fools of the parables, such as the Prodigal and the Rich Fool, were men
who were idle by choice. There were other idlers, in the Labourers in the
Vineyard; but they were idle only because no man had hired them.

Against their will they had been deprived of the joy of helping to gather in the
harvest. They were not rebels against an immutable law of God, but victims of a
vicious system, and as such they were treated. We are here a very long way from
the conception of work as a curse imposed on man as a punishment for the sin of
our first parents. We have needed unemployment on a gigantic scale to teach us
the lesson we might have learned from the parables of Jesus: that the normal man
is the working man, that the idler can be employed to typify only some human
folly. Unemployment is in the first place an economic problem; at long last we
are realising that, in an almost greater degree, it is a moral and spiritual
problem, that every man who has been deprived of the normal exercise of his
faculties is a man who has been artificiallv made halt or maimed.

Human nature is so constituted that the economic problem seems to demand
solution far more urgently than the moral and spiritual problem. Infinitely
stronger pressure is brought to bear on our statesmen to provide means of
subsistence for the unemployed than to provide work for them. But man cannot
live by bread alone. When statesmen tell us that we cannot afford to provide
work for them, the answer is that we cannot afford to keep them idle. To the
credit of the Christian community be it said that there are many who do now
realize that it is more blessed to give than to receive, that every potential
worker whom we turn into a receiver when he might also be a giver is one to whom
we have done a deadly wrong.


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CHAPTER VII SOME QUESTIONS RAISED BY A STUDY OF THE PARABLES IN the general
discussion of the parables, some questions remain.

(i) Have the parables that artistic perfection that is so often claimed for
them? In a powerful defence of the authenticity of the parables, Buzy lays down
the thesis that the imperfect is not necessarily the unauthentic. He gives
examples of the ’ ’ gaucheries ’ ’ of the Rabbinic parables and insists that,
even in the case of Jesus, the Semitic genius preserves its independence over
against the classical ideals, refuses to be imprisoned within our intellectual
trammels, and declines to conform to the laws of strictly logical thought. It is
a useful warning, yet in this connection perhaps hardly called for. We have
discussed the cases in which the story is supposed to make too great a demand on
the imagination, and shown that the idea that these ’ improbabilities ’ are an
artistic defect is due to a misconception of the nature of the argument. The
military interlude in Matthew’s Wedding Feast and the rebellion in Luke’s
version of the Talents detract from the beauty of the story, but there is no
need to ascribe either to Jesus. The conclusion of the Ten Bridesmaids somewhat
jars upon us; we shall leave that point for discussion till we come to the
exposition of the parable. It is sometimes said that in the Talents “ Enter thou
into thy master’s joy ’ (perhaps ’ into thy master’s feast “) is more in place
in the interpretation of the parable than in the story. Has anyone ever felt
that that interfered with his enjoyment of the parable? The true critic of art
is Time: Time riddles the dross and lets the metal remain. Some of the parables
of Jesus are among the richest treasures, not only of the Christian Church, but
of mankind. The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Great Supper, the Ten
Bridesmaids, the Talents, are the final answer to the question why Jesus taught
in parables. Our Lord has his own way of telling a story; there is no “
padding,” no background, no description. The hearer is expected to do his part
of the work, and it is a large part. In the parables, as in all the rest of the
teaching of Jesus, he that hath ears to hear must use them. In the experience of
nineteen hundred years, the plan has more than justified itself. In the Pharisee
and the Tax-collector, perhaps more than anywhere else, the parable method is
seen in the perfection of its power. There in a few unforgettable words is the
teaching which others with less success have striven to give in pages or
chapters or even in whole volumes.

(2) Has the Church always been wisely guided in its choice of names for the
parables? In his book on the parables Mr. Lithgow in a most interesting way has
called attention to this subject, and the point is one of some importance.

Just as in our search for the appropriate definition of a word, we are learning
the nature of the thing indicated by the word, so our study of the meaning of a
parable should be crowned by an appropriate name for it. The title given to a
parable inevitably colours the popular conception of its message. Some of the
names in common use seem to have been chosen simply for reference; others are in
greater or less degree misleading. The names ’ The Hid Treasure ’ and “ The
Pearl of Great Price ’ conceal the fact that the stories centre round the lucky
peasant and the pearl-merchant. ’ The Lost Sheep ’ and “ The Lost Coin ’
distract our attention from the point that the story is primarily concerned, not
with the experiences of the sheep or the coin, but with the shepherd who lost
and found the sheep, the woman who lost and found the coin. “ The Unmerciful
Servant “ fails to make prominent that it was not as a servant but as a creditor
that he showed mercilessness. The parables have given us a new word in the
language, namely “talents,” and a new use of an old word, “ prodigal.” The fact
that he was prodigal or a spendthrift, is one of the accidents of the story: the
point is that he was an unfilial son, a son who recognized none of the
obligations of sonship. The word “ prodigal ’ has been given a new sense to
correspond with the life of the young man in the far country. The common,
misleading title of this parable has done us this disservice, that in the
popular mind the story has its lesson only for those guilty only of that kind of
“ wildness ’ which involves some measure of public obloquy. For the Labourers in
the Vineyard (Mat 20:1-16) the titles “ The Hours ’ and “ Equal Pay for Unequal
Work ’ have also been suggested. The former designation suggests nothing, and
the latter conveys an idea the reverse of the truth.

1 The Friend at Midnight ’ is a designation which would not have appealed to the
man who was roused from his midnight slumbers. The name ’ The Ten Virgins ’
emphasizes their virginity, which is no part of the point of the story. The
title ’ The Unjust Steward ’ puts the stress in the wrong place. The steward’s
vice was not injustice but dishonesty; and, as commonly interpreted, the parable
invites us to imitate the steward in respect not of any of his vices, but of a
certain virtue he was supposed to have. ’ The Importunate Widow ’ conveys the
lesson of the parable, if not accurately, at least much less inaccurately than ’
The Unjust Judge.” The name “ The Seed Growing Secretly “ involves an
unfortunate mistranslation of the last word, which has displayed wonderful
vitality. It should be either ’ mysteriously ’ (if we look to the end of Mark
4:27) or ’of its own accord’ (“of itself,” Weymouth) (lit. “automatically”) if
we take the title from the beginning of the next verse.

(3) In connection with each of the parables, at least of the longer parables,
there are five questions that might be profitably discussed:

(4) What was the parable as actually spoken by Jesus? That is a question for
literary criticism. We have already given some attention to this matter and it
will come up for further consideration.

(5) What did the parables mean for those who first heard them? On that subject,
speaking generally, we have no information. In the Gospels Jesus is represented
as giving, in response to a request, an interpretation of the Sower and of the
Darnel among the Wheat, and a voluntary interpretation of the Fishing-net; while
Mark tells us it was the custom of Jesus to expound his parables in private to
the disciples (Mark 4:34).

Apart from these references we hear of no difficulty experienced by an audience
in understanding the general bearing of a parable. In some cases, like the
Unjust Steward and the Wicked Vinedressers, the evangelists tell us that the
religious leaders saw the point at once.

Judging from the analogy of a modern nonChristian audience, it is reasonable to
suppose that a popular audience would catch the drift of a number of the
parables, like the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Pearl, the Fishingnet.
The disciples at least would see at once the meaning of the Seed Growing
Automatically, the Mustard Seed and the Leaven. It was only in later times, when
the whole meaning and purpose of the parable method became obscured, that the
original and obvious interpretations were dropped. Other parables, like the
Talents and the Bridesmaids, could hardly be called self-explanatory. The
difficulties of expounding them and the diverse interpretations given, doubtless
contributed to the spread of the conception of the parables as ’ hidden
mysteries.”

(c) How did the evangelists who gave us the parables understand them? In many
cases this question is much easier to answer. Whether the interpretations given
of the Sower, the Darnel and the Fishing-net are genuine or not, the
Gospel-writers must have regarded them as genuine. We have seen also of how many
other parables the evangelists either give interpretations of their own or
ascribe such to Jesus. In other cases the context in which they place, a parable
indicates their conception of its point.

(/) How have the parables fared in the history of the Church? We have already
given some account of Julicher’s thorough study of this subject.

(e) What do the parables mean for us?

There is no irreverence in suggesting that we may see applications of the
parables which were hidden from the Gospel writers, which were not fully within
the view of our Lord himself. The modern robber, for example, knows cleaner and
more scientific ways of getting at his victim’s money-bags than by lying in wait
for him on a lonely road and bludgeoning him. But the Church of our day has not
been content with trying to bring a fresh mind to bear on the teaching of the
individual parables.

It has sought to apply to the moral and spiritual problems of our day the spirit
that lies behind the whole parable method, that appeal to the imagination which
lies behind the conception of the parable. The Salvation Army, the Boys’

Brigade, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides and similar movements have enlisted
psychology in the service of ethics and religion. These movements are only
carrying into practical effect the ideas behind the parables of Jesus, who
taught us to think of ourselves as farmers contending against difficulties, as
the children of the Father, as stewards to whom has been committed a trust,
guests at the feast of a gracious host, bridesmaids who must uphold the honour
of the bride. In the moral life an appealing pictorial representation of the
issues at stake is half the battle.


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  CHAPTER 10: 08 - CHAPTER 08
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CHAPTER VIII THE SOWER Mark 4:1-9, Mark 4:13-20; Mat 13:1-9, Mat 13:18-23; Luk
8:4-8, Luk 8:11-15.

ATTEMPTS to classify the parables do not seem to have met with much success.
They were preserved, not only because they were recognized as genuine words of
Jesus, but because they supplied the answer to questions which bulked largely in
the minds of the early Christian teachers. Perhaps as good a way as any is to
group them according to the questions to which they supplied the answer. The
Sower deals with the unresponsiveness of the people to the Christian message.
One of the great problems of the early Church was the rejection of Jesus by his
own people, and especially by their leaders. If Jesus was indeed the King of the
Jews, and it was his claim to be so that was the legal pretext for his
crucifixion, why did not his natural subjects acknowledge his sovereignty? The
preaching of the early chapters of Acts emphasizes that the moral responsibility
for the death of Jesus rested not with the Romans but with his own countrymen
(Acts 2:23; Acts 3:13). As far as their own faith was concerned, the Christians
could not believe that God’s purpose had gone awry (Acts 2:23; Acts 3:15); yet
when they preached to Jews, these would naturally ask, “ Have any of the rulers
or of the Pharisees believed on him? “; while, when they were dealing with
Gentiles, the question was pertinent, ’ If you claim that Jesus was the
fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, why did the Jews have him put to death? ’
So far as the Jews were concerned, the famous passage in the epistle to the
Romans (Rom 9:1-33; Rom 10:1-21; Rom 11:1-36) shows how deeply Paul was moved by
their rejection of Jesus. From the beginning of his second chapter Mark deals
with this question, and in incident after incident shows the features in the
life and teaching of Jesus which estranged from him the leaders of his people.
The Sower must have made a strong appeal to the first evangelists in another
way. Fresh from the experience of Pentecost they felt the powers of the unseen
world pulsing within them.

Like the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, they had been crippled,
by sin and doubt, by fear and diffidence; and now all that was gone, their
shackles broken, their fears forgotten. For the first time, they could now stand
erect on their own feet, and walk and leap and praise God. It was inconceivable,
they felt, that to a message like theirs from men who had come face to face with
the divine, people would not listen. The early chapters of Acts dwell far more
on the successes of the Christian preachers than on their failures. Still, even
from Acts it is clear that in Jerusalem there was nothing like a wholesale
movement of the people into the fellowship of the followers of Jesus. It is
equally clear that, so far as the leaders are concerned, the events that
followed the crucifixion of Jesus made very little difference in their attitude
to the movement of which Jesus was the centre. Paul and the others had the same
experience when they began to preach to the Jews of the Dispersion and to the
Gentiles, an enthusiastic welcome of their message from a few, and, from the
many, indifference or active hostility.

It is easy to see, then, why the Sower occupies a position of such prominence in
the Gospel records. (As a matter of fact there is no good reason to suppose it
was the first parable spoken.

It is not the first given either by Matthew or by Luke, who tell us far more of
the teaching of Jesus than does Mark.) It is round this parable in all three
Synoptists that the whole question of the parable method is discussed, and it
has played a prominent part in the thought of the Church. Our Lord spoke this
parable out of his own distress at the careless or even hostile way in which men
received his message. After his marvellous experience at his baptism and in the
Temptation, believing that men would thrill with joy at his announcement that
the Kingdom of God was at hand, he bade them prepare for the new era, forsake
their sins, believe in the Good News. A few did accept his message, left all,
and became his disciples. For a time great crowds, apparently largely under a
misapprehension of what he had come to say or do, followed him, hanging on his
lips and giving God thanks for his wondrous deeds. In the capital, so far as we
have any record, his movement made little headway; the leaders were critical
when they were not hostile. What is more surprising is his rejection in the
towns of Galilee, in Bethsaida, in Nazareth, in Chorazin, in Capernaum (Luk
4:28-30, Mat 11:20-24). For a time he seems to have left Palestine altogether,
presumably under some compulsion (Mark 7:24 ff.). Herod, too, was or became his
bitter enemy.

What could it all mean? We can picture Jesus watching a farmer at work in the
spring time. Most of the seed he sows will come to maturity, but not all of it.
The seed sown is all of the same kind; clearly the fault does not lie with the
seed or the farmer. Why, then, in some cases is there failure? Part of the seed
never enters the ground at all; part of it does get in, but not deeply enough;
another part gets in and takes deep root, but encounters the opposition of a
rival and hurtful growth, which turns out to be stronger. Our Lord, then, had
the same experience as the Christian preacher has had from his day till our own:
his message often fell on deaf ears, and, so far as any impression was
concerned, might never have been delivered at all. There was no need to bring
Satan into the business; the plain fact was that the preaching fell on
unreceptive ears. This might be due to prejudice, as Paul found when he preached
the Gospel in Greece (1Co 1:23); prejudice created by Greek absorption in
philosophical speculation, which made the Christian Gospel seem absurd, or by
Jewish preconceptions which revolted against the thought of a crucified Messiah.
In our day, a greater or less degree of knowledge of the supposed teaching of
science closes many a mind to the message of Jesus. Again, as the Gospels show,
it was often the moral demands of Jesus, or the realisation that acceptance of
his claims would interfere with their power and prestige, that made it
impossible for his message to penetrate beneath the surface. Perhaps most often,
then as now, it was sheer worldliness, in the narrowest sense of the word,
absorption in the world of sense experience, that made men Gallios in the things
of the spirit.

There were others who felt attracted by the message, but their zeal was
short-lived. There is no need to interpret too precisely the sun that burnt up
their enthusiasm. It was natural that the preachers of the first and second
Christian generations should emphasize the effect of persecution, which may have
played a less important part in our Lord’s own life-time. Perhaps in many cases
it was the gradual realisation of all that citizenship in the Kingdom meant that
quenched their zeal, of the sacrifices it called for and the lofty demands it
made. There are many, too, who cannot be enthusiastic long about anything.

There were yet other hearers whose response to the call of Jesus was
intelligent, genuine and willing; men of deep natures who, if they had been
whole-hearted, could have held out. But for them devotion to the ideals of Jesus
was only one of the interests of their lives. In competition with these other
interests, without any conscious decision on their part or perhaps any conscious
struggle, their religious zeal gradually weakened till it perished. The
pleasure-seeking, the money-making and the worldly anxieties that the Gospel
writers find in the thorns are doubtless included among, though they do not
exhaust the list of, these dangerous and too often successful rivals of
enthusiasm for God. This is all that the Gospel writers tell us about the
matter: it is difficult to think that this is all that Jesus saw in it, or all
that he wants us to see in it. We want more than an analysis, however skilful,
of the causes of our failure.

Whatever may be said of the spiritual problem, at least the farmer’s problem was
capable of solution. If he wanted grain to grow on his by-path, all he had to do
was to plough it. If in patches the ground was too shallow, more earth could be
brought or the stones could be taken out. One has often looked with wonder and
admiration at the boulders that have been, at the cost of infinite labour, dug
out of an Ontario field, and now form a boundary dyke.

If thorns are choking the grain, they can be weeded out. In other words, by a
course of preparation, unproductive soil can be made fertile. What is the
counterpart of this in the spiritual world? The attitude of men and women to the
things of the spirit depends not only on their nature and their voluntary
choices, but also on their experience and their environment. Hardness of heart
and blindness of mind are not necessarily congenital but can be induced. Where
there is intense poverty, a state of semi-starvation may become a second nature,
so that a natural hunger practically ceases to function; and, when better times
come, people have to be taught to eat. A long course of insult and oppression
may embitter even a gentle nature, and harden a heart that is naturally tender.
Constant intercourse with people of base instincts and trivial ideals may lower
the whole standard of a life. Engaged in a constant and often unsuccessful
struggle for the elementary necessities of life, one may have so little time and
energy for the cultivation of the nobler faculties that, if they do not perish
of degeneration, at least they are so quiescent that one ceases to be conscious
of their existence. Physical pain, bodily weakness, failure in cherished
undertakings may, though they need not, so absorb all one’s energies that there
is no room for God; just as, at the opposite extreme, there are those whose
lives are so full of pleasing activities that God is shut out. People whose
souls have been steeped in an atmosphere of idolatry, with the moral outlook it
so often connotes, cannot all at once learn to breathe the air of the Kingdom of
God. Is there no means of softening hard hearts, or giving depth to superficial
hearts? Cannot he who opened the eyes of the blind man prevent such people from
dying? The attitude of Paul and Barnabas to the recalcitrant Jews, at Pisidian
Antioch and Iconium, for example, according to the account in Acts, suggests
that, when they found the ground hard, in their judgment the Christian attitude
was to pass on and plant the seed in more responsive soil (though Paul’s own
treatment of the Jewish problem in Rom 9:1-33; Rom 10:1-21; Rom 11:1-36 suggests
a far more patient and optimistic outlook, while the urgency of his mission, in
view of the expected imminent return of Jesus, must have influenced his
judgment). But one lesson of the Sower is that, for multitudes, preaching does
not by itself provide a pathway to the Kingdom. Our Lord’s healing ministry to
the distressed in body and in mind, his invitations to the rich to help the poor
(intended to remove spiritual obstacles from the rich even more than from the
poor), his attempts to free the people from the intolerable burdens imposed on
them by the religious lawyers, his efforts to open the eyes of the Pharisees to
the true nature of their religious code, were all by way of preparation, of
ploughing and removing stones and weeds. In the West, until lately and in a
measure still, in dealing with those sections of the population that seem to
feel least need of the Church and all that the Church stands for, we have gone
on mechanically offering them a Gospel which obviously means nothing to the vast
majority of them; often sending to them our youngest and least experienced
workers, imperfectly trained and with little equipment of any kind.

We have at last learned that souls are not to be captured with less ingenuity
than any other object of the chase, and that in his work God wants the
dedication of brain as well as heart. The varieties of social and educational
activities that now accompany our evangelistic efforts are a recognition of the
fact that the soil counts for something as well as the seed. But the Church
alone can never plough up all the hard ground, can never root out all the thorns
that choke the growth of all good. It needs the Church and the State and the
school all working together; and perhaps God alone, through the experiences of
life, can give depth to the shallow soul. On the mission field also, the crust
of age-long superstition, pride, contempt and unbrotherliness has to be broken
down before the seed can enter in with any hope of bearing fruit. Here too there
are thorns of abject poverty, arrogant wealth, painful and often loathsome
disease, ignorance, fear of all kinds, class and national conceit to be
extirpated if the seed, when it does take root, is not to be stifled at its
birth.

Hence the varieties of Mission work that sometimes puzzle so much the observer
at home, the hospitals and dispensaries, the schools and colleges, the homes and
hostels, the trainingschools, industrial institutions and printing presses, the
co-operative societies and farm colonies. This preparatory stage may continue
for generations before the Gospel gets an opportunity to show its real power.
This parable is a piece of splendid optimism. Where there is failure, it is
failure of a kind which can be traced to its sources and dealt with. But when
the seed falls on suitable soil that has been carefully prepared and protected
from hostile influences, God sends fruit out of all proportion to the seed that
has been sown or the labour that has been expended.


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  CHAPTER 11: 09 - CHAPTER 09
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CHAPTER IX THE DARNEL AMONG THE WHEAT Mat 13:24-30, Mat 13:36-43. IN the Sower
it was assumed that the thorns got in among the crop by accident. The Darnel
presents a new case in which the weeds are deliberately sown with hostile
intent. Let us ask first what the parable meant to “ Matthew ’ and the circle
for which he wrote. They may have had in mind cases of grave moral delinquency
in the Church. Was Paul right, for example, in recommending the excommunication
of the Corinthian Christian who was living with his father’s wife (1Co 5:4 f.)?
It seems unlikely that any Gospel writer could ascribe to Jesus the view that no
attempt should be made to root iniquity out of the Church.

More probably, the early Church regarded the parable as giving guidance on the
treatment to be accorded to Christians who held and taught beliefs that differed
from the received teaching of the authorities. There was, for example, the great
Pauline heresy, that Gentile believers might be baptized without first being
circumcised. The proper treatment for men whose beliefs were considered
dangerously erroneous must have been at first a matter for serious discussion.
Were they to be tolerated in the Church, or were they to be driven out? The
parable seemed to answer: “ Let the heretics alone. If their teaching is really
wrong and dangerous, in due time its true nature will show itself. Let God be
the judge.” This was, in fact, the advice which Gamaliel had given the members
of the Sanhedrin, when they wanted to root out their thorns, Peter and the other
apostles who had defied them (Acts 5:38 f.) The Jerusalem Council also decided
that the uncircumcised Gentile converts might remain in the Church, though some
members regarded their membership as a noxious weed (Acts 15:19).

Paul gave the same answer to the same question.

If on the foundation any man builds a structure of wood or thatch, there is no
need for us to burn it down; the Day, God’s Day, will show it up; the Fire will
bring out its true quality (1Co 3:13). But such questions can hardly have been
in the mind of Jesus. The opening scene conveys an important and memorable
truth. If there are farmers who sow good seed, there are other farmers who sow
darnel. In our Lord’s day, his disciples were not the only preachers; Pharisees
were scouring sea and land to make proselytes. In our day, if there are
missionaries of the cross, there are also missionaries of the Rationalist Press
Association, and there are distinguished novelists and essayists, often with the
most meagre knowledge of what they are discussing, using their influence to
discredit the Christian message. While Christian preachers and writers are
sowing the seed of lofty thought, pure ideals and upright conduct, multitudes in
the press, in the drink saloon, on the race course, in the cheap theatre, with
no thought but that of making money from the foibles of their fellow-men, are
briskly advertising their wares and sowing the seeds of destruction.

It is not only in the sphere of religion that good seems to be inextricably
intertwined with evil. Invention has enlarged the opportunity of the criminal as
well as of the respectable citizen, and discovery has smoothed the path of vice
as well as of virtue; so that many of us have a certain sympathy with Mr.
Gandhi’s desire to stop the march of what we call progress, if only it were
feasible or possible. But our Lord’s thought moved in the moral and spiritual
sphere. With the history of his own people in view, he knew how the system of
animal sacrifice had attached itself to the Jewish religion, and men at one and
the same time could believe that God was righteous and that by the blood of
bulls and goats God could be induced to forgive their sins. Pharisaic zeal for
the purity of their race and their religion had resulted in the ugly Pharisaism
depicted in the Gospels. A genuine desire to have all things clean in the sight
of God had been transformed into that ceremonialism which cleansed all the
appurtenances of religion except the heart of the worshipper. The Sabbath rest
had become a burden and tithing a mechanical tax. The Law, whose function was to
keep people walking in the ways of God, had been corrupted into a yoke beneath
which many refused to bend their necks, while those who did were like overladen
bullocks, struggling feebly and painfully along, unable to walk upright.

We have similar experiences in our own day.

We have only to look around to see how easily religion, however noble its
development, deteriorates till it becomes a parody of its former self. The
living Church becomes a dead institution, faith degenerates into a creed and
worship into a repetition of formulas and ceremonies. The ecclesiastic becomes a
poor substitute for the Churchman and the priest for the pastor. The sacrament
turns into the mystery and the joyous reading of the Bible issues in
fundamentalism.

Whether or not we have the parable in the precise form in which Jesus gave it,
at all events it graphically sets before us three points of great practical
importance. There are missionaries of evil as well as missionaries of good; the
evil and the good are intertwined in the closest way, the evil being often, in
fact, a parasite of the good; and rash attempts to destroy the evil may involve
the destruction of much of the good. In uprooting the magical element in the
sacramentalist’s attitude to religion, may we not at the same time destroy his
interest in the sacrament? Convince the fundamentalist of the intellectual
unsoundness of his position, and in some cases he may never again feel the same
joyful certainty in reading the old book. Who can tell us the precise point in
religion at which the external ends and the internal begins? The architecture,
the appurtenances, the liturgy, the music, the vestments, beautiful in
themselves and rich in historic memories and spiritual significance: can those
who regard these things as of the essence of their worship be deprived of them
without the quality of their worship being vitally affected? It is a live issue
with which this parable deals.

There was much that was revolting in the Judaism of our Lord’s day; yet he
conducted the whole of his ministry within its confines, and he knew that there
was another side to contemporary religion. In the introduction to his Gospel
Luke seems anxious to show the reverse side of the picture. There were men like
Zechariah and women like Elizabeth in the priestly families as well as the
priest who ignored the wounded traveller lying on the Jericho road and the
priests who hounded Jesus to his death. In the country there were simple
shepherds of unaffected piety with an ear for the heavenly choir. Even in
Jerusalem there were pious souls like Symeon and Hanna waiting for the coming of
the glory of the Lord. Even in the Temple one might see the doctors amazed at
the questions and answers of the child Jesus. Our Lord did attack the
corruptions of Judaism in some of the fiercest denunciations in literature; yet
in all his dealings with it he kept in view his own principle that the uprooting
of the evil should not endanger the good. He must have loathed the stream of
animal blood that flowed in the name of God, yet we nowhere read that he
denounced animal sacrifice: he left the system to perish, and it did perish. He
knew how far the priests had fallen from the priestly ideal, but he nowhere
suggested the abolition of the priesthood. To the last he remained loyal to the
Temple in spite of its corruptions. So far was he from proposing to break loose
from the whole Judaic system that after he was taken from them his followers
still thought of themselves as Jews and continued to worship in the temple. When
the harvest was ripe the separation took place spontaneously. On every mission
field we have learned the wisdom of the warning that, in seeking to lop off
rotten branches, we may kill the tree. There are many pious souls to whom a work
of destruction is very congenial, but Sodom is not the only city that is worth
saving if there are even ten righteous men within it.


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  CHAPTER 12: 10 - CHAPTER 10
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CHAPTER X THE GREAT SUPPER Luk 14:15-24; Mat 22:1-46. IN the Sower the problem
was put from the point of view of the evangelist: ’ Why does our appeal so often
fall on deaf ears? ’ but the Great Supper is a parable for the people. ’ The
feast is spread: why will ye not come? ’ The picture, too, is different; here we
have no demand for fruit of seed that has been sown, but an invitation to a
joyous experience. This is one of Jesus’ favourite thoughts: the Kingdom as
social joy, as the satisfaction of hunger, the fulfilment of desire. ’ They
shall come from east and west and from north and south and take their places at
the feast in God’s kingdom ’ (Luk 13:28). “ Enter thou into the joy of thy
Lord.” Nor was the host content with providing the feast; he could not rest till
every seat was occupied, till the guest-chamber was filled. In the Sower the
explanation of fruitlessness was that the ground had not been prepared. That
leaves us with the question: ’ If the ground is carefully prepared, ploughed and
harrowed and weeded and given a sufficiency of soil, is the harvest certain? ’
Even in the sphere of agriculture, the result is still contingent; frost, or
deficient rain, or excessive rain, or blight or birds or insects or animals, may
blast the hopes of the farmer, however careful his work of preparation. In the
spiritual sphere we have to reckon with free will; the invited guests are not
brought into the kingdom by violence, The first guest pleads that he is engaged
in the operation known to economists as extensive agriculture. Having some
capital to spare he thinks he can best use it in taking in some more ground. He
wants one of the healthiest and most satisfying of all joys, the joy of looking
on a piece of God’s earth and saying: “ This is mine, to do with it what I
will.” The second is engaged in intensive agriculture. His superfluous capital
he proposes to use in cultivating more efficiently the ground he has; so he has
bought five more pairs of bullocks and now wants the thrill of seeing his new
teams at work. The third intimates that he has just got married: ’ That is why /
cannot come.”

They were all apparently, certainly the first two, busy men, but it was not
their work that kept them from the feast. The first wanted to see his new field,
the second to try his new bullocks, the third to be with his new wife.

They were all prosperous men, extending the sphere of their operations and
responsibilities; it was in this “ newness “ that their trouble lay. The things
they were doing were all things that could wait, but they would not wait. In no
case was it vice that kept them from the feast. They were all respectable men,
engaged in useful work, and presumably good citizens; but they were preoccupied.
Their minds were so engrossed with the things that had caught their attention at
the moment that they forgot that there were other people in the world beside
themselves and that life held other interests than theirs. At first sight the
parable seems to suggest a depreciation of work or of family life. In so many of
his parables Jesus made the worker, especially the agricultural worker, his
hero, that we may be sure this first impression is wrong; yet it need not be
altogether wrong. As Dr. Marshall pointed out a generation ago the farmer,
especially the peasant proprietor, is under a grave temptation to allow his work
to dwarf every other consideration, to lead him to forget the claims not only of
culture, not only of the arts and graces of life, but even of happiness, of
health and comfort, nay of common decency. But there is a much bigger question
involved.

Nowadays we scorn the teaching of the third chapter of Genesis that work is a
curse imposed on us as a penalty for the sin of our first parents. But the
Genesis story does not suggest that the ideal for man is a state of chronic
idleness. The curse it has in view is not labour, but a particular kind of
labour, the unremitting toil of hard and bitter wrestling with a reluctant soil.
When we think of it dispassionately, is there not a certain degradation in the
fact that so much of the time, the energy, the thought of so large a proportion
of the population even in the most advanced countries, should be devoted to the
satisfaction of our elementary economic needs? In ancient Athens, the citizens
made the intellectual life possible for themselves by handing over the drudgery
to slaves, as the favoured few in our day hand it over to the wage-earners. It
is true also that those forms of labour which do not turn men into robots, which
are not essentially disgusting, and which leave the worker a certain amount of
leisure, are consistent with lives of a lofty and even a noble quality. The fact
remains that so long as the economic motive reigns supreme, so long as for
multitudes life is one long, hard struggle for the means of subsistence, the
human race is at an elementary stage. For the first time in history modern
science is pointing to us a better way. The pains from which the world suffers
to-day are “ growing “pains. We are already able to produce, not faster than the
world can consume, but faster than the world can buy, and our means of
production are increasing by leaps and bounds. When our statesmen and economists
have found out for us how to lay hold of and enjoy the riches that the earth is
ready to pour into our lap, then there is good reason to hope that we shall at
last enter our inheritance. Then shall all men be able to look up, not only at
the close of the day as the darkness falls, but oftentimes when the sun is yet
shining, look up from their fields and their bullocks, hearken and respond to
the invitation from the great Lord of all to come to the feast, the feast of
intellectual and artistic and spiritual treasures to which he daily invites us,
in the palace which it is his joy to see filled with guests. In both accounts of
the parable the feast was in celebration of some joyous event in the life of one
whom the guests should have delighted to honour. So obsessed were they with the
claims of their own self-advancement that they had no sympathy with their
friend’s joy. There is a time to do our own work and there is a time to think of
others. There is a time to work, and there is a time to see our work in its
relative unimportance, to ask ourselves whether our work is our servant or our
master. The invited guests did not attend the banquet, because they had no sense
of need; they were not hungry, whether for food or for fellowship.

They felt no need of anyone, and had no idea that anyone, least of all their
king, could feel need of them. So the invitation went to those who would
appreciate it, to the hungry and the lonely, to those who knew that they were
poor and naked and had need of all things. In this parable, as elsewhere, Jesus
speaks of the hunger in the heart of God, hunger for his children, for their
loyalty, for their devotion and their love. It is his will, his fixed
determination, that his house shall be filled. The invited guests would not
come; the punishment was that they were not allowed to come; they were held to
their choice. ’ This is the judgment: that the Light has come into the world and
men have loved the darkness rather than the light “ (John 3:19). The door into
the festal chamber was shut; thev had shut it with their own hands.

It seems clear that for Luke the guests first invited were the Jews, who tried
more or less successfully to keep the Law; that the city outcasts next invited
were the tax-collectors and “ sinners; ’ and that the offscourings of the
country lanes invited last were the Gentiles.

(In the Wicked Vinedressers also, the Vineyard was given to others only when the
first Vinedressers, the Jewish leaders, proved unworthy.) Can we believe that
this conception of the Gentile mission as an after-thought, of the Gentiles as
being brought into the Kingdom as poor substitutes only when the Jews declined
to enter, represented the mind of Jesus?

Doubtless this was a common enough view among the first Christian preachers. It
is a conception we get in the Acts. “ Since you (Jews) thrust the word of God
from you... lo! we turn to the Gentiles ’ (Acts 13:46). But Jesus’ tribute to
the men of Nineveh, to Naaman, the Queen of Sheba, to the Roman centurion and
the Syrophenician woman, forbid us to think that in his scheme of things the
whole Gentile world held this insignificant place. To the last the Temple was
for him a house of prayer “ for all nations.” In his account of Peter’s vision
at Joppa, Luke himself (Acts 10:1-48) gives us the true mind of Christ. The same
Lord who had made all foods clean and made all peoples clean, had declared that
the whole distinction between clean and unclean was a tragic misunderstanding of
the mind of God.


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  CHAPTER 13: 11 - CHAPTER 11
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CHAPTER XI THE MAN WITHOUT THE WEDDING GARMENT

Mat 22:11-14 IN Matthew’s version of the Great Feast, after the great rejection
the servants were instructed to invite ’ everybody you happen to meet ’ (Mat
22:9), and those who responded included the bad as well as the good (Mat 22:10).
In view of the Christian emphasis on character, if there was not to be grave
misunderstanding of the point of the parable, some explanation seemed to be
called for.

It is easy to see how the story that emphasized the importance of the wedding
garment came to be added: it is not so easy to feel sure that the addition was
made by Jesus, at least in connection with this parable. Our Lord was not at all
afraid of being misunderstood, since men had ears to hear with. The treatment of
the unfortunate guest is painfully out of harmony with the gracious spirit of
the parable. The story is brief to the point of obscurity. We are not told that
a particular dress was obligatory on the guests. We wonder why the guest, when
questioned, did not give the obvious answer that paupers have no decent clothing
of any kind, much less wedding robes. If it was the custom, as some would have
us believe, for royal hosts to provide suitable array, why is a fact so
important left to the imagination? The doom of the rejected guest is expressed
in conventional language (cf. Mat 25:30, Luk 13:27 f, and the implication of Mat
25:12). The conventional moral that Matthew draws is also misapplied (Mat 25:12)
since, of all the guests to whom the later invitation was sent, only one was
rejected. The figure may have been suggested by the threat in Zep 1:7 of
punishment ’ to all such as are clothed with strange (foreign) apparel.” In any
case the parable conveys the true lesson that while the invitation is to all,
admission to the kingdom is for those only who are prepared to wear the uniform
of the kingdom, to live in loyal obedience to the King’s will. The invitation is
to the poor, maimed, blind and lame.

If we enter the kingdom in that spirit which alone entitles us to citizenship,
our rags are transformed, our blindness forgotten; we stand erect on our feet
and join the throng that enters God’s temple to give thanks.


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  CHAPTER 14: 12 - CHAPTER 12
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CHAPTER XII THE WICKED VINEDRESSERS Mat 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; Luk 20:9-19 This
parable deals with yet another aspect of the problem of the rejection of Jesus.
If Jesus was the embodiment of Jewish ideals and the fulfilment of Jewish
prophecy, then the men who were officially responsible for preserving these
ideals and treasuring these prophecies should surely have recognized him when he
came. On the contrary it was they who had secured his condemnation. In dealing
with this disconcerting situation, the Christian evangelists had the advantage
of Jesus’ own verdict on it, the parable of the Vinedressers.

It is not surprising that it is one of the four told by all the Synoptists. In
all three it comes near the end of the Gospel story when the Jewish leaders had
made up their minds. In Matthew the “Vinedressers” comes immediately before the
Great Supper, with which it has many features in common, including, in his
account, the reference to the Son. Read in the light of the stories that
precede, we can see what the parable meant to the Synoptists, what undoubtedly
it meant to Jesus. No attempt to deny this parable to Jesus has succeeded. Are
we to reject it because it is an allegory? He who gave a broader reach and a
deeper depth to the Law of Moses would not have hesitated to ignore the dictates
of a modern grammarian. Is it suggested that Jesus could not have foreseen his
death? No divine penetration was needed to know that the storm which had long
been gathering was about to break on his head. He knew whether he meant to flee
that storm. As has been pointed out, if the parable had been the work of
Christian preachers, there would have been a reference to the resurrection as
well as to the death of the Son. Could Jesus have referred to himself as the
Lord of the Vineyard’s only son, the Beloved? These are the very terms used of
him in the story of the Baptism and the Transfiguration. The Temptation story,
which must have come from himself, is based on his unique sonship. The
authenticity of this parable can be seriously questioned only by those for whom
it is impossible that Jesus should have spoken of himself in the words ascribed
to him in Mat 11:28. The parable gives us a most vivid glimpse into Jesus’
thought of the infinite and loving patience with which God had watched over
Israel, the almost incredible perversity with which Israel had scorned that
patience and that love. The stern words which announce the doom of the
vinedressers and the transference of their privileges to others Matthew puts
into the mouth of the bystanders. If they ever suggest to us a tone of gloating
revenge, let us read the lament of Jesus over Jerusalem and see there the real
feelings with which Jesus saw the nation he loved, at the end of a career of
glorious possibilities, voluntarily choosing the path that led to destruction.
Whatever the tone in which Jesus pronounced sentence on the nation, no prophecy
in history has been more abundantly fulfilled.

Unerringly Jesus put his finger on the sore spot. The vinedressers were God’s
agents, but they did not recognize any responsibility to God. They regarded the
vineyard as their own, and Jesus was threatening to displace them from their
position of authority. They claimed to sit on Moses’ seat: Jesus claimed an
authority above that of Moses. They expounded the Law: Jesus taught not as the
Scribes. They were self-appointed guardians of the tradition: for Jesus the
tradition was a yoke that crushed the life out of religion. On points to which
the Pharisees attached enormous importance Jesus strenuously attacked Pharisaic
practice. The parable must be read in the context of the whole preceding
section. This parable, perhaps alone of all the parables, is not a call to
action, but a parable of judgment.

“ Too late! Too late! Te cannot enter now?’

Jesus depicts the vinedressers as recognizing the heir. In any case the parable
graphically portrays the danger that besets a Church when it becomes an
institution, with the full apparatus of creed, organisation and officials.
Henceforth the institution becomes a citadel to be defended; henceforth the
discovery, the preservation, the propagation of truth may be an aim; at best, it
is only one aim and may cease to be an aim at all. Not truth but the creed; not
the welfare of the world, but the prosperity of the Church; not the glory of God
but the honour and prestige of the officials: if the Jewish Church did not
escape the danger of making these aims paramount, who will claim that the
Christian Churches have always escaped them? It is easy to recognize in other
Churches the counterpart of the Vinedressers; it is always more profitable to
find it in ourselves and our colleagues.

There must have been honest men among the Pharisees, the Scribes and the
Priests. Here and there there must have been a Gamaliel, a Nicodemus, a Joseph
of Arimathaea, not utterly blinded. In the early days of the Church we hear of
the conversion of ’ a great crowd of priests ’ (Acts 6:7): but the machine was
against them as it has so often been in the history of the Church.
Institutionalize the Church, and immediately an immense weight is thrown on the
side of conservatism, alike in belief and practice; a weight so immense that the
institution, when it moves at all, moves with infinite leisure and with
uncertain aim. We are so anxious to preserve the ark of God from falling that
often we do not let it move at all. No Church with a developed organisation
seems really to have solved this problem, and to be able to offer a hospitable
welcome to new truth and to new claims upon us however just. Well may Jesus have
spoken the parable of the Darnel.

Sometimes the greatest danger in uprooting the darnel is that the darnel may
after all turn out to be wheat, its true nature revealed only at the harvest.
But in this parable our Lord had something more in view than the conservatism of
the institution. He clearly points to the special temptation of the Church
dignitaries. Strongly entrenched as they often are in positions of power,
influence and prestige, their temptation is to feel resentment against any
person, plan, organisation or idea that threatens to dethrone them. It has
sometimes been suggested that the interference by Jesus with a profitable
monopoly of the priests in the sale of animals for sacrifice and the work of
money-changing added the final touch of exasperation that made them resolve on
his death. There may well be some truth in this; yet the whole impression left
on our minds by the story of the opposition to Jesus is that financial
considerations played a minor part if any. The degenerate Churchman has often
been too fond of money, as Luke, with whatever justification, says the Pharisees
were (Luk 16:14); yet the special temptation of the ecclesiastic is not greed
but worldly ambition. In its coarsest form, this ambition takes shape in as a
love of power, of splendour, of adulation; in a less vulgar manifestation it is
a craving for leadership; in its most sublimated form it becomes the desire, not
only that good should be done but that we should do it, a desire to be first in
the service of men. It has been true in the Christian Church, as it was true in
the Jewish Church, that infinitely more harm has been wrought by some form of
worldly ambition than by any kind of self-indulgence. He who to-day holds the
allegiance of more men and women than any other, during his lifetime held no
official position; had no servants and no subordinates; had no promotion to
offer save more intimate fellowship with himself, especially in his sufferings,
and no weapon of discipline save the loving appeal. The only one of the twelve
who did not continue in the fellowship left of his own accord. In the foreign
enterprise of the Church, no small part of the work of the missionary to-day is
the gradual devolution on Christian nationals of duties and responsibilities
formerly wielded by the missionaries from the West. The formation in all the
more advanced mission fields of indigenous Churches responsible for their own
administration, and the gradual transference to these Churches of the task and
privilege of evangelising the country to which they belong, is an indication
that in this department of our Church work the lesson of the Vinedressers has
been taken to heart. Nor is it only in the sphere of the Christian Church that
the temptation is present and the warning needed. For thousands of years the
higher castes of India, by the exercise of much ingenuity and with wonderful
pertinacity, have clung to their exalted position. Even to-day we are witnessing
hardly more than the beginning of the breakdown of the system, if indeed it is
to be broken down at all. In this these castes are typical of aristocracies
almost everywhere, whether they be aristocracies of birth or colour of wealth or
privilege. “ Noblesse oblige; “but we prefer to help our weaker neighbour from
the eminence of our own exalted position; we are seldom eager to help him to
climb up beside us.


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  CHAPTER 15: 13 - CHAPTER 13
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CHAPTER XIII THE BARREN FIG-TREE

Luk 13:6-9

[N discussing the Sower, we suggested that one of the main points of the parable
is that, if the seed is to yield fruit, the soil must be carefully prepared.
That lesson is even more clearly brought out in the Fig-Tree. In some of the
parables, like the Sower and the Fishing Net, though there are people present,
the action moves forward in silence. In others, though there is speech, some of
the prominent actors are significantly silent: Lazarus, for example, the
tax-collector, and all the figures in the Good Samaritan except the Samaritan
himself. Others, again, are conversational parables in which the conclusion is
reached after different points of view have been presented. The farmer’s men
want to root out the darnel here and now; the farmer decides for delay. The
unforgiving creditor, his debtor, his lord, his fellow-servants, all have their
views on the treatment of an insolvent debtor by his creditor. The father and
the elder brother present two contrasted views on the treatment appropriate for
a returning prodigal. The master differs from the one-talent man about the
latter’s duty. The owner of the vineyard and his man are at variance in their
prescriptions for a fig-tree that bears no figs. As Mr. Cyril Flower has pointed
out, apparently the owner had neither planted nor tended the tree himself. He
had no love for it; to him it was simply a business proposition, simply a source
of income. Poets and artists have thought that there were other things about a
tree besides its capacity for earning money; but this gentleman wants no
nonsense of that kind.

He is one of the rationalisers of industry. ’ What is a tree for anyhow? “ he
asks. ’ If it is not producing an income, it is not only good for nothing; it is
occupying valuable space on which one could plant a real tree, a money-making
tree.” This man is good at “ cost-accounting,” and “ efficiency “ and “
scrap-heap “ are two of his favourite words. The gardener had an interest in the
tree of another kind. He had toiled over it, studied it, perhaps prayed over it;
above all, he loved the tree: that made a difference. He quietly accepts the
owner’s verdict that a fig-tree should bear figs; “ but,” he pleads, “ before we
impose the death penalty on this tree, let us be quite sure that its barrenness
is its own fault; it may turn out that it is our fault. Give it a chance, open
up the ground all round and let the air in. Feed it; give it some manure; then
let us see.’

Jesus knew that a generation trained under the scribes of his day was hardly in
a condition to bear fruit. A good deal of digging and manuring was required
before one could tell of what they were really capable. Even among his own
followers there were many “ little ones “ who in spiritual things hardly knew
their right hand from their left, whose tiny spark of spiritual life would be
extinguished if they were not treated with infinite tenderness. Some of Paul’s
converts bore fruit that could hardly be described even as wild grapes or crab
apples.

Instead of expelling them from the Church, he thanked God for them, prayed over
them, instructed them. Have the Brahmins of India on the whole rejected the
Christ who has been preached to them for a hundred years? Before we shake off
the dust of our feet against them, let us be quite sure that the Christ was
presented to them in conditions that would reveal him as he is, as something
more than a destroyer of Hinduism, as a non-controversial, non-denominational
Christ, a Christ not associated in their minds with repellent customs, ideas or
people. In the war cry of the Baptist, the axe was already at the root of the
tree; the fate of the fruitless tree was already sealed. In the teaching of
Jesus God in his infinite patience is always ready to give another chance, to
wait another year. But the extra year is not to be a year of idleness; it is to
be spent in toil, in ensuring that if the fruitlessness continues, it is because
the tree is rotten at the core. As Mr. Flower has pointed out, the parable, like
so many of the parables of Jesus, has a wide application. Until quite recently,
it was only when we saw a young criminal standing at the bar of justice that we
discovered for the first time that we had any relation to him. Now we want to
know his whole history from his birth and even before his birth, and we ask: ’
Has he had a chance? Has he been given any moral training, taught any useful
occupation, given any rational amusement, secured from a vicious environment,
taught anything about the world of unseen realities? ’ Almost till our own day,
children were punished, often with great cruelty, for stupidity. Now we
recognize that in multitudes of cases what they need is feeding and careful
training. We try to diagnose the particular nature and cause of the “ stupidity
“ and prescribe the appropriate remedy. The parable is altogether in the spirit
of our Lord’s teaching and of his life. Before we condemn a person, an
institution, a system, an undertaking, let us make sure it has had its chance.
It may be that all it needs is careful, patient attention. But there is one
stipulation, the work of digging round the tree and manuring it must be done by
one who loves the tree and has a personal interest in its welfare.


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  CHAPTER 16: 14 - CHAPTER 14
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CHAPTER XIV. THE HIDDEN TREASURE AND THE PEARL

Mat 13:44-46 THE parables we have discussed hitherto have been answers to the
question: “ Why do men refuse the invitation to become citizens of the Kingdom?"
The answers have been variants of the theme that they did not find such
citizenship attractive, at least sufficiently attractive to induce them to
enrol. In these two parables we have Jesus’ estimate of the worth of
citizenship: it is a treasure against which all life’s other treasures are
weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Jesus pictures two men each discovering a treasure which made all their previous
possessions seem mean and petty. To borrow a simile from Miss Underbill: Suppose
a man who has been blind from birth suddenly to receive the gift of sight. For
the first time he beholds the marvels of sky and field and sea, the beauty of
tree and flower and plant, the flight of birds, the graceful forms of the animal
world, the human countenance. Suppose a man who has been deaf from birth
suddenly to have his ears unstopped. For the first time he hears the songs of
singing birds, the sighing of the wind among the trees, the cheerful discords of
the farm-yard, the sound of the human voice. Imagine one who loves music and
whose soul has been starved for years in a foreign land to hear the first
strains of a symphony by a trained orchestra. Picture an intelligent youth
beginning the study of astronomy. In these and all such cases what happens is
not advance to a new stage in a known world; it is a thrill of a new kind, an
entrance into a joyous world till now unknown. It is an experience of that kind
our Lord depicts in these two parables. For the finder life is filled at once
with a new significance. No longer is it enough just to get through the day’s
work; the labourer must at all costs acquire the field that contains the
treasure; the merchant must at all costs become the owner of the precious pearl.
The stolid ploughman becomes the alert athlete; the sedate merchant is
transformed into the eager schoolboy. Till the prize be won, everything else
must wait, every other consideration be forgotten. In the joy of the great
discovery the finder is a “ new creature.” For the most part our generation
feels no such thrill at the thought of the life to which Jesus calls us. In Noel
Coward’s “ Cavalcade,” nothing was more impressive than the singing of the
soldiers during the Great War. There was in it a certain grim courage; but it
was the courage of men resolved to go on till the death in a stern task in which
they can see no meaning and to which they can see no end, music infinitely sad
and weirdly pathetic, a music that seems to typify the post-war generation even
more than the generation that went through the war. In the world as Jesus knew
it the strong man armed held mighty sway; there were paupers and parasites,
diseases of body and mind in their most repulsive forms, moral cripples and
pretentious hypocrites. Yet he never despaired, never wavered in his conviction
that the world was God’s world, never thought of men as a race of crawling ants.
He knew that the strong man armed had met a stronger, that the blind could be
made to see and the deaf to hear, that disease could be cured and leprosy
cleansed, that demons could be exorcised, prostitutes turned into saints and
cheats into honest men. In the Gospels, not least in the parables, life has
infinite significance, the world is instinct with purpose, men are called to
tasks worthy of men. Jesus and the disciple circle were often weary, sometimes
perhaps despondent; but they were never bored. Men to-day may be right in
thinking that life as it is commonly lived is hardly worth living; but life in “
the Kingdom of God,” in the world as God meant it to be, and as it might become,
is abundantly worth living. In our preaching do we not dwell too much on smaller
themes, and forget to hold before men the splendour of the treasure, the glory
of the pearl? But the farm-labourer did not simply add the treasure to his
little store of goods and chattels, nor did the unique pearl just become a new
item in the merchant’s collection. In both cases there was a price to be paid
and the price was all their other possessions. The parable is a commentary on
the story of the rich ruler, may indeed have been spoken on the occasion of that
famous interview. It is in line with the teaching of Jesus, which at times seems
so harsh, that the dearest of familyties, the noblest talents, the most
cherished possessions, must not be allowed to stand in the way of the fulfilment
of the end and aim of cur being.

We think of some of the other pearls that men prize, pearls of very varying
degrees of worth, family affection, success in business, social prestige, fame
or power, scholarship or art, amusement or passing the time as pleasantly as
possible, good health or athletic prowess. We are allegorizing when we interpret
the parable to mean that all these are to be abandoned if we are to claim our
citizenship in the kingdom. On the contrary it is partly through some of these
that our citizenship is manifested. The parable is a comparison of values; its
lesson is that to be a citizen of the kingdom outweighs in value all other
objects of pursuit, and that, when there is a clash, if we subordinate our
citizenship to any other aim, we are dealing a vital blow at that which makes us
men and women. On this point our Lord was adamant; it was one of his constant
themes that our dearest privileges are also the source of our keenest
temptations. This is the parable in its simplest form, When the peasant sold his
odds and ends of furniture to buy a field that contained a box of treasure, he
was no fool; and when the follower of Jesus ignores the ordinary prizes of life
he is displaying the highest wisdom. The fact remains that most men do not think
so. We continue to assume that the money bait is practically the only one that
will call forth the higher forms of service. The man who does not make his own
comfort one of the primary aims of his life is looked on as a being of another
flesh and blood, as in fact he is. In the thought of Jesus sacrifice in itself
has no significance. The hidden treasure, the pearl of great price, await those
who for his sake have sat lightly to earth’s allurements. But the rewards that
God gives are such as none can appreciate save those who are purged of all gross
desires and all worldly ambitions.


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  CHAPTER 17: 15 - CHAPTER 15
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CHAPTER XV THE MUSTARD SEED Mark 4:30-32; Mat 13:31 f.; Luk 13:18 f. THE
smallness of the mustard-seed was proverbial: “ If you have faith as a grain of
mustardseed.” Experts tell us that the plant Jesus has in mind is commonly
planted in gardens, and grows rapidly to a height of ten or twelve feet, and
that its branches attract birds to eat the seeds though not to make nests. (This
last feature may have been suggested by Dan 4:12, Dan 4:21, and Eze 17:23). The
cheerful optimism of this parable shows that those are right who refuse to
interpret the Sower as an utterance of despair. From whatever point we trace the
beginning of the Kingdom, its rise seems so insignificant as to attract
practically no attention. But when the Kingdom does arise, even in germ, it is
something new. The writer; To the Hebrews ’ speaks of a door between men and God
that remained in some sense closed until Jesus opened it, of the road from man
to God and from God to man as in some sense blocked till Jesus gave us the new
and living way, of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in this sense that our
conception of God is our knowledge of Jesus. Others before him had had lofty and
true thoughts of God, but it is from the birth of Jesus that we count our dates.
The kingdom grows from generation to generation, ever embracing larger numbers
under its sway, ever unfolding some new significance.

Almost down to our own day our creed-makers and our organisation-builders forgot
that the Kingdom grows like a tree; that we cannot say of the seed, the first
shoots, the earliest branches,: This is the tree; thus far and no farther.”

We must wait and see whereunto this will grow. The trees of earth in time reach
their full stature, in time fade and die; but the tree of God grows while the
world lasts, ever giving us new thoughts of God, ever expanding the circle of
those who have claims upon us, ever deepening our conception of those claims.

Let us try as we will to limit God, to put boundaries round ourselves or our
Church, to stop the flow of Christian thought, try as we will to narrow the
sphere of Christian duty, to restrict the sphere of Christian influence, to
stifle the urge of Christian charity, the tree will burst all bonds asunder and
go on growing. The tree will bring forth nothing that was not in the seed; but
it has brought forth many things, it will bring forth many things, that we never
imagined were in the seed. The growth of the tree is the gradual revelation of
the meaning of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ; for revelation is not an
event but a process, and God is writing still, and will go on writing, the pages
of his New Testament. Here and there a branch may be lopped off, as the once
flourishing Christian Church of North Africa perished under persecution and
disappeared from the face of the earth. But the tree of life grows and grows for
ever, because it is the tree of God, planted near by a river, the river of the
water of life. Can we identify the tree with the Church?

Yes, the mustard plant is the Church, the fellowship of them that come to God
through Jesus, and seek to live their lives in the strength that he gives. How
far this Church coincides with those whose names are written in our communion
rolls, we leave to God to decide. We can see that the work of the Church, not
least its work in foreign lands, is carried on by minorities, often small
minorities. But there is the more cheerful truth that the Kingdom may be
advancing, surely if imperceptibly, at times when even loyal members of the
Church are beginning to question whether there is faith on the earth.

God’s knowledge is deeper than ours, his charity greater.

We wonder at the faith of Jesus, who, in a tiny corner of the world, with so
little apparent prospect of success, had such insight into the future. But can
we marvel sufficiently at the Christian preachers who went on their missionary
journeys from country to country, realizing the immensity of the task they were
undertaking, the apparently irresistible might of the forces arrayed against
them, the slenderness of their own human resources, the indifference or contempt
with which their message was so often met; yet had the faith to go on repeating
this parable?


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  CHAPTER 18: 16 - CHAPTER 16
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CHAPTER XVI THE SEED GROWING OF ITSELF

Mark 4:26-29. THIS parable, recorded by Mark alone, goes naturally with the
Mustard Seed. It has been misinterpreted in two ways; first by the misleading
title ’ The Seed Growing Secretly; ’ secondly, by finding the lesson in the
slowness of the plant’s growth: if there is any time reference at all, surely it
is to the speed of the growth. But the emphasis is neither on the rapidity nor
on the gradual nature nor on the certainty of the growth, though these may be
all implicit. In the Sower, the farmer who planted the seed was a prominent
figure. This parable reminds us that he may be too prominent. Many things the
farmer can do; nay, must do: one thing he cannot do; he cannot make a single
blade of corn grow. When he has done his part, the growth goes on, silently,
imperceptibly, inevitably, but “ automatically,” whether the farmer wakes or
sleepes. Revivals do not come by organisation. “ Why could not we cast him out?
’ Because we thought we could. The Red Indian may.count his scalps and the
football player his goals; the Christian must not reckon up the number he has
brought to Christ. For one thing no one can analyse the contribution of each
human instrument at work in any spiritual achievement. The last agent employed
by God is not necessarily the only or the main agent. In any case we are but
servants, farm-labourers who plant or irrigate; it is God who gives the
increase. If the parable is a rebuke to boasting, no less is it a warning
against despondency. If the farmer honestly does, day by day, the work that lies
before him, he is entitled to his quiet rest by night. Whether or not in the
morning the corn is perceptibly higher than the day before, he can leave the
future in God’s hands. The responsibility is his; in due time the harvest will
come. This parable has the historic importance of having been used, a generation
ago, to discredit the motto of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union: “ The
Evangelisation of the World in This Generation.” If the organizers had had any
real conception, it was urged, of the nature of the task they were undertaking,
the gigantic areas involved, the teeming millions of the population, the
difficulties of reaching them, the varieties of creed professed, the age-long
prestige behind them, the vested interests that sheltered under them, they would
have seen the absurdity of their hopes. Perhaps they were wrong in fixing a time
limit; our times are in God’s hands; God does not count time as we do and hastes
not even as he rests not. Perhaps also they thought too much in geographical
areas. It is the people, not the areas, that are to be evangelized; and even if
the programme had been carried out, the inhabitants of the areas would have
largely changed during the generation of accomplishment.

Yet the aim itself was entirely in the spirit of the parable; and the faith that
inspired it, quixotic as it seemed to common sense, is the kind of faith our
Lord enjoined on his disciples. But the harvest does not come unless the
husbandmen, all the husbandmen, do their part. We have seen the wonderful
advance that is possible when small minorities of enthusiasts, some in the home
land, some in lands afar, prepare the soil, sow the seed, and weed and irrigate.
What would happen with a whole Church in earnest, with a deep sense of
indebtedness to God and to Jesus Christ, prayerfully working in the confident
belief that they had a message that could save mankind as to that we have no
knowledge, for we have no experience.


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  CHAPTER 19: 17 - CHAPTER 17
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CHAPTER XVII THE LEAVEN Mat 13:33; Luk 13:20 f. OUR Lord watches a woman baking
the family bread; he notes how the yeast lays itself alongside the flour and, by
a process of transforming influence, moulds it into a new creation. He marks how
the yeast works gradually, powerfully, inevitably, passing from grain to grain
of the flour, changing the nature of all it touches.

“ That,” said Jesus, “ is how the Kingdom of God grows.”

There is here the same trust in God, the same confident belief in the future of
the Kingdom, that we found in the Mustard Seed. But there is a new idea, the
idea of an irresistible force, subduing to its will all that it meets, bringing
within its sphere of influence ever new individuals, new groups, new spheres of
thought, new departments of life; giving us new creatures, a new Covenant, new
heavens and a new earth. The forces of the Kingdom, then, are to work by their
own inherent influence; men are to be induced, not compelled, to wear its
uniform. The ideals of the Kingdom are to be gladly accepted, not thrust upon
us. The communism of the early Jerusalem Church was not the fiat of an
organisation but a spontaneous outburst of Christian giving. Ananias and
Sapphira were at perfect liberty to retain the whole proceeds of the sale of
their property had they so chosen.

Slaves were not to demand their freedom, but to wait till their masters learned
a more excellent way. In all our thought of the evangelisation of the world, we
have a tendency to picture as the main force at work officially appointed
missionaries using the official agencies of sermons, schools, hospitals and the
printing press. It may be doubted if this is how Christianity ever has spread in
any large community beyond the initial stages. In any case it is not the way of
the parable, which pictures the new religion as having within itself its own
expansive force; or, if we may so put it, the lives of Christian people as the
supreme missionary force.

History has confirmed both the justice of our Lord’s faith in the expansive
power of the Kingdom and the wisdom of his method. During the last century we
have seen one fortress after another of entrenched wrong crumble before the
spread of Christian ideas. The British in India have sometimes been blamed by
Indians for not adopting more drastic methods in dealing with the moral sores of
that country; yet on the whole the leavening principle has worked effectively,
if slowly. It has been recognized that legislation itself has a certain
educative effect; but the general policy has been to suppress no social evil
till public opinion was sufficiently advanced to see the wisdom of the move.
Thus suttee, the murder of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, is now unknown
except in sporadic cases.

If the use of images still plays a large part in the religion of the masses,
idolatry has largely lost its hold over the minds of the educated. At last we
see the beginning even of the recognition as human beings of those we now
euphemistically call the depressed classes. The measure in which we use
compulsion is the measure of our unbelief. The lesson of the parable is that
truth, once it gets a grip, has sufficient vitality in itself to spread. In our
own country, more perhaps than in any other, in our social and political life,
with a few terrible exceptions even in our religious life, the instrument of
persuasion has been the leaven rather than the legal code or the sword. In the
new India, Mr. Gandhi has told us, he will welcome our Christian hospitals and
agencies for social uplift, but not our Christian propaganda. It may be that
Christian charity, to exercise its full missionary power, requires an
explanatory commentary; but surely Mr. Gandhi underestimates the attractive
power of the Christian life as much as he overestimates the persuasive power of
the Christian word. The Hindu, like the Pharisee of our Lord’s time, believes
that uncleanness, by which they both mean ceremonial uncleanness, is contagious,
that it passes with destructive effect from man to man, from man to object, from
object to man. Our Lord had no fear of such contagion, had no doctrine of
untouchability. In contact with the leper, the woman of the city, the woman with
the hasmorrhage, far from being defiled by their defilement he made the unclean
clean.

“ Till the whole has been leavened.” Does this phrase simply complete the story
of the baking operations, or does it point to a time when in every corner of the
world, in every region of thought and life, Jesus Christ will reign?

One would like to believe it; but with the Darnel, the Great Supper and the
Vinedressers among the parables, we cannot say it is the teaching of Jesus. Man
has the terrible power of saying, ’ I pray thee have me excused.” “ Lord, are
there few that be saved? ’ “ Strive ye to enter in at the strait gate.”


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  CHAPTER 20: 18 - CHAPTER 18
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CHAPTER XVIII THE FISHING NET

Mat 13:47-50.

ONCE again, in a scene as familiar to his hearers as to himself, Jesus sees an
illustration of a point he wishes to make clear. He has often noted how the
fishing-net, working unintelligently, inexorably, ruthlessly, drags within its
meshes all kinds of marine objects, animate and inanimate. When the net is drawn
to the shore, the fishermen set to work on the motley collection; for the first
time an intelligent principle is brought to bear on the seething mass. A
selection is made; the fishermen are after fish that they can sell; all objects
that answer this description are carefully separated and placed in baskets. The
other objects in the net may have other uses; some of them certainly have: but
they are of no use for the fisherman’s purpose; in them he is not interested and
they are tossed outside.

There is no parable to which hilicher’s main principle is more applicable. There
is one point, and one only: the Kingdom works as a divisive force. We are to
find here no teaching of the fate in this life or in the life which is to come
of those who are cast aside. God has still his relation to them; the citizens of
the Kingdom have still their duty towards them. Our Lord was speaking out of his
experience; as he came in contact with one after another, and delivered his
message, he acted as a touchstone. Some gladly accepted; some turned against him
with scorn and malice; some begged to be excused. Our Lord seems to have been
deeply impressed with this selective power of the Kingdom. Many of those who are
tossed aside as being useless for the Kingdom may have capacities very valuable
for other purposes. They may be poets or artists, inventors or business
organizers, good fellows, amusing fellows, and so forth; is all this to go for
nothing? Is not life a far broader and richer thing than these narrow ethical
and spiritual tests of Jesus would make it? Many would tell us that he ignores
some of the most important and valuable spheres of life. Art has its kingdom and
its kings, its citizens and its laws. There are realms of knowledge as well as
the realm of God, princes of science and discovery as well as sons of God; there
are industrial triumphs and political achievements which take their place at
least alongside the spiritual victories to which the followers of Jesus attach
so much importance. In the saner forms of this criticism there is a real
difficulty, but our Lord would accept the challenge. The Kingdom does not exist
in a vacuum; its forces can be seen at work only in life’s other activities, but
its place among them is always the supreme place. For Jesus the Kingdom of God
is not a kingdom but the kingdom. Its aims and tests and values are the ultimate
aims and tests and values, in the long run the only ones that count. Our Lord’s
means of locomotion were his feet, the fishing boat, and a horse or ass. There
is no indication that he felt his ministry impeded by the primitive nature of
his means of communication, that his work would have been more effective had he
used a car, or that he would have considered the inventor of such a machine
necessarily entitled to a high place in the Kingdom. He had never seen a mill or
factory. If he had, his one question would have been: “ Have they brought men
nearer God; the men and women that work in them as well as the men and women who
consume their products? ’ There are indications, in the story of the
Syro-Phoenician for example, that he appreciated ready wit, and recognized that
a healthy humour gives salt to life. In all his recorded utterances there is no
reference to a picture, save those which God has drawn with his own hands; or to
a piece of music, save the Hosannas of the children; or any certain reference to
literature save the sacred books of the Jews. But neither do we find any
depreciation of these things, and in so far as they enrich and uplift life,
surely our Lord would have welcomed them as allies. The subject is one on which
it is easy to depart from reality and become priggish. There are whole realms of
life and many spheres of pleasant activity in connection with which moral
questions can hardly be said to arise. To suggest that one should not enjoy a
play of Shakespeare or Aristophanes or play a game of golf except in so far as
one’s character is improved by the experience would not be a sign of moral
health and would find no support in the teaching of Jesus. The late Dr. Denney
spoke of the welcome relief he found in Homer from the strain of the spiritual
tension of the New Testament. Surely every good gift of God is to be received
with thanksgiving, and we do thank God for a thousand precious gifts which at
first sight seem to have very little relation to the Kingdom of God. It is not
for us to assess the relative values of the intellectual and artistic triumphs
which have exalted human nature and made us feel that the world is a good place
to live in.

It is very possible, also, to exaggerate the extent to which Jesus ignores all
spheres in life save the ethical and spiritual. His parables, like so much of
the rest of his teaching, testify to his vivid interest in the varied activities
of men and in the world of nature. Jesus was no aesthete in the narrow sense of
the term; but he had the artist’s hatred of ugliness, and a determination, which
not all artists have, to do his part in abolishing ugliness from the earth.

Many of the sights that met his eye were as offensive to the senses as to the
spirit: beggars, lepers, demoniacs, epileptics, people with loathsome sores. He
felt that such sights were out of place in God’s world; he pitied the victims
and sought to deliver them from their repulsiveness as well as from their pain.
The coming of the Kingdom of God would mean the fulfilment of the loftier dreams
of the artists as well as of the moralists.

“ The love of God is broader than the measures of man’s mind; ’ there are first
which shall be last and last which shall be first. We may be far astray in our
judgments of men’s contribution, of our own contribution, to the welfare of the
world. None of these things alter the central fact: our Lord’s mission was to
seek to turn the world as it is into the world as God meant it to be, and in
this work to invite the co-operation of all men of good will. There are those
who gladly respond, and there are those who decide that for them other interests
are supreme.


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  CHAPTER 21: 19 - CHAPTER 19
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CHAPTER XIX THE LOST SHEEP AND THE LOST COIN Mat 18:10-14; Luk 15:3-7; Luk
15:8-10.

HITHERTO we have dealt with parables which answer the question why so many
reject the invitation to the Kingdom, which picture the transcendent worth of
citizenship in the Kingdom, and show that there is a searching test for
candidates for citizenship. We turn now to other parables which tell us
something about the King and about the qualifications for citizenship. One would
naturally take these points separately, but in the parables the relation of the
King to the citizens is so vitally connected with the relation of the citizens
to the King and to each other that they must be studied together.

We have seen that Matthew places the Lost Sheep in a different context from
Luke, and gives the parable a somewhat different turn.

Yet it may well have been that the first application of the three “ lost ’
parables was a defence of the ministry to the religious outcasts. They were
included among the “ lost,” though Jesus knew that among the Pharisees there
were many that were more hopelessly lost. The “ sinners ’ of the Gospel story
corresponded with some degree of accuracy to the nonChurchgoers of our day. It
would require more courage than most of us possess to suggest that attendance or
non-attendance at Church is the hall-mark of the distinction between the sheep
and the goats. The “sinners” might be bad men or women; but the designation
covered all who did not choose, or who (as in the case of the tax-collectors)
for reasons connected with their occupation were unable, to fulfil the
requirements of the ceremonial law. Prostitutes and thieves might be “sinners,”
but those who did not or could not avoid contact with “ unclean ’ persons or
things, and who did not or could not attend the stated religious celebrations in
the Temple, were also ’ sinners.” The stigma attached to the ’ sinners ’ of our
Lord’s day would tend of itself to a feeling of moral inferiority and consequent
moral deterioration. The possibilities that Jesus saw in the class are witnessed
by the story of the woman of the city in Luke vii, by the call of Levi, by the
story of Zacchasus and that of the repentant tax-gatherer in the parable. In the
Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin we usually emphasize Jesus’ thought of the worth of
the individual. We know the saving virtue there is in the thought that somebody
cares; in these parables Jesus taught that God cares.

God thinks not only of the flock, but of the individual sheep; and when a sheep
strays from the fold, it is, for the time being, the only sheep that counts.
Human thought swings backwards and forwards between emphasis on the individual
and emphasis on the community. In our own day, after a long period of
individualism, we are beginning again to think of ourselves as members of a
social group, to realise the importance of leavening society with Christian
ideals and standards.

Jesus teaches that God sees the group as a group of individuals and the
individual as a member of the group. Jesus felt the passion, which the early
Church inherited, for the koinonia, for the fellowship, that they might be One,
an unbroken whole, all in all to each other. Our Lord’s conception of his
followers as a family, brothers and sisters of each other and of himself, went
to the very root of his thought. Our Lord’s mission was primarily to his own
people, but he saw that they were not all Israel that were of Israel, Israel
after the flesh must become Israel after the spirit. In the very forefront of
his ministry he put the healing of the breach in Judaism itself. The Israel of
our Lord’s day was a house divided against itself: there were the clean and the
unclean, the righteous and the sinners, those within the pale and those without
the pale; and between the two there was a great gulf fixed. This middle wall of
partition must be broken down. Jesus’ longing for the restoration within the
fold of those whom “ the righteous ’ shut out was so deep that the ministry to
the publicans and sinners took a prominent place in his work.

He could even say that it was his chief work; he was not sent but to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel. Our Lord’s heart was profoundly moved at the sight
of the outcasts. He thought of them as sheep who had strayed from the flock, as
treasures lost to God and man, as children who had in wilfulness left their
home. He reminded the Pharisees how it is the sheep on the mountains, not the
sheep safe in the pasture, that is the centre of the shepherd’s love and care;
that though a woman has plenty of other coins in her purse, it is the coin she
has dropped that occupies all her thought; that the father’s heart goes out to
the wayward child in the far country and is at rest about the boy hard at work
on the farm. Whether men have gone astray in ignorance like the sheep, through
someone’s negligence like the coin, or by free choice like the prodigal, there
is a gap in the circle; the number is incomplete; God’s love and longing are
with the wanderer while there is even one sheep away from the fold or one vacant
chair in the home.

There are sayings in the Gospels ascribed to Jesus which, read by an
unsympathetic reader, might almost suggest a gloomy gloating over the fate of
the unrepentant. “ Shall cast them into the furnace of fire; there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “ He will come and destroy the farmers and give
the vineyard to others.” Surely in this fifteenth chapter of Luke we get Jesus’
true thought of God, that when men are “ lost ’ it is not to themselves they are
lost, that their refusal to come back to the home is a wound to divine love such
as we cannot know. It was the thought of Jesus himself as he wept over
Jerusalem.

All through Luk 15:1-32 Jesus pictures the joy, the social joy in the unseen
world, over a single wanderer who comes home.

There are multitudes in the Christian Church who feel no such joy as they hear
of one after another in far-off lands professing the Christian faith, whose joy
is kept for every testimony, often without foundation, that ’ the native
Christians are no better than the heathen.” It was in that spirit that the
Pharisees watched Jesus’ ministry to the “ sinners,” regarding as a traitor to
their order this preacher whose friendly approach to the outcasts challenged the
established order of things that suited them so well. Thus Jesus’ ploughshare
became a sword; the movement that was meant to restore the broken unity of
Israel’s home resulted in the estrangement from Jesus of the leaders of his
people, and in that long controversy with them which ended only on the Cross.


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  CHAPTER 22: 20 - CHAPTER 20
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CHAPTER XX THE PHARISEE AND THE PUBLICAN

Luk 18:9-14. ON God’s plan, then, the Kingdom is all-comprehensive; it is God’s
will that all should come in: but some refuse to enter, and many will not have
their neighbours enter, if they can shut them out: they want the Kingdom to be a
close preserve, confined to their own little caste. This exclusiveness in itself
marks them out as no true citizens of the Kingdom. Our Lord is not recorded as
having given a Beatitude, ’ Blessed are the inclusive “; but the thought runs
through all his teaching, and follows directly from his conception of God. Those
who want to shut others out cannot themselves be in. If one is to enter the
Kingdom, he must first realize his need of a complete transformation, his need
in the first place of that cancelling of the past that we call forgiveness. At
first we are inclined to call this story a solitary example of the parable as
caricature, to say that no man ever really prayed as this Pharisee is
represented as praying, but that Jesus is frankly and bluntly making explicit
the spirit that underlay this whole type of religion. Yet the Pharisee’s prayer
is not so very unlike the prayer which every Jewish boy was taught: “ My God, I
thank thee that I was born, not a Gentile, but a Jew; not a slave but a free
man; not a woman, but a man.” As Professor J. A. Findlay points out, it is this
prayer Paul has in mind when he claims that, for those who have put on Christ
the old distinctions of Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female are
forgotten (Gal 3:28).

(On a strict definition of * parable ’ this story would not be included; it is
simply a story of two men, one held up for imitation, one for our warning.)
Sometimes the Gospel writers preach a sermon by the position in which they place
a passage.

Luke cunningly puts the story of Jesus blessing the children between this
Pharisee and the rich ruler; it shines all the more brightly against the dark
background on either side. This is one of the parables that give a final answer
to the question why Jesus taught in parables.

Paul had much to say about the Law and the relation of Christians to the Law;
yet many Church members have vague ideas of Paul’s teaching on the subject,
partly because Paul was not always very clear about it himself. Faced with the
same question Jesus in a few words draws a lightning sketch of a Pharisee at
prayer. There we have, unforgettably portrayed for all time, our Lord’s
criticism of Religion as Law. The Pharisee climbed the Temple Mount to pray;
but, having reached the Temple he forgot to pray, and spent all his time telling
God what a splendid fellow he was. The Pharisee’s prayer consists entirely of
thanksgiving. Christian prayer (Paul shines in this respect) includes the giving
of thanks; thanks to God for His goodness, not for our own. Christian prayer
includes petition: this man is already so perfect that he needs nothing more.
Christian prayer includes the confession of sin: the sins the Pharisee confesses
are other people’s sins.

Christian prayer includes intercession for others.

Five times the Pharisee uses the word ’ I; ’ he mentions various classes of
people and calls God’s attention to the tax-collector outside, but he has no
blessing to ask for them. They are introduced only that their blackness may
bring out in more dazzling relief his own spotless purity. The Pharisee tells
God what he thinks of himself. We should like to know what his wife thought of
him, his children, his servants, his neighbours, the people with whom he dealt
in business. Were they all as pleased with him as he was with himself? Jesus
tells us what God thought of him. The Pharisee had a list; your Pharisee always
has a list. It was a list of his own virtues, and other people’s vices. The
virtues he claims for himself are partly of a negative nature; they are of that
primitive kind the absence of which is apt to lead to the felon’s dock or to
social ostracism. His positive virtues concern only the ceremonial side of
religion, and in this department his record is excellent. Not content with the
fast on the Day of Atonement required by the Law, he was one of the specialists
in piety who added the weekly Monday and Thursday Fast. In the matter of
tithing, again going beyond the requirement of the Law, he added the tithing of
garden vegetables. We know what Jesus thought of those ostentatious fasts that
had no meaning behind them, of that mechanical tithing that sprang from no pity
and no love. The Pharisee compared himself with others, especially with the
tax-collector. Your Pharisee is always strong in comparisons, to his own
advantage. If he was hopelessly at sea in his judgment of himself, he was still
more incapable of judging others. He could not even see them as they were; much
less could he take into account their heredity, their training, their
environment, their temptations, their achievements. He did not even know that
such things must be taken into account if our judgment is to be worth anything.

Many people find in contempt a seductive luxury; but it is not one of the
Christian graces.

It is particularly out of place when the qualities on which one prides oneself
happen to be moral virtues. If the Pharisee really is as much superior to the
tax-collector as he thinks he is, is it not his business to raise him up to his
own level? He may find the attempt illuminating. The Pharisee “ took his stand,”
planted himself down; the tax-collector beat his breast. Evidently the Pharisee
looked up to heaven. When our Lord looked up, he saw the heavens opened, when
the Pharisee looked up, he saw nothing but the reflection of his own face. The
taxcollector looked down: he knew that if he looked up, whether or not he would
see God, God would see him; and he could not bear it. The Pharisee felt that the
Temple of God was the fitting place for his prayer: the tax-collector stood afar
off, afraid to defile by his presence the holy ground on which the pious
Pharisee was praying. Our verdict is that the Pharisee is a thoroughly
contemptible man with a thoroughly contemptible type of religion. However bad we
are, at least we have not fallen as far as that; and we enjoy the story all the
more because we have known people just like this Pharisee, people that one
cannot help despising. When we have got thus far in our thoughts, perhaps in
some moment of inspiration we begin to wonder whether we may not have prided
ourselves too much on our Church-going and subscription-paying; whether we have
not also our pet lists of virtues and vices, carefully selected in view of our
own strong points; whether we really know as much about either ourselves or our
neighbours as we think we do, and whether after all contempt is any more
respectable when we feel it than when the Pharisee felt it. Pharisaism is a
spirit; and there are few of us who do not fall victims to it in some shape or
other. The tax-collector makes no reference to the Pharisee, apparently is
hardly conscious of his presence. He has no thought of any other human being,
save perhaps the men he has wronged. For the time being, his universe consists
of God and his own sin. He makes no plea, offers no excuse: if God treats him as
he is, if God in his mercy does not cancel his sin, he is undone.

There is no reason to doubt the truth of the account the two men give of
themselves. The Pharisee was a respectable, faithful member of the Church, who
paid all and more than all that was expected of him: the tax-collector was a
rascal. But there was this difference between them. The Pharisee, being a
legalist, had a petty moral standard; he had reached it and had no more worlds
to conquer. He was facing in the wrong direction; and, unless God opened his
eyes, his life would be a steady deterioration. The tax-collector, having some
dim vision of the righteousness of God, knew that his life was wrong from the
foundation. With even the elementary virtues still to acquire, he might yet
become a good man. The whole environment in which he lived, the look he saw in
all men’s eyes, helped the tax-collector to see himself as he was: the Pharisee
was born blind.


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  CHAPTER 23: 21 - CHAPTER 21
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CHAPTER XXI THE PRODIGAL SON

Luk 15:11-32.

WE gather then that citizenship in the Kingdom means not obedience to a code of
laws, but living in a certain spirit; and that the first step towards the
acquisition of that spirit is to realise our utter need of it. Jesus elaborates
this in one of the longest of the parables, that commonly and not very happily
styled ’ The Prodigal Son.” The young man in this parable is typical of a far
wider class than the gaol-birds, drunkards and sensualists, with whom he is
commonly identified. If we were asked for an analysis of the greatest disruptive
force in society to-day, could we answer better than by saying that, in some
shape or other, we are all, individuals, classes, nations and races, making the
demand made by this youth: * Give me my share of the property.” At this stage
the favourite verb is ’ give,” in the imperative; the young man has no such

1 This section is an abridgement, made by permission of the publishers, from the
authors article on “ The Prodigal Son “ in “ The Speaker’s Bible: the Gospel
according to St. Luke.” use for the verb “ take.” His favourite pronoun is that
of the first person: ’ Give me my share.”

Material goods are the height of his ambition, property that may be turned into
money and from money into pleasure. Having got what he wanted, the young man
went abroad; and it is clear that his departure was his verdict on his home;
life as he conceived it could not be lived in that atmosphere. The routine of
his father’s house meant work, discipline, and the Ten Commandments, all of
which he felt to be unsuited to a man of his soaring temperament. Sometimes, for
good as well as for evil, a new way of life requires a new stage. If Abraham is
to become the Father of the Faithful, he must first leave his country and his
kindred and his father’s house. But the far country of the parable is one to
reach which needs no travelling. We are all in the far country in so far as we
are rebels in our Father’s world, demanding that it shall minister to our wants,
our pleasures or our glory, refusing to keep the terms on which alone we hold
our inheritance as sons terms of work and duty and thoughtful consideration for
others.

We must not assume that there was nothing to be said for the young man. The
sound of music and dancing issuing from the house was sufficiently rare to
attract attention and demand explanation; and the elder son told his father, if
we can believe him, that no feast, on however moderate a scale, had been made
for him. But that is a side-issue and Jesus goes on with the story. When he had
gone through all his money with reckless prodigality, ’ there was a terrible
famine in that country, and he began to feel the pinch.” The world was no longer
a pleasure garden; the holiday was finished; getting a job as a swine-herd,
hungry enough to eat the pigs’ diet of carob-pods, he was at last compelled to
face the realities of life.

Then the youth made an astonishing discovery; he ’ came to himself,” awaking as
from a bad dream. He had supposed that he was the one sane member of his family,
that life was a far bigger, freer, more joyous thing than his straitlaced father
and sour-faced brother supposed it to be. After some experience of life
according to his own description, he felt like one awaking from a nightmare. He
had fled from the dignified work of a son on his father’s farm; he had to beg
for the most loathsome work a Jew could be given to do, on the farm of a
stranger and a foreigner. His father and his brother had shown far too much
interest in his doings; in the far country no one took any interest in him, not
even in his elementary bodily needs. Hunger and loneliness and shame had burned
it into his mind that when he made the choice, he had made it blindfold, seeing
neither of the alternatives in their true light; for, whatever course of life we
decide to follow, we have to take it with all its consequences. It had seemed
the choice lay between a dull routine of work and duty on the one hand, and on
the other a vivacious sampling of the best that life has to give, a career of
selfrealisation or self-expression as we call it to-day. But with the home life
went affection and honour, self-respect and the sense that one was justifying
one’s existence; the undisciplined life, “ having a good time “ in the modern
phrase, had as its sequel famine and the swine-trough. We are living in a moral
world; we may disregard its laws, but they will find us out and compel us to
reckon with them. It is a story of the eternal prodigal, of no race or language
or age, because he is of all races and languages and ages, who leaves his home
and goes abroad, lives in strange ways and finds what a fool he is; and his
repentance means that he comes home. In the youth’s first speech to his father,
there is no note but that of demand (Mat 15:12); the speech he now rehearses is
all confession and petition (Mat 15:18 f.). The word ’ father ’ in Mat 15:12 is
but a name for one who was to him only a source of supplies; the same word in
Mat 15:18 is wrung from him by the remembrance of the treasure of love he had
flung away; he became a son indeed when he knew he had no longer the right to
use the name. The test of the sincerity of his repentance is in Mat 15:19, “
Treat me like one of your hired men.” At the beginning of the story, his thought
was all of his claims: what had life to give him? When he returned, humbled and
with eyes opened, there was no more talk of his rights. ’ Let me be a member of
the home circle on any terms, even on condition of menial service; only let me
be within the house.” The work he had scorned as a duty he now begged as a boon;
he had learned that service is the law of life. When more of us have learned
this, the world will be a better place to live in. We live in perpetual strife
or fear of strife because we are all fond of airing our grievances and claiming
our dues, of saying: ’ Give me my portion of the goods.” We are not so insistent
on men receiving from us our contribution of service.

We do not often hear of workmen returning part of their wages because they know
they have not earned it, of merchants lying awake at night wondering if they are
giving a fair equivalent for the profits they take, of professional men blushing
as they charge fees whose only justification is the privileged position of those
who charge them, of stockholders consulting the economists to discover just why
they are entitled to make such large demands on the fruit of other men’s toil.
Would these experiences be quite so rare if the world had laid to heart the
story of the prodigal? This father was of the noble army of runners.

There are those who run in their eagerness to do mischief; but there is a
running of earnest purpose, like that of the ruler who came to ask Jesus the way
of eternal life; and there is the running of affection which cannot wait to
walk.

All through this part of the story there are signs of eager haste. The father
interrupts his son’s, penitential speech; he rejoices to see the repentant
spirit; but who wants to hear apologies, especially from his child? His first
word is “Quick”!’ “Quick! Bring out the best robe.” His hospitable orders are
short and sharp; the preparations have been completed, the household is
feasting, and the musicians and dancers have been summoned and are plying their
art before the elder son comes in from his work on the farm. Rags, shame, and
hunger all forgotten, the petitioner for a hireling’s place is welcomed with all
the honour, and far more than the affection, given to a prince.

It is a simple story, perhaps drawn from the life, of a father welcoming home a
wandering child; but it is more than that. It is the testimony of one who saw
the truth of things as no one else has ever seen it, saw that, behind all that
is, there is a great heart of love and goodness, One who waits with eager
longing till his children have learned the spirit of the family and have taken
their place as members of the home, asking no question but “ What wilt thou have
me to do? ’ In words whose compelling beauty have moved the hearts of men
throughout the ages as hardly any other words have done, our Lord assures us
that the whole spiritual force of the universe thrills with joy as each
potential son and daughter abandons the barren, selfcentred, loveless life;
learns to say ’ Father,” and asks to be enrolled as a member of the family of
those who do God’s will.

We wrong ourselves if we allow this gospel to be restricted to thieves and
drunkards; it is good news for all of us whose aim in life has been to make a
series of as good bargains as we could for ourselves, and then have come to
realize that God and our neighbour have claims on us, and that we justify our
existence only as we live for the Family. There is joy in the presence of God’s
angels over a single sinner that repents. The son had been reconciled to the
father; a more difficult problem remained, to reconcile brother to brother.
Influenced by Luke’s introduction to the chapter, expositors have assumed that,
as the younger brother stands for the outcast, the elder brother represents the
Pharisee, and have heaped on him ugly names. Certainly he is not presented in a
lovable light, and it may be that he deserves many of the hard things that have
been said of him. Yet if we are to find infinite significance in the father’s
reception of the prodigal, must we not take seriously the father’s assurance to
the elder son: ’ Son, you are with me all the time, and all that is mine is
yours “? It was not so that Jesus was wont to speak of the Pharisees. We are
sometimes told that the elder son is the type of legalistic piety that reckons
its services and expects its rewards. But there is no suggestion in the story
that he had worked with his eye on the clock or expected recognition of his
service, until he found his scapegrace brother so handsomely treated for no
reason that he could see. Such men are industrious and upright, but for them
religion has no redemptive mission. They believe that the idler and the scamp
should be punished, not embraced, decked out and feasted. The limitations of
forgiveness, even of the forgiveness of God, are apt to be forgotten, unless we
contrast the new lot of the younger son, as Jesus implicitly contrasts it, with
that of the elder. He comes back, indeed; but he does not begin again where he
left off. The wearing of the best robe does not obliterate the fact that he came
home in rags, nor does the fingerring of honour make him or others forget that
he was once a swine-herd. Only after a long struggle, if ever, will he regain
the esteem and self-esteem that he has lost. But the elder son’s inheritance,
material and spiritual, is intact.

’ We had to make merry and be glad. Your brother has lost all else, but he has
saved his life.” Here surely, as much as anywhere, we vividly realize the
contrast between the two ideals of life as they seemed to Jesus. To accept the
Father-will that rules the world, to be a member of the household of love and
service, though we creep in shame-faced, famine-stricken and naked, is life from
the dead.

Each son was now doing the father’s will, but that gave them no common bond. The
ill-will, so far as the story goes, was all on the side of the elder brother. He
thought the prodigal should be treated as he deserved; he would not call him
brother, but “ this, thy son.” Is not this, also, a diagnosis of the unrest of
our time? Our grievances, we feel sure, are wellfounded; we want our superiority
to be recognized; we ask for simple justice; and we forget that in the course of
justice, none of us would see salvation. If the strife of sects and classes and
nations is ever to be stilled, we must find some motive power strong enough to
produce mutual regard and mutual service. We know of none save that which our
Lord teaches in this parable. We are all children of one common Father; we have
to learn to feel towards each other as brothers and as sisters, to stretch out
towards each other a forgiving, helping hand; so shall we all be members of the
great family of God.


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  CHAPTER 24: 22 - CHAPTER 22
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CHAPTER XXII THE TWO DEBTORS

Luk 7:36-50. IN the Pharisee and the Tax-collector Jesus taught that complacency
with ourselves excludes us from citizenship in the Kingdom, especially a
complacency based on the fulfilment of certain legal requirements on which we
ourselves happen to have placed the emphasis: the citizen of the Kingdom does
not keep laws; he shows a certain spirit. In the Prodigal Son we have learned
something of what that spirit is; to qualify for citizenship one must abandon
the self-centred life in which one seeks one’s own happiness and fights for
one’s own interests; the citizen sees the world as his Father’s world, makes it
his home, lives as a son and a brother and asks only that he may serve the
common good. In the Prodigal Son Jesus told of the joy in heaven over one sinner
that returns from the far country of estrangement from God; in the Two Debtors
he shows us the other side of the picture, the overwhelming sense of
indebtedness of the man or woman whose past record of selfishness and wilfulness
is cancelled and forgotten. This is one of the parables that help us to realize
how much we have lost in being deprived of the historical context of so many of
the parables. By itself the story of the Two Debtors would have been
intelligible, beautiful, powerful; but with the background of the dinner in
Simon’s house, when we know who the two debtors were and the conduct that called
forth the parable, the abstract becomes the concrete and the figures take on
flesh and blood.

Simon was one of those in the parables who spoke ’ within themselves.” Others
were the Rich Fool, the Pharisee at Prayer, and the Unjust Steward. Perhaps if
they had given others the benefit of their thoughts, it would have helped them
to see their folly. Jesus as usual read the man’s unspoken thought. ’ Whatever
else this Jesus is, he is no prophet, as so many call him; a prophet is one who
can see beneath the surface; evidently Jesus does not realize that this woman,
who is coming into such close contact with him, is an ’ untouchable.’

Jesus says to Simon in effect: You have been speaking to yourself; let me now
say something to you.” That something was a comparison between Simon and the
outcast.

One can imagine the surprise with which Simon heard himself placed in the same
category as the woman of the city, the greater surprise with which he learned
that the comparison was all to his disadvantage. The apostles at Thessalonica
were accused of turning the world upside-down; their Master before them had
delighted to make the first last and the last first. With an outspoken courage
which we do not always appreciate, Jesus reminded Simon that he had neglected
those hospitable and kindly customs with which an honoured guest was received;
the obvious inference was that Simon had invited him simply out of curiosity.
Satisfied with himself, the message of Jesus brought to him no thrill, no
welcome answer to any of life’s questions, no fulfilment of any longing. The
duties which Simon had neglected, the despised woman from the city had
discharged, not with water from the well but with her tears, not with a towel
brought by a servant but with her hair, not with the routine of the well-trained
domestic but with loving gratitude. ’ The Word of God is sharper than any
two-edged sword, can separate soul and spirit and penetrate between joints and
marrow.” So could the living Word; Jesus read Simon’s unspoken thought and
invited him to turn his criticism on himself; yet he answers Simon’s unspoken
gibe only indirectly.

It was just because he was a prophet that he allowed, nay encouraged, this woman
to touch him. Love must be allowed to express itself, and wherever there is
forgiveness there is love.

There has been much unprofitable discussion about the precise relation of love
and forgiveness. Hope, forgiveness, penitence, love; what does it matter, except
to the theologians, which comes first or whether they all come together, whether
the woman loved much because she was forgiven, or was forgiven because she loved
much. Where there is forgiveness, there is love; and where there is love,; such
as this woman had, there is forgiveness.!’

Simon thought that what had to be explained was Jesus’ willingness to let the
woman touch him. “ No,” said Jesus; ’ what has to be explained is the woman’s
love, and incidentally your want of love.” Jesus does not say: ’ He who has
little need of forgiveness loves little, but he who is forgiven little loves
little.” The parable is of the simplest kind, hardly more than a simile; yet it
lights up the whole subject of forgiveness. Most of us would confess that in
this matter we are in the position of Simon rather than of the woman. We can see
how thieves and other criminals, if they repent, may feel surprised that God is
willing to receive them; in their case emotional gratitude is pardonable and
commendable. But the case is different with respectable people like Simon and
ourselves, whose sins are just the ordinary, every-day sins that everybody takes
for granted and nobody worries about. In Church we pray, often at considerable
speed, for mercy on us miserable offenders; we mechanically wait for the
absolution, pass on to the rest of the service, and return to our work, our
social life, and our miserable offences, with no feeling farther from our minds
than gratitude for forgiveness. There is no point at which we are more out of
touch with the spirit of the New Testament, indeed of the Bible, than in the
absence from our minds of an overmastering consciousness of sin, of the need of
forgiveness, of wonder and gratitude at God’s readiness to forgive. We divide
sins into little and big; our own sins are the little ones. In some externals we
do not correspond to the Pharisee of our Lord’s time; but in the great central
fact of our complacency with ourselves, of our utter unconsciousness that there
is anything seriously amiss with us, most of us might have sat for the picture.
It has taken a World War to bring home to us with terrible power the
deathdealing cruelty and heinousness of what we used to regard as trivial faults
or even virtues in our national life. Perhaps it will take a similar upheaval at
home to show us the true nature of our individual outlook, especially of the
Prodigal’s view of the world as a place in which our business is to “ get on “
and enjoy ourselves.

It was no accident that when our Lord showed us a Pharisee at prayer, he put a
publican in the background. It was the Pharisee’s thought and treatment of the
publican and the Gentile that showed what Pharisaism meant; and if we would see
what we are, it is not enough to look inside; we must look at our neighbours,
our neighbours of all kinds and classes, and ask how far our selfishness, our
indifference, our contempt are responsible for making them what they are.


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  CHAPTER 25: 23 - CHAPTER 23
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CHAPTER XXIII THE UNFORGIVING CREDITOR

Mat 18:23-35.

ATTENTION has been called to the large figure mentioned for the first debt. Ten
thousand talents was, we are told, considerably more than ten times the combined
annual tribute paid to the Imperial treasury by Judaea, Samaria, Idumaea,
Galilee and Peraea. The second man’s debt was a mere twenty pounds. But this is
no reckless use of figures; again there is the implied “ as if: ’ ’ It is as if
a king had a servant who owed an impossibly large sum, which servant in turn was
creditor to another for a trifle.”

There are other illustrations of Jesus’ parable method here. He speaks of the
King changing his mind, meaning of course that his forgiveness was conditional.
Also, in the previous parables, he has spoken as if forgiveness followed
automatically on prayer. The fear of misunderstanding never turned Jesus aside
from the point he was making at the time; for each parable its own lesson. Now
there is further teaching to be given on this subject. Forgiveness is not
something that can be handed over like a coin; a violin is a useless gift to one
who has no ear for music; forgiveness is for those who are qualified to receive
it; forgiveness is for the forgiving. The other servants rose in a body against
the outrageous conduct of the forgiven debtor; we all call him an impossible
person, unless he happens to be ourselves. The argument is not that of a quid
fro quo, God’s forgiveness of us in exchange for our forgiveness of each other.

Jesus asks his hearers to consider the nature of forgiveness; it is not a legal
act but a moral and spiritual process. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall
obtain mercy; but not as the result of a bargain, God’s grace is ever flowing
full and free like a river; it will enter every heart unless there is an
obstacle: hardness and hatred towards a brother form such a barrier. This
parable also is placed in its historical context. Peter wants to know how soon
he can with decency leave off forgiving a brother.

Jesus replies that the extent to which we show the forgiving spirit is the
extent to which alone God can forgive us. Forgiveness would mean nothing to the
unforgiving. The past life is wiped out only when the new life begins. The first
debtor offers no excuses. He promises to pay; but in his heart of hearts he
knows that a life-time of service will not redeem a fraction of the debt. We too
think of our excuses: our inherited temptations, our want of wise counsellors,
our seductive environment. But the tax-collector’s prayer was a manly prayer:
one reason why he went home forgiven was that he did not plead his temptations,
he begged forgiveness for his sins. Our Lord wants his hearers to reflect, not
only on the scarlet of our sins against God, but on the trivial nature of the
wrongs that others do to us. There are indeed times when we can understand, even
if we do not sympathize with, the agonized prayer of the oppressed that the
little ones of the oppressor may be dashed against a rock. But most of the
injuries done to us are not of that tragic kind. If they loom large in our
sight, it is only because our pride and our self-love have swollen them out of
all recognition. A bigger man would hardly notice them, and would forget them
the next day. Even if the wounds are deep, and not just flesh-wounds magnified
into mortal injuries, our Lord asks us to restore sanity to our judgment by
reckoning up the countless ways in which we have thwarted God’s plans for
ourselves and others, and still prayed for forgiveness.

It is the king who sets the example of exalting mercy above justice. The first
debtor received mercy; he gave only justice. When the king cancelled his
servant’s debt, he paid a great price for his debtor’s freedom. Even for a king
to cancel a debt with a stroke of the pen means that he bears the loss himself.
Jesus hints here, as he does in the Prodigal Son, at the suffering our sin
imposes upon God; not the resentment of wounded pride as in heathen mythology,
but the pain of a Father at the indifference shown to him, the insults heaped
upon him, by the waywardness of a loved child. The first debtor begged for mercy
and received it, far beyond his wildest dreams. Dr. Dods raises the question:
What of the very common case where he who has wronged me does not seek, or
appear to want, forgiveness? We ask ourselves: ’ Have we given our brother any
reason to think that an attempt at reconciliation will meet with a friendly
reception? Do we hug our wrath, cherish our resentment and parade it? If our
wrongs are indeed anything more than wounded vanity, is our suffering altogether
self-pity; or have we room in our hearts for unselfish disappointment that one
whom we had looked on as a brother could be capable of conduct so unbrotherly? ’
Few men like tendering apologies and most decent men dislike having apologies
tendered to them; while there is a widespread and not unhealthy antipathy to ’
scenes,” even scenes of reconciliation; but there are unostentatious and
unofficial ways of smoothing the path to a restoration of friendly relations
that may be more efficacious than more elaborate methods. In the Sermon on the
Mount it is not on the oppressor but on his victim that Jesus throws the onus of
breaking down barriers of hatred.

God, myself, my neighbour; in the teaching of Jesus these are indissolubly bound
together. To the extent to which I shut my neighbour out from myself, to that
extent by inexorable law I shut myself out from God. It is not that God will
not, but that God cannot, forgive the unforgiving.


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  CHAPTER 26: 24 - CHAPTER 24
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CHAPTER XXIV THE TOWER AND THE THREATENED KING

Luk 14:28-35.

WE have seen, then, that the citizen of the Kingdom must turn his back on the
kind of life that most men live by preference; either abandon, or at least give
a secondary place to, life’s ordinary aims and ambitions; and live a new life in
a new spirit. Is he to begin this new life by a conscious resolution and after
deliberate calculation? Jesus loved people who lived their lives in a spirit of
daring adventure, with a reckless disregard of the cost, men who counted the
world well lost if only they could win the hidden treasure or the most precious
of all pearls. But there is a time to be reckless and there is a time to be
deliberate; and the time to be deliberate is before one sets out at all on this
career of Christian recklessness.

Matthew concludes the Sermon on the Mount with the similes of the two houses;
the house built on rock and the house built on the sand.

Only the house on the rock foundation can stand the strain and stress of life,
and the rock is obedience to the teaching of Jesus. In the Tower the point is
that the solidest foundation is not enough. A man who proposes to build,
especially if the building is to be a place of refuge in time of need, will
first sit down and make certain calculations. If he finds he has money for the
foundation but not for the building, he will not begin. If he lays down the
foundation and then has to stop, he will become the laughing-stock of the
neighbourhood. Similarly if a king finds that his enemy’s forces outnumber his
by two to one, he will probably find it wiser to make a treaty than to fight.

We know from other parables that Jesus knew and feared the danger of a
short-lived enthusiasm, To these two parables Luke appends the moral, ascribed
to Jesus, that the citizen of the Kingdom must be ready for the most
heart-rending sacrifices; and that, no doubt, is part of the meaning. On the
allegorical method of interpretation, the two parables would mean that, if we do
not feel strong enough to go through with the stern life of hardship to which
Jesus calls us, it is better not to begin. But surely Jesus did not teach that.
Rather in both parables he is warning his followers that discipleship is a
costly business.

If we enter on it light-heartedly, the disillusionment, when it comes, will take
us at a serious disadvantage. If we have faith in God, ’ the strain will bring
the strength,” but let us face open-eyed the certainty that the strain will
come. In the Temptation our Lord exemplified these parables. He frankly faced
the forces arrayed against him in his mission and met them in the strength that
God supplied.


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  CHAPTER 27: 25 - CHAPTER 25
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CHAPTER XXV THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS

Luk 16:19-31.

LUKE places this parable in the near neighbourhood of the Prodigal Son, and
there are one or two curious points of comparison between the stories. The word
used in Luk 16:19 for the daily enjoyment of Dives (euphrainomenos] occurs three
times in the Prodigal Son in connection with the banquet prepared for the
reception of the prodigal. Dives’ enjoyment was selfish and splendid feeding;
the banquet of Luk 15:1-32 was a social expression of the loftiest kind of joy.
In Hades Dives was anxious lest his brothers should share his awful fate; the
elder brother felt no anxiety for his brother when he was absent, no joy when he
returned. Lazarus longed for the crumbs from Dives’ table as the prodigal fed on
the swine’s carob pods. As the story of the Syrophenician and the feeding of the
five thousand remind us, our Lord’s interest in the fragments was
characteristic. One’s sensitiveness to the waste of food in a world where
millions go hungry may not be a decisive test of character; it is one test. Our
Lord was vividly conscious of the moral effects of hunger and repletion. During
the war, it was one of the great fears of statesmen that their nation might go
hungry; hungry men are apt to develop a new code of morals, to do things and
endure humiliations which in their days of plenty they would have scorned.

It was not altogether sympathy with the poor but, in part at least, fear of
hungry men, that instituted what we contemptuously call the “ dole.” The guests
who, when invited to the Great Feast, began to make excuses were all well-fed
men; the hungry outcasts needed no second invitation. The prodigal had no
thought of returning home till he knew the pangs of hunger. If Dives had ever
known what it was to wonder where his next meal was to come from, he would not
have been so unconscious of the existence of Lazarus. It was the fear of hunger
and his unwillingness to face it that led the Squandering Steward to become a
cheat. One of our Lord’s own temptations received its force from his hunger.
This parable was formerly something of a puzzle. It is the only parable in which
one of the actors is given a name; it is the only parable that draws a picture
of the other world (unless we call the Judgment scene in Mat 25:1-46 a parable);
and it employs Jewish imagery to an unusual extent. It is now 1 believed that
Jesus

1 Since the publication of Gressmann’s Monograph “ Vom reichem Mann und armen
Lazarus” (1918); see Easton, “ Gospel according to St. Luke,” adloc. based the
first part of the parable on a familiar story (originating in Egypt) about the
future reversal of human destiny, told by a seer who had been granted a visit to
the other world. The theory is that Jesus disapproved of such stories, which
only gratify idle curiosity, and so added the appendix.

There is no parable which more urgently requires to be read ’with the mind
also.” It is generally recognized that it is not a guide to the manners and
customs of life beyond the grave. No one imagines that it teaches that all rich
people go to hell and all poor people to heaven. Nor is the main point that the
inequalities of this life are redressed in the next, though something like that
may be suggested. We call the story the parable of Dives and Lazarus; but the
fact is that Lazarus plays practically no part in the tale except as a foil to
Dives. The interest of the story centres in the life and fate of the Rich Man.
In the preceding parables we have seen that the relation of the citizen to the
King is bound up in the most intimate way with his relation to other men. One
aspect of this relation is that it is unneighbourly for a prosperous man to
ignore the needs of one with whom he is brought in contact, and that, whether he
is conscious of the contact or not. In the scene at the Last Judgment (Mat
25:1-6) those on the left hand were quite unconscious of having neglected their
Lord in his hour of need. When it was pointed out to them that their real
transgression was their neglect of the King’s brethren in their hour of need,
doubtless they were still unconscious of this neglect. They had never
deliberately refused an opportunity of service.

They did not know that such opportunities had been put before them. In the
parables thoughtlessness or carelessness is one of the major sins. Some thorns
have got in among the wheat; we hardly notice them, but in the end there is no
crop. Some bridesmaids, preparing for the wedding, have omitted the precaution
of taking spare oil for their torches, in case of unexpected delay. They find
the door of the festal chamber shut in their faces. Dives has often noticed
Lazarus at his gate. It has never occurred to him that he has any relation to
Lazarus. There is no suggestion that he was cruel or insulting to Lazarus, that
he exploited him in any way, or took any unfair advantage of his poverty. He
simply regarded Lazarus as a phenomenon outside the sphere of his existence. Yet
they needed each other, the over-flow of Dives’ table would have made all the
difference to Lazarus; it was only after his death that Dives discovered that
Lazarus might be of use to him. Our Lord claimed to fulfil the prophecy of One
who was to proclaim recovery of sight to the blind. Partly by the spread of the
Christian outlook, partly by forcible surgery on the part of those we sought to
ignore, we are learning to see. In our own country the Lazaruses we used to keep
outside the door are no longer content to feed on the crumbs that fall from the
tables of the rich. They have learned that if they knock, if they knock hard
enough and persistently enough and threateningly enough, the door will gradually
open and admit them to some share in the daily banquet. In connection with other
countries, there is still much blindness and much myopia. There are still men,
and plenty of them, who think of India as the brightest jewel in the Imperial
crown, of China as a possible market for our trade, of Africa as a continent
whose people may be induced to drink our rum. The prodigal put a physical gulf
between himself and his home; the Pharisee saw a moral gulf between himself and
the tax-collector; in Dives’ eyes there was a social gulf between himself and
Lazarus. In each of the three cases the man who thought he was on the right side
of the gulf was on the wrong side. Jesus is the bridge-builder; the people on
both sides have each something to give the other. When Dives opens his eyes and
sees Lazarus, whether he is of his own country or some other, he will find he is
not just a beggar; find that he has a story to tell which is often pathetic but
always full of interest. As his sympathies are drawn out, he will find that life
has other and richer joys than wearing fine linen or its modern counterpart, and
turning each meal into a banquet. The form of our temptation varies; the
temptation itself remains. As in the Rich Fool, Death is presented as the great
Revealer. Death taught Dives what life might have taught him had he opened his
ears to hear. His punishment was that he had to abide by his own decision; what
he had written, he had written. He had put Lazarus to such an immense distance
from himself that when he needed him, there was no point of contact. Lazarus is
one of those characters in the parables whose silence is eloquent. The father
pleads with the elder son to give a gracious reception to the prodigal; the
prodigal puts in no plea for himself. The Pharisee tells God what he thinks of
the tax-collector; the taxcollector seems unconscious of the Pharisee’s
presence. The Rich Fool expounds his plans for excluding his servants and his
neighbours from any share of his prosperity; his servants and his neighbours do
not appear in the story at all. The eleventh hour labourers made no claim for
themselves. From beginning to end of this parable, Lazarus utters not one word.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. In the concluding part
of the parable there are two striking sayings. Abraham refuses to send Lazarus
to warn Dives’ brothers on the ground that “ they have Moses and the prophets.”

There were many in Jesus’ day, as there are many in our day, who did not regard
Moses and the prophets as primarily teachers of social righteousness. Again,
Abraham told Dives that if his brothers did not learn considerate treatment of
the poor from the Old Testament, neither would they learn it though one rose
from the dead. The seemingly miraculous has an extraordinary power of stirring
interest and raising a momentary enthusiasm; but it is in the Bible that the
Word of God is found. They who do not find God there, will not find him
anywhere.


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  CHAPTER 28: 26 - CHAPTER 26
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CHAPTER XXVI THE GOOD SAMARITAN

Luk 10:25-37, THE question has been raised: Are the riches and poverty of Dives
and Lazarus literal or metaphorical? Was Dives just a rich man, or does he
represent the middle and upper class Jews “ rich in possession of Moses and the
prophets if not in material goods “? Is Lazarus just a poor man, or does he
typify the taxgatherers, “just on the threshold of the Jewish Church, yet always
outside “? 2

Certainly the Prodigal Son is not intended to teach that the self-centred life
always leads to literal starvation; very often it has the opposite result. Nor
does anyone imagine that the teaching of the Unjust Steward or the Talents is
primarily concerned with money, though both stories centre round the use of
money. Yet the Rich Fool is obviously a warning against a wrong attitude to
material wealth; and our Lord spoke so much on this subject that there is no
reason for regarding the wealth of Dives

1 This parable is treated at much greater length in the last chapter of the
author’s “ Jesus and Life “ (Jas. Clarke and Co.).

2 “ Abingdon Bible Commentary,” p. 1030. and the poverty of Lazarus as symbolic.
The Good Samaritan enlarges the range of the teaching about the duty of a
citizen of the Kingdom to a neighbour. When our neighbour needs our help, not
only our pecuniary assistance but our help in any way, it is our business to
render that help, asking no questions.

We do not know, it is part of the meaning of the story that we should not
inquire as the Samaritan did not inquire, whether the wounded traveller was rich
or poor, educated or uneducated, Jew, Gentile or Samaritan; we do not even know
whether he was a bad man or a good man. All that the Samaritan saw was that he
was a man in need of help. Paul taught that we should do good to all men,
especially to those who belong to the home circle of the Faith. Perhaps we have
given too much prominence to this limiting ’ especially.” The Prodigal was still
a son and a brother even when he was in the far country, with no filial or
brotherly thoughts. The priest was going down the road ’ by chance.” Apparently,
then, we have to revise our conception of ’ chance.” Chance is our ignorance of
God’s arrangement of our lives. The traveller did not know that the priest would
come, and the priest did not know that he would see the half-dead traveller. But
God knew; God was giving the traveller a chance of help, was giving the priest
an opportunity of doing a noble act. Of all the people who came into contact
with the traveller that day, the robbers alone sought contact with him. The
priest, the Levite and the Samaritan met him in the ordinary course of their
work; he was brought to the innkeeper; but the robbers were on the look-out for
him or such as he. The Samaritan lived the guided life, accepting such
opportunities as God put in his way; but the robbers guided their own lives.
They knew what they wanted, and knew how to get it; for the robbers represent
the commercial spirit, the spirit which sees in a neighbour only an opportunity
for making money. So far as we know, these robbers would have preferred to make
money honestly, if they could have made it as easily; in any case assault and
murder were only among the accidents of their profession, not its aim. The
interest that the commercial spirit takes in us may be limited in its range, but
it is astonishingly active. With what obsequiousness are we received, how
important are we made to feel, how wise are our most foolish remarks found to
be, how readily are our lightest wishes obeyed, when people are trying to
persuade us to buy something from them. In our more cynical moods we think of
the art of salesmanship as the art of persuading people to buy things they do
not want and do not need and cannot afford.

One often thinks of the men engaged in producing the lowest type of newspapers,
and especially of those who prepare their news-bills, how the grief, the
anxiety, the shame of fellow-citizens mean nothing to them but the possibility
of an extra circulation. At its best the commercial spirit, as our wiser
merchants have found, may be hardly distinguishable from a genuine desire for
service. At its worst, it is pure greed, which, as in the case of the
drink-sellers, pursues its aim indefatigably, remorselessly, undeterred by any
thought of the consequences in ruined homes and wasted lives, unhampered by any
pity or any moral scruple, allowing no consideration to turn them for a moment
from man’s chief end, the making of money out of one’s neighbours. When the
robbers had got the traveller’s money, and incidentally had nearly killed him,
though that was only a by-product of their activities, ’ off they went,” just
as, when the farmer’s enemy had sown darnel among the wheat crop, “ off he
went.” They had got what they wanted; in the true commercial spirit, they
recognized no further relation to their victim.

They had created a problem; anyone who cared might take a hand at solving it;
they were no longer interested. As it happened, the first men who got the
opportunity to undo some of their work did not take it. Characteristically our
Lord makes no excuse for the priest and the Levite. They were entitled to feel a
just resentment at the traveller for being alone with moneybags on such a
dangerous road. He must have been a suspicious fellow who would not trust a
companion, or a secretive person who did not wa,nt anyone to know he had money,
or a reckless person who took foolish risks. Why should they have to risk their
lives because he had chosen to be a fool? Doubtless also there was fear of
defilement in case he was dead or dying. If we are to help only those who are in
no way to blame for their misfortunes, then the work of Christian charity will
be immensely simplified.

There was much to be said for the priest and the Levite, but Jesus does not say
it. Was there justification for singling out the Churchmen of the time for this
unenviable distinction? When the stress is put on the ritual and ceremonial side
of religion, the moral side is apt to be obscured. One supreme example of this
is popular Hinduism, in which the priesthood is a synonym for infinite cruelty
and greed. The priests played a large part, perhaps the largest part, in
bringing our Lord to his death. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews found
in Jewish ceremonial, especially the ritual of the Day of Atonement, symbols of
eternal realities in the unseen world. But the Levitical priesthood had no
counterpart in his scheme. Jesus was a priest, not after the order of Aaron, but
after the order of Melchizedec, the priest of an eternal order, who was a priest
in his own right, whose appointment depended on nothing in his lineage, nothing
extrinsic. In accordance with the best traditions of the Jewish prophets, Jesus
throws all the stress on the moral. For him the Temple was a place of prayer,
and that not for the Jew only but for all nations; the synagogue was a place not
only for worship but for a healing ministry; the whole distinction of clean and
unclean, whether as applied to people or to things, he swept away; sacrifice he
hardly mentioned, and never practised; for him the Sabbath was not a burden
imposed by lawyers but a gift of God; fasting, if practised at all, was a secret
self-discipline; and tithing found its truest expression in the Templeoffering
of the widow whose penny that she gave was her last penny. The robbers saw in
the traveller a source of gain; for them he had no other interest. The priest
and the Levite recognized no relation at all to the traveller; he was outside
their orbit; they passed on. The Samaritan saw in the traveller a man who needed
his help. As Jesus taught that our forgiveness of those who wrong us must know
no limits, the Samaritan’s creed was that the help to be given to a neighbour in
need must know no limits. If we ask what he did for the traveller, the answer is
that he did everything that the occasion called for. He gave his time; and we
can see that he was a busy man with urgent work on hand; he gave his skill and
material resources, the ’ first aid ’ of the time; he risked his life, for he
also must have been a tempting bait for the robbers; he took trouble, mounting
the traveller on his own horse or ass; he gave his money, but not recklessly,
all that was needed and no more; he saw the job through, never resting till the
traveller was in safe and competent hands; he exercised both thought and
fore-thought, and even when the traveller was safe in the inn, he continued to
accept responsibility, promising to look in on his return journey. With most of
us our goodness is “ goodness limited; ’ here is goodness unlimited, goodness
that knows no rest till there is nothing more to be done. The Lord loveth a
cheerful giver; the Samaritan was of the noble company of those to be helped by
whom is not a humiliation but a joy.

We are often struck by the way in which in our day benevolence has been taken
out of the hands of the private individual and entrusted to public bodies,
especially to the State. In the complicated life of modern times, the process is
inevitable; but is it not destructive of an important Christian grace? The
answer we find in this parable. The officials of the time, the priest and the
Levite, noticed the wounded traveller; they saw him with their eyes, they did
not see him with their hearts. They found in him no call for service; it was the
private individual, the despised Samaritan, who realized that here was a piece
of work waiting to be done. The Samaritan gave temporary assistance, arranged
for the care of the traveller and supplied the funds. Beyond that he could not
go; there was a work of nursing to be done for which he had not the time, nor
presumably the skill. But the innkeeper was there for the purpose of attending
to travellers, sick or well; he had the time, the skill and the apparatus, only
he had to be paid for it. Even in the modern State there is abundance of work
for the Christian philanthropist; it is for him to find the needy men who
require help, to give direction to the work of assistance, to supervise it and,
in a measure, to finance it; above all, to ensure that the task of the
professionals from beginning to end is carried out in a Christian spirit. The
criticism has been made that Christian charity as represented in the Gospels is
conceived chiefly as ambulance work, that the follower of Jesus is taught to be
more interested in the hospital than in the school, more concerned for wounded
travellers than for those who are going about their business; that his relation
to men is conceived to arise only when these are famine-stricken or in gaol.
That the criticism is superficial is evinced by this, that it is least of all
applicable in those regions which are most permeated by the Christian spirit.
Our Lord always put the emphasis where, at the time, it most needed to be put;
on the pitifully restricted outlook of some priests, for example, or the genuine
goodness of some Samaritans. The plight into which multitudes in his day had
actually fallen gave them the first claim for help. But what he was inculcating
was a new attitude to one’s neighbour, a new conception of who our neighbour is.
When this new conception of and new attitude to our neighbour have been learned,
it will be as a seed that takes root and becomes a great tree with branches
spreading in all directions. The Samaritan will recognize the traveller as his
neighbour before he has been attacked by robbers and left half-dead. He will
have something to say to the robbers, whose need, it may turn out, is much
greater than that of the traveller. He will have a message for the priest and
the Levite whose plight, it may be, in God’s sight is the most deplorable of
all. In all the story the name of God is not mentioned, nor is there any hint of
the source of the Samaritan’s goodness; but Luke follows the parable with the
story of Martha and Mary.

Martha too was a Good Samaritan; but the best of Good Samaritans need to have
their goodness replenished at the fountain. When the Master speaks, they must
needs listen.


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  CHAPTER 29: 27 - CHAPTER 27
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CHAPTER XXVII THE RICH FOOL

Luk 12:16-21.

DIVES and Lazarus taught us that a citizen of the Kingdom cannot see a neighbour
starve while he himself has plenty; from the Good Samaritan we learned that
every needy person whom we encounter, or whom we ought to encounter, is a call
for help that extends far beyond the region of finance. The Rich Fool is more
fundamental still, and invites us to consider the relation between a man and his
possessions. A number of the parables are concerned with dilemmas and their
solution. In the Darnel among the Wheat, the farmer’s men wondered whether they
could uproot the darnel without hurting the wheat. The Midnight Petitioner was
at a loss how to provide a meal for his unexpected guest; the Importunate Widow
how to get justice against her oppressor. The gardener’s problem was to get
another chance for his Unfruitful Fig-tree. The Unjust Steward had to consider
ways and means of getting a livelihood when he lost his appointment. The Rich
Landlord’s Dilemma was of a different kind. His trouble was an embarrassment of
riches, a problem with which the scientific progress of our day has made us
painfully familiar. Our fields bring forth so plentifully that some of our
farmers find it profitable to use their grain as fuel. Our mills and factories
bring forth so plentifully that we cannot sell our product; so we dismiss our
workmen and leave them to starve or to be supported by the State. As in our own
case, the rich landlord’s problem was one not of production but of distribution,
how to dispose of his bumper harvest. This landlord was a man with definite
ideals.

Like the heroes of other parables, he held a consultation with himself, with the
result that we have come to expect. One point on which he was quite clear was
that the only person who was to benefit from his fine harvest was himself.

Joseph stored up the surplus of the good years to feed the people of his own
country and other countries in later years. This man stored up the surplus of
the good year to feed himself in later years. The first result of his prosperity
was a work of destruction. The barns that had served his father, and served
himself in simpler days, had to come down. Business men have sometimes to “
scrap “ their machinery and tools, their buildings and means of transport, as a
sacrifice to the more efficient methods of a new age; but this farmer had no new
methods in view. The new barns that were to replace the old were no better than
their predecessors, only bigger; for this man was a believer in SIZE; he would
be at home among those in our age who believe that an increase in size is a sign
of progress and well-being. This farmer had other ideals even more modern. He
wanted to insure his future.

’ Faith in God ’ ’ he seems to say ’ is all very well; but a well-filled barn, a
large holding in gilt-edged securities, is much better.” He was of those who
regard work as a disagreeable necessity. He will retire at the first possible
moment; not to devote himself to the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of
those sides of his nature which the farmer is apt to neglect, or to the public
welfare in any shape or form.

He wants good meals and plenty of time to eat them, and to “have a good time.”

Throughout he proceeds on the assumption that his surplus crops are his to
dispose of as he wills. He would have been helpless without his farm-labourers,
the men from whom he bought and to whom he sold, the men who made his tools, the
officials who guarded his property, the men who taught him his trade and ten
thousand others. The law said the surplus was his and for him that was final. In
the end he became generous in spite of himself; the contents of his over-flowing
barns went to feed the others he had forgotten. In the rich fool’s philosophy,
the centre of the universe is himself and the central reality of himself is his
body. When his body is provided for, no other provision is necessary.

He had insured against every contingency in life save one, the only one that
would certainly happen. He had used the goodness of God to try to dispense with
God. “ Suddenly,” says Jesus, ’ God entered his life.” There are people who tell
us that they are not religious, and who seem to think that their decision to
dispense with God has settled some question. But the man who steps over a cliff
will be killed whether he believes in the law of gravity or not; and God will
have something to say to us whether we have anything to say to God or not.

We may be sure that Jesus was not using the thought of death to frighten people
into a sensible way of life. As in Dives and Lazarus, Death is here the great
Revealer, the Remembrancer that leads the blind to discover truths which those
who have eyes can see without waiting for death. The seeing know that their big
barns are no part of themselves; only when death came did the rich landlord find
it out.

It needs an effort beyond that of which most of us are capable to see a man
apart from the house he lives in, the money he possesses, the clothes he wears,
the office he fills, the social station he occupies. How many of us would
frankly confess that we cannot look on a millionaire who has lost all his money
with quite the same eyes with which we regard him in the hey-day of his
prosperity? A man and his possessions have a curious way of becoming almost
inextricably intertwined. If this is true in our thought of other men, it is
hardly less true in our thought of ourselves. The rich man did not discover,
till death brought it home to him, that one’s real self is the part of one that
abides, that death itself cannot destroy. The parable was given to teach us to
distinguish between what we have and what we are, to show us where our anxieties
and our preparations for the future should chiefly centre, to help us to
concentrate on the abiding reality of the self whose needs can be met only by
the abiding reality of God. This is one of the parables given in a suggestive
historical context. A man wanted Jesus to interfere in a case of a disputed
inheritance.

Jesus apparently made no inquiry into the justice or injustice of the man’s
case; he made no suggestion that injustice should always be patiently borne. But
he knew the family feuds, the heart-burnings, the hatred and malice that are so
often engendered by such disputes. He recognized that the mainspring of these
ugly things is the desire to increase our material possessions. It seemed
therefore appropriate to tell the story of the man who did not discover till he
was about to die that his wealth was one of the accidents of his life, that he
could not take it with him into another world, and that in the meantime he was
neglecting the cultivation of his real self.

Jesus speaks of wealth always in one of three ways. It is a burden to be got rid
of, a temptation to be avoided, or a source of help for the poor. As a means of
enriching the life of him who owns it, he never once speaks of it. This is one
of the subjects on which it is easy to say pious things that mean nothing. Life
is infinitely richer, in some respects, than it was nineteen hundred years ago.
The world is full of sources of enjoyment, most of which cost money, not all of
which are degrading, and some of which are ennobling. If our wealth is no part
of us, this is equally true of our poverty.

Yet there is no reason to think that, if our Lord were living under modern
conditions, his teaching on wealth would be greatly different from what it was.
Many of the forms of wealth which provide life with most real enrichment have
become public property and are within the reach of all: our parks, our art
galleries and museums, and our libraries. Other sources of refined enjoyment may
be, and doubtless will be, treated in the same way. In the case of music, the
process has already more than begun. Apart from these it is quite certain that
the enjoyment most men get from the wealth they acquire, even when it is only
moderate in amount, inadequately repays the toil, the anxiety and often the.
lack of moral scruple that have gone to the gathering and preserving of it. The
amount of money spent by the rich on foolish display or costly social rivalry,
and by the poor on luxuries which have no effect or a deleterious effect on the
standard of their lives, is a forceful reminder that the world has not grown
beyond the need for the teaching of the Rich Fool. The many-sidedness of his
teaching is illustrated by the words of Jesus which in Luke succeed this parable
as its moral, the words concerning excessive anxiety about food and clothing. In
Matthew (Mat 6:25-33) they are a warning to the poor, in Luke a warning to the
rich: both warnings are needed. Great wealth and great poverty, the former more
than the latter, have an all but compelling power to make material interests
supreme in our lives. Within these two extremes the wise man is he who realizes
that a man’s life is more than his food, his body more than its raiment, that he
is more than what he owns the man who is the master and not the servant of his
material surroundings.


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  CHAPTER 30: 28 - CHAPTER 28
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CHAPTER XXVIII THE TALENTS AND THE POUNDS Mat 25:14-30Luk 19:12-27. THE citizen
of the Kingdom, then, carefully distinguishes between himself and his
possessions; even his possessions are by no means his absolute property; when
occasion calls they are to be placed freely at the disposal of those who need
them. In the Talents Jesus becomes more inward still; not only our external and
material possessions but even our internal wealth, our wealth that is part of
us, is given to us only in trust; we are not owners but stewards; as Paul would
say (1Co 12:1-31) it is to be thrown into the common stock for the common good.

We ask first what experience or what train of thought led Jesus to this parable.
He must have been impressed with the amount of talent, some of it of a high
order, that in his own country and his own age was lying unused. Had they never
come into contact with Jesus, the men in the innermost circle of the disciples
to the end of their lives would have seemed to themselves as to others
commonplace fishermen, taxgathers, tradesmen or minor politicians. Yet they had
within them, only wanting the magic touch to stimulate it into rapid growth, the
germ of eloquence, of invincible courage, of organizing ability, of spiritual
insight and power and capacity for sacrifice. Such people were not to blame for
their failure to cultivate their talents; neither themselves nor their
neighbours knew that they possessed them. In other cases failure to use talents
was due to physical disability or social prejudice. Bartimaeus had more insight
than most men of his time; and had a gift of persistence, of refusal to be put
down by the crowd, that would have carried him far in a worthy cause; only,
beggars have no influence. The woman of the city (Luk 7:1-50) had a depth of
moral earnestness, a capacity for the fearless expression of grateful love, that
might have inspired many others to a fervour of devotion; but, except in a rare
society such as the Greece of Pericles, people do not look to such women for
guidance.

There were others, and doubtless it was of them chiefly that Jesus was thinking,
whose talents lay unused because they did not choose to cultivate them. We feel
an almost personal grief as we read the refusal of the rich ruler and consider
what an acquisition he would have been to the disciple circle had he chosen to
dedicate his talents to the cause of Jesus. In every crowd that Jesus addressed,
in every little group with which he had an interview, he must have met men and
women with gifts that were meant to be used to enrich the life around them, but
who were restrained from using them by prejudice or greed or fear. In this
parable Jesus taught it is the teaching also of biology and psychology that used
powers grow and develop; unused powers wither and perish. In parable after
parable Jesus sought to make men realize that growth, expansion, is the law of
the Kingdom. In the Sower, the Darnel, the Mustard Seed, the Leaven, the
Unfruitful Fig-tree, he taught that the essence of the Kingdom is life, a life
that spreads and dominates and subdues one region after another of men and
ideals and institutions. Yet to a large number of professing Christians, this is
an uncomfortable doctrine in which they do not believe and which they resent.
Having reached a certain moral and spiritual level, probably in early youth,
they have no ambition to go beyond this. Aids to the deepening of spiritual
life, forward movements, revivals, are to them anathema. If they are tolerable
at all, they are only for Church officials and religious professionals, the five
and the two talent men of the spiritual world. As they conceive it, these things
have no relation to the average Church member whose business it is to keep on
the wellbeaten track. The spread of the Christian religion to people of other
races is the particular aversion of this type of Christian. Geographically also,
to keep what we have, not to reach out for more, is the true Christian wisdom.
The Christian religion has more or less found its home among the white races;
why should we take the risk of spreading it beyond them, when we could keep it
safe in a hole in the ground in our own country? The Palestine of Jesus’ day
must have had its share of people who thought that piety consisted in just going
on as they were, who had never discovered that we cannot remain kind people
unless we do kind things, that we cannot have or retain any of the virtues
unless we practise them, and that every temptation resisted strengthens our
resisting power. As Dr. Edward Caird put it: “ In the moral world standing still
is going back.”

It is the incompetent and unenterprising men who are the grumblers, and it is
characteristic that the very harsh picture of the master is drawn by the.
one-talent man, a very different picture from that his colleagues would have
drawn. But he had noted accurately one feature in his master’s character. When
he entrusted treasure to his servants, he expected it to be profitably employed
and returned to him with increase. To the more competent servants this gave a
zest to the enterprise into which they entered joyfully and successfully. To the
incapable servant, it was a grievance to be rebelled against. Yet it is one of
the laws of life; in parable after parable Jesus emphasized that God expects
fruit, and that, if the labourer does his work faithfully, God gives fruit and
gives it abundantly. The excuse offered by the one-talent servant was his fear
of losing his talent and of the consequences from such a severe taskmaster. In
his reply the master roundly accuses him of laziness. We can well imagine that
the lesson of the parable is one that Jesus not merely regarded as important,
but, in the circumstances of the time, saw to be of paramount importance.

He was leaving the prosecution of his mission to a tiny band of disciples who
would meet with bitter opposition even in the land where the Faith had its
birth. On one condition only could the enterprise prosper: that those to whom it
had been entrusted should fling aside every fear, forget every consideration
save loyal service of the Master, and go forth in a spirit of utter faith,
devotion and confidence, dedicating to the spreading of the Good News every
power with which God had endowed them. The leaders could be trusted; but the
leaders alone could never accomplish the work; the average men, the one-talent
disciples, must also be pressed into the service, must learn the same spirit of
dedication.

Jesus saw that one particular form of letting talents rust was just want of
enterprise, leaving the work to others, cherishing the idea that because one has
no outstanding gifts, one has little influence and is therefore not called on to
take any risks. In the Treasure and the Pearl we saw how Jesus thought of the
citizen of the Kingdom as taking part in a great adventure, flinging away, with
a faith that he knows is justified, precious treasures with an abandon that to
the world seems reckless. Except to the eye of faith, the mission of Jesus and
his followers must have seemed a forlorn hope.

He was constantly calling men to defy the cautious usages, opinions and
standards established by convention. Those who took the plunge never regretted
it; they counted all things but loss if only they could win Christ and lead
others to know him. The men who jealously guarded their talents on the ’ safety
first ’ principle saw them shrivel before their eyes; those who spent them in
the Master’s service found them grow and grow. In the apostolic Church the word
’ ’ talents ’ would come to have a more technical sense. From more than one
passage in Paul’s epistles (e.g. 1Co 12:8-10) we know the endowments and
qualities that came to be regarded as special gifts of the Spirit. It was the
duty of the Christian to exercise the gift that was in him. By common consent
the teaching of the parable for us covers a wide range. A talent was originally
a sum of money. In its most literal sense the parable has an application. Our
money is a trust from God; not only the pound of the rich man, but the penny of
the poor man; not only the fraction that we devote to religion and charity, but
all our money. But it is not in this sense that the word “ talent ’ has enriched
our vocabulary as a new acquisition. When one has a special gift for art, for
languages, for public speech, for organization, and we call such a person
“talented,” we sometimes forget that, if we look to the origin of the word, we
mean that he possesses capacities whose only appropriate function is to be used
in the Master’s service. But we are not all talented in this sense, and surely
the parable has its message for us all.

Frances Ridley Havergal’s consecration hymn breathes the very spirit of this
parable. To use our hands in God’s service does not mean that they should be
always uplifted in prayer; it means in the first place doing with our might and
with our conscience the daily work we have undertaken to do, the work for which
we are paid. Consecrating our feet means something more than that they should
convey us to Church or to prayer meeting. It incites that they should sometimes
lead us to the house of the needy or the mourner, and that they should bring us
to no place to which we cannot ask God to go with us. The voice may often be
uplifted in prayer or praise without being consecrated to God’s service. The
consecrated voice will speak the words of truth and soberness, will avoid the
untested scandal that poisons social relations, and will be more often heard in
praise and encouragement than in unkindly criticism. The consecrated gift will
grow from strength to strength; the task that was impossible yesterday is
possible to-day and will be easy to-morrow. The Master asked from each servant
only the fruit of the talents he had given that servant, not the fruit of the
talents he had given his neighbour. The one-talent man was not blamed because he
could not produce an additional five talents or even two. How often we sav: “ If
only I had better health, a higher social position, a larger income, greater
eloquence, a more thorough education, how much more I should accomplish for the
community in which I live.” But the only talents for which we are responsible
are the talents we have, and envy is not one of the Christian graces. It is not
reading too much into this parable to believe that in some measure the foolish
indolence of the one-talent man was due to resentment at the inferiority of his
equipment as compared with his colleagues.

He was unenterprising because he was sulky. Our one-talent men have no cause to
feel ashamed. As Paul teaches in I Cor. xii. every talent is an essential
talent, even those that the world counts humble. If the preaching is altogether
done by the man in the pulpit, it is not likely to carry very far. As has been
said, ’ It is great hearing that makes great preaching.”

If we have not been given the talent of prophecy, at least the talent of
attentive, sympathetic, responsive listening is within our reach and is well
worthy of cultivation.


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CHAPTER XXIX THE UNJUST STEWARD

Luk 16:1-14.

EVEN if the disciples of Jesus, and especially the leaders, accepted this
conception of themselves as stewards of the Master, there was one special
temptation to which they were subject. That temptation is dealt with in the
parable commonly, but somewhat unfortunately, known as the Unjust Steward. This
is, by common consent, the most difficult of all the parables, the number of
explanations given even before the days of Trench being described as appalling.
We may dismiss at once a moral that has found much favour with commentators,
viz. that the followers of Jesus must show in spiritual matters the same
long-sightedness which enabled the steward to escape from his difficulties, and
that wealth, even wealth dishonestly acquired, should be generously distributed
with a view to a good reception of the donor in the next world. Jesus did not
teach men to make an immoral use of

1 Summarized, by permission of the publishers, from an article by the author in
The Expository ’Times for September, 1926. their own money, much less of other
people’s money.

Luke appends four or five different lessons to the parable, which looks as if,
by the time he wrote, people were just as much puzzled by it as we are to-day,
and so various sayings of Jesus had become attached to it as its explanation.

(Two of these have parallels in Luk 19:17 and Mat 6:24.) Luke’s third and fourth
lessons are: (3) A man trustworthy in a trifle will be trustworthy in a big
affair; the converse is also true, and if you cannot be trusted with ’ ’ filthy
lucre,” who will commit to your keeping genuine wealth? (4) You may be a slave
of God or of mammon, but not of both; you must choose. The true exegesis of the
parable seems to be in the line of these morals. If people follow the ironical
advice to be generous with their illgotten gains, the homes they will thereby
secure for themselves in the other world will have only the eternity of tents,
which are the very symbol of the temporary and evanescent. The steward is held
up not as a model but as a warning, as an illustration of one to whom a trust
has been committed, and who evades his difficulties by lowering his master’s
claims. In the early centuries the principle involved in this parable proved to
be of supreme importance. 1 From the time the religion of Jesus entered the
Gentile world, the Christians put

1 See Harnack’s “ Expansion of Christianity “ and C. J. Cadoux’ “ The Early
Church and the World.” in the very fore-front of their teaching that God is
spirit and that God is One. Then, as now, idolatry did not confine itself to a
compartment of life that might be labelled religious; it insinuated itself into
social life and into the occupations by which men earned their bread, and some
felt that the only way to keep their garments clean was to hold aloof altogether
from those outside the Church. Not only guild feasts and dinners held in
temples, but marriages and the coming-of-age ceremony were closely associated
with idolatrous rites: might a Christian accept an invitation to such? In the
circus performances which were the football matches of those days, idolatry
played an essential part; could a Christian be an actor or even a spectator? A
magistrate or an army officer had to conduct sacrifices, while even the private
soldier became involved in the sacrificial ceremonies; did that close to the
Christian political and military service? Having to read with his pupils heathen
literature and to explain to them heathen mythology and idolatrous customs, the
schoolmaster was placed in an ambiguous position. There were, again, many trades
such as that of incense-seller, builder or engraver which might at any time
involve their workmen, wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of idols,
heathen temples, or sacrifices. No less strong was Christian antipathy to a
living idol in the shape of the reigning emperor.

Round this point centred one of the earliest and most persistent struggles
between the Church and the State. From the first it was realized in the most
vital way that a spiritual worship and a life of lofty moral purity were of the
essence of the Faith.

If the Master had written a hundred, then whatever pain or shame or loss might
be involved, though the refusal might mean torture or death, the steward must
not lower his Master’s claims to eighty or fifty. Ultimately there came a time
when Church leaders not only showed a Christian consideration for those who
found the demands of the religion too rigorous, but actually sought to smooth
the path to acceptance of the Gospel by an unworthy lowering of its claims. For
such disloyal stewardship there was a heavy price to pay. As Harnack has shown,
the adoption from the third century onwards of semi-divine saints and angels, of
local cults and holy places, of noisy annual festivals, and of relics and bones
of saints as objects of reverence and instruments of healing, was really a
reversion to paganism which has permanently degraded Christianity in the theory
and practice of large sections of its followers. The classic example of lowering
the standard to lighten the load alike of the leaders and of the rank and file
was the introduction of the system of indulgences, which instituted what has
been aptly called a tariff for sin. In our own day every one who tries to take a
dispassionate view of the situation must be seriously perturbed by the extent to
which even in the Christian West life seems to demand one long series of
compromises with the Christian standard. A passage of Dr. Herbert Gray’s As
Tommy Sees Us reads like a commentary on The Dishonest Steward. His soldier
friends, he tells us, just said quite bluntly: “ In business you can’t be a
Christian.” “ In the modern competitive scramble a man who took Christ’s
teaching seriously and honestly could not exist.”

’ They did not feel it was all so very bad, but they were quite clear it was not
Christian, and therefore for them Christianity was an impossible religion.” In
other words they themselves, however reluctantly, were quite prepared to abate
twenty or fiftypercent, of the demands of Christian morality, but they were
honest enough to call what they were doing by its proper name. In Stones of
Stumbling^ Mr. Tillyard, who had himself been in business, gave it as his
conviction that ’ no Christian has ever been engaged for long in a competitive
business without doing many things he would have liked not to do. He may desire
to love his neighbour as himself, but he dwells in the midst of people who are
out to do the best they can for themselves, and he must do as they do or go
under.” In politics, the average voter is as well aware as the statesman that
the statecraft even of those politicians who are enthusiasts for righteousness,
consists largely in accommodating the moral progress of the State to the pace of
the average citizen. As Dr. Hodgkin says in ’The Christian Revolution: “ Its
legislation is for men as they are, or seem to the politician to be, rather than
for men as they may become, or seem to the Christ-eyes to be.” Any who are
inclined to think that the temptation of the Dishonest Steward is one with which
the Christian in the West has no longer seriously to reckon, should weigh the
words of Dr. C. J. Cadoux: “ The spirit of the world has eaten deeply into the
vitals of the Christian commonwealth, so much so that the charge can be made,
not justifiably indeed, but at least without obvious absurdity, that the average
moral life within the Church is little higher, if at all, than the average moral
life without, that the Church is as much the home of lazy reactionism and
selfishness as it is of idealism and progress.” The Church has her own peculiar
problems; one of them is that of tainted money. Yet in this sphere also, ideal
purity is not even possible except within strict limits. Church balances kept in
a bank may be employed to finance a distillery or a firm of swindlers. The
leaders of the Church, too, are stewards of God in other than financial matters.
They are defenders of the faith, not onlv of the faith once delivered to the
saints, but of the new truth that God makes known to each generation. There are
always those who resent the idea that revelation is progressive; and the
stewards of the mysteries of God know very well that they can simplify their own
task by placating the conservatives, who are often the elderly and influential
men, while keeping their own counsel about any new light they may have
themselves received. Has it not at times been regarded even as a virtue in an
ecclesiastic to be a “ safe “ rather than an honest man? On this subject as on
all others, Pharisaic self-satisfaction and condemnation of others are out of
place; to our own Master we stand or fall. Yet it is idle to minimize the
reality of the danger or the seriousness of the temptation.

Self-respect requires that we do not rest content with any comfort secured by
acquiescing in a second-best. The application of the parable to life demands
earnest thought and fearless facing of the situation. In our age the difficulty
has been increased by the extent to which moral responsibility has been
socialized. Arrangements are made for us by our joint-stock company, our trade
union, our municipality, our Church; our individual responsibility almost seems
so small as to be negligible. Yet however helpless each of us may seem to be,
our stewardship not only remains but can be in some measure discharged. It is
always in our power to strive to retain a conscience keenly alive to the
difference between what is and what ought to be, and to throw ourselves into the
work of trying to Christianize the social sentiment that dictates so much of our
policy. There are times we can learn to recognize them, and perhaps they come
oftener than we think when it is unmanly to take refuge behind the corporate
conscience and the customs of our society. It is ours, too, to guard against the
insidious danger, the temptation especially of middle life, of making props of
the words ’ impracticable ’ and “ impossible,” of believing that an unworthy
compromise with wrong is the utmost that even the Church of God can ever hope to
achieve.


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CHAPTER XXX THE WORKERS IN THE VINEYARD

Mat 20:1-16. THE citizen of the Kingdom, then, is a steward, dedicating his
money, his possessions, his physical, intellectual and spiritual endowments to
the service of God, his neighbour, and the community to which he belongs, a
steward who is never at liberty to make things more comfortable for himself by
lowering his Master’s claims. In Matthew’s Talents, the honest servants make an
equally good use of a different equipment; in Luke’s Pounds, they make a
different use of the same equipment; in any case differences of achievement
arise. In the world these differences would be reflected in a corresponding
distinction of rewards; does the same rule hold good in the Kingdom? The ’
Workers in the Vineyard “ supplies the answer.

Though the moral which “ Matthew ’ finds in the parable (Mat 20:16) does not
really apply, the context in which he places the story is appropriate. People
like the rich ruler refused to pay the price of discipleship. Peter reminded
Jesus that he and his fellow-disciples had paid the price in full; what reward,
then, were they to have? Clearly he expected that bigger sacrifices would meet
with bigger reward (Mat 19:27). The sons of Zebedee (their mother on their
behalf in Matthew’s version) wanted to steal a march on the other disciples, to
get above them (Mat 20:21). But Jesus was thinking in terms other than those of
earthly glory and reward; he was thinking of his death (Mat 20:17-19). At such a
time teaching like that of the Workers in the Vineyard was called for. Our Lord
had watched the steward on a big farm paying the labourers at the end of the
day, had noted how the wage varied according to the number of hours worked.

“ Suppose,” said Jesus, “ the steward were to pay them ail the same rate of
wage; that is how God deals with His workers.” The toilers of this parable are
men who accept the conditions of the world, who will labour all day if anyone
will hire them; but in no other parable is the urgency of the work so great, in
the later hours so feverish. Truly, the harvest is great but the labourers are
few; the haste is as that in the mission of the seventy. Our Lord as usual makes
straight for his goal; but, because he makes no comment on it we are not
entitled to assume that he felt no pity and no indignation at the haphazard
system which left willing men waiting hour after hour for the work that so often
did not come, work the absence of which meant starving wives and children. For
generations, with the Gospel of Christ in our hands, we have looked at those
bands of eager, despairing men standing all day idle in the market-place for no
better reason than that no man had hired them. Are there any other wrongs
waiting to be remedied till the sufferer refuses to suffer any longer? Are there
any other groups of men or women whom till now we have regarded as a feature of
the landscape or at worst a disconcerting by-product of our system, waiting till
at last a beam of light from the Gospels is shed upon them, revealing to us
people like ourselves, victims of our injustice? In this parable, then, our Lord
would have the disciples remember that all questions of reward may be safely
left to God. Later on (Mat 20:25-28) he will try to give a loftier range to
their whole thought of reward, which as yet is moving on a low level. Meantime
he asks them to have faith that the Judge of all the earth will do right. In the
parable, those who drove a bargain with the farmer got as much as they were
legally entitled to; the farmer kept his promise. All the others, those who
simply trusted the farmer and made no stipulation about wages, received far more
than they could legally claim. Jesus never wearied of insisting that God does
not deal with us according to our sins or even according to our good deeds; that
God gives good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. The
early-morning workers had no fault to find with their own pay, until they saw
how generously the other workers were being treated.

If all had been paid according to the number of hours worked, they would have
made no complaint. It was the good fortune of their fellow-workers that roused
their ire. Employers of labour have tried various systems of assessing wages: “
time wages “ that ignore the difference between the industrious workman and the
lazy, “ piecework wages ’ that fail to distinguish between men working with
up-to-date appliances and those supplied only with primitive tools or machines,
and “ efficiency wages ’ that try to apportion the wage to the effort. The
workmen of our day have demanded, and successfully demanded, the application of
another principle, the very principle of the employer in the parable, what we
might call “ willingness wages,” that those who are ready to work but whom no
one hires must have their share in the product with those who toil all the day.
Our passion for spiritualizing may blind us to the elementary lesson that is on
the surface of a parable. The annals of our treatment of the unemployed would
have been less terrible than they are if followers of Jesus had been more
willing to believe that the parables had a meaning as stories before they had a
meaning as sermons. The denarius that those first hired received as their day’s
wage was evidently the recognized day’s wage of an agricultural labourer,
presumably little more than enough to supply the workman and his wife and family
with the necessities of life. Half of this amount, still more one twelfth, would
have been utterly inadequate. Yet the early-morning workers would have been
quite satisfied to see all wages paid in proportion to the hours worked, since
that would have meant that the demands of the multiplication table were being
met, trade union regulations maintained, old customs kept up and justice done.
As they had the legal view of the wages, so they took a purely commercial view
of the work.

Otherwise they would have seen that they were the most fortunate of all the
labourers, since all through the day they had the joy of exercising the talents
God had given them, of helping the earth to yield her fruits, of entering into
their master’s joy. In the parables it is the disagreeable people who compare
themselves with others. The Pharisee looked down from his towering height upon
the tax-collector; the elder brother could not understand the fuss that was
being made about his younger brother; the wealthy debtor, just delivered from
fear of a debtors’ gaol, thought it a favourable opportunity for putting the
screw on his debtor a few rungs further down the social scale; the labourers who
had earned their shilling thought themselves much finer men than those who got
it without earning it.

What did the parable mean on the lips of Jesus? The great majority of those to
whom the message of Jesus came were neither invited nor expected to become
followers in the literal sense; they were to become disciples in their own
homes. Caste feeling, then, would naturally arise, those who had forsaken all
being the Brahmins. So Peter, speaking for the twelve, asked: “What shall we
have?’ while James and John put in their special claim. If completely wrong
relations were not to arise among the various circles of followers, teaching
like this was necessary. Our Lord’s call in itself constitutes all the honour we
need. When we depreciate our neighbour’s task, we are not only exhibiting a
repulsive conceit; we are going beyond what we know. It may well be that our
neighbour would be only too delighted to have our opportunity. In any case, we
are all needed, the ninth- and the eleventh-hour workers as well as those who
join at break of day. We are taking part in an organic whole; in his own good
time the Master will call for all the service that he needs. If we work for our
wage and with our eye on the clock, our neighbour, coming in at the last hour
and working with a will because at last he has had his chance, may make a
contribution that will bear no unworthy comparison with our own. It is a foolish
and vain calculation to try to apportion the praise for the successful execution
of any enterprise; nor, if we have the spirit of the Kingdom, shall we wish to
do so in any Christian enterprise. To be ready when the call comes, that is the
finest service we can render, that is all the Master asks. The generation that
gave us the Gospels must have felt in a still more acute form the temptation
against which the parable warns.

We know that those who had been with Jesus from the Baptism to Gethsemane
expected and received a pre-eminence in the Church over those who joined the
disciple circle later. The Jewish Christians who had been followers from the
beginning considered themselves the true Church in comparison with the Gentile
converts whose very presence in the Church was regarded as an after-thought of
God. Some of the most eloquent passages in Paul’s epistles are those in which he
records the sufferings he endured for the sake of the Gospel. Paul himself was
too deeply imbued with the spirit of Christ to imagine that his pre-eminence in
toil and suffering was due to any merit of his own, or gave him any title to
rank in the Kingdom. But there were other Christians who had toiled and endured,
yet who had not Paul’s fine Christian intuitions, his self-suppression and
willingness to look on the things of others. To them this parable must have
brought the reminder that we are but servants; our service and our suffering are
but the fulfilment of our stewardship; our neighbour’s toil and tribulation and
our neighbour’s reward are in God’s hands. In our own day the parable has even
wider applications. From 1914 till 1918 to hundreds of thousands of young men
the call came to leave all, even life itself, in the cause of honour and of
country. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them;
yet we do not believe, nor would they ask us to believe, that had the same call
come to the youth of other generations they would not have been ready. In some
communities, among the caste Hindus of India for example, in the early days of
missions the call to leave all and to follow Jesus has an even more terrible
meaning than it had to his followers in Palestine. All honour to the men without
whose splendid courage and patient self-sacrifice the history of our religion in
their community would never have been written. Yet among the ninth- and
eleventh-hour Christians, among those who follow in later and easier days, we
know there are many who, in the same circumstances, would have shown the same
grit. Our own experience confirms the justice of the rebuke conveyed in this
parable to the early-morning claimants to pre-eminence. We have known men and
women who seemed to be essentially common-place, living hum-drum lives, with
nothing to distinguish them from ten thousand of their fellows; and then a
sudden call came: a painful task that meant the abandonment of all their
ambitions, financial ruin, a disabling illness, a call for unremitting attention
to a loved one continued through long years; and they patiently took up the
burden. Those we had thought to be average people showed themselves heroes or
heroines. They had only been waiting for their chance, and when the call came it
found them ready.


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CHAPTER XXXI THE MIDNIGHT PETITIONER

Luk 11:5-10.

WE have seen the noble but heavy responsibilities laid on the citizen of the
Kingdom. Is he to be left to discharge them all in his own strength? Or we may
put the question in another way: what is the relation of the world in which we
live to the spiritual Kingdom which Jesus invites us to enter? Some tell us we
are living in an environment hostile to man’s endeavour, that the forces behind
the world, of whatever nature they be, delight to wreck the pet schemes of puny
mortals. Others teach that the gods, whatever gods there be, are indifferent to
human joys, griefs and aspirations, that the material world, if not anti-moral,
is non-moral, that man is the only friend of man. In this parable Jesus states
his conviction that we are living in a responsive world in which petition is
answered, search is rewarded and doors are opened to them that knock.

Here again we must be on our guard against too rigorous allegorizing. As the
midnight cry, the midnight thief, the midnight petition testify, our Lord was
alive to the fateful significance that may attach to the solemn hour that marks
that the night has run half its course. But obviously the hour of midnight here
is chosen simply as an inconvenient time at which to knock at a neighbour’s
door; it has no spiritual significance. Some, again, have found a spiritual
truth in the fact that the petitioner was borrowing not on his own behalf but
for the sake of a friend; but this touch was necessary to give realism to the
story. It was hardly likely that a man should wake up in the middle of the night
hungry enough to pester his neighbour into giving him something to eat. The
significance that has been found in the number three is allegorical folly; three
is chosen as the number of “ breads ’ a man was most likely to ask for.

It is sometimes said that Luke has three prayer parables. As we have seen, one
of these, the Pharisee and the Tax-collector, though it pictures two men at
prayer, is not a parable about prayer. It is a lesson on religion conceived as
Law and conveys a warning against selfrighteousness. The Midnight Petitioner
does deal in a measure with prayer. When the average man discusses whether God
does or does not answer prayer, he conceives prayer primarily as a request to
God for some favour. But there are prayers of Thanksgiving, of Adoration, of
Confession, of Intercession for others. Some Christians would deny that petition
ever has any rightful place in Christian prayer, least of all petition for
material favours. Our Lord does not go so far as that; he encourages petitionary
prayer; but he teaches that petition must be something more than a form of
words. As we saw that forgiveness is not something that can be handed over like
a document, so answers to prayer cannot be bestowed like presents. This graphic
and rather amusing little story by no means illustrates the whole science of
prayer, but it does emphasize one important aspect of it. The petitioner knew
that his neighbour, though not a paragon of kindness, was not ill-natured. He
knew also that he wanted the bread and was determined to get it. So he kept
hammering at the door and shouting till the door was opened and the coveted
loaves handed out. A very elementary lesson in prayer, yet how little
assimilated in nineteen hundred years! If we deduct from all our petitions to
God, whether uttered in public or in private, those which we do not expect, or
hardly expect, God to answer, and those to which we scarcely give a passing
thought, which indeed we forget completely the moment we utter them, how much of
real prayer is left?

If the prayer means nothing to us, how can we expect it to mean anything to God?

Moreover, in this case the petitioner himself was taking far more trouble than
he was asking his neighbour to take. When his friend arrived at an inconvenient
hour, instead of sleepily telling him to lie down somewhere till morning, he
bestirred himself to give him a hospitable reception. Even at that untimely hour
he would prepare a meal to set before him. In the case of many of our petitions
there is a price to be paid before even God can answer our prayers.

Prayer is a petition, a demand if you will, not that God will work for us, but
that God will allow us to co-operate with Him in some enterprise into which we
throw our whole hearts. The borrower was convinced that sooner or later he would
get what he asked, and find what he sought; that the door at which he knocked so
persistently would eventually open. Let us, if we will, find in this parable a
lesson on prayer. But surely Luke (Luk 11:9 f.) is right in applying here words
of Jesus that carry us far beyond the region of prayer as commonly conceived.
The asking that receives is no mere lip petition; it is a demand of the whole
being; the seeking that surely finds is a search of the whole personality; the
knocking to which the door is opened is no verbal knocking, it is the insistent
demand of heart and soul. Moreover, the words carry our thoughts to richer gifts
than loaves, to a search for something less prosaic than a meal for a friend, to
a door that gives entrance to a more wondrous store-house than a neighbour’s
kitchen.

We are living in an age when we have almost ceased to wonder, when we have
become blase with the miracles of knowledge that are daily revealed to us, the
miracles of power that are daily performed before our eyes, nay, that we
ourselves are able to perform. Yet down almost to our own age nature did not
tell us these things, because we did not ask her; the world hid her secrets,
because men did not search for them; the doors of earth’s treasurehouse remained
closed, because we did not knock at them; at least we did not ask or seek or
knock in the spirit of this parable. It has been well said that it was only
natural that modern science should arise in the Christian world. The faith of
modern men of science is the faith of this parable, the conviction that we are
living in a responsive world in which nature will give when they ask, will
reward their search, will open her doors into palaces more wonderful than
Aladdin’s, provided that, forsaking all other aims, they ask and seek and knock,
earnestly, persistently, expectantly. Jesus does not say that we shall get
exactly what we ask, find exactly what we seek, or enter the kind of store-house
we expect to find. But the things God sends us are never hurtful parodies of the
things we seek (Luk 11:11-13); His answers are our prayers transfigured. The
parable is our Lord’s answer to the agnostic. The quest is not in vain; the
world is no insoluble riddle; our Lord was speaking out of his own experience.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. If with all our hearts we
truly seek Him, we shall ever surely find Him.


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CHAPTER XXXII THE IMPORTUNATE WIDOW

Luk 18:1-8. THIS is the third of Luke’s three “ prayer ’ parables, so-called. We
have seen that one of them is not a parable about prayer, and that the second
reaches far beyond the confines of prayer as commonly understood. This third
parable inculcates an attitude to life, especially to the Christian mission,
rather than to prayer in the narrow sense (though in his introduction Luke finds
in it the teaching that ’ ’ men must always pray and never lose heart “
(Weymouth).) In various parables Jesus described the character of the citizen of
the Kingdom, and then in the Midnight Petitioner he taught that the world in
which the programme of the Kingdom has to be carried out provides a friendly
environment, that it has boundless resources which are freely at the disposal of
the citizen of the Kingdom who approaches them in the right way.

One needs little experience of life to discover that there is much in the world
that militates against this optimistic creed. In some moods and in some
circumstances one is far more impressed by the unresponsiveness of the world
than by its friendliness to the aims of the Kingdom. There is much in life to
justify those passages in the New Testament in which the word ’ world ’ is used
to summarize the forces in life that fight against God. It is with this fact in
view that Jesus in the Unjust Judge (or the Importunate Widow) reiterates in
stronger terms the teaching of the Midnight Petitioner. In the latter parable
the neighbour, though not specially neighbourly, is not an absolute churl, and
the petitioner has good reason to believe that by persistence he will get what
he wants. In the Importunate Widow Jesus pictures a very different situation.
The petitioner is among the most helpless of human beings, a poor and persecuted
widow without influence. Nor could anyone seem harder to move than an
unscrupulous judge, irreligious and with no regard for public opinion. ’ By
dogged persistence,” says Jesus, ’ even such a woman will get what she wants.”

If the judge cannot be persuaded into giving her justice, he can be plagued into
it.

Jesus, then, urges his followers to go forward on the mission entrusted to them,
refusing to be dismayed or made afraid by the hostility of men or the seeming
indifference of the universe; to go forward in the faith, nay, in the knowledge
that in the end God will vindicate them and their cause will triumph. He that
endureth to the end, the same shall be saved. Patient endurance, invincible
determination, quenchless faith, the ability to see the guiding hand of God
behind the hostility of men and the perverseness of things, these were qualities
that Jesus ranked high among the qualifications for the citizen of the Kingdom.
They had been his rock amid the storms of his own life; he knew how desperately
his followers would need them. This is the most daring, the least allegorical,
of all the parables. Though persistent prayer is only one application of it, it
is, as Luke discerned, one application. But the screams and shouts of the widow
have the faintest resemblance to the earnest prayers of the Church, and the
atheistical, cynical judge is the antipodes of the heavenly Father. There is
just the one point in common: the faith that refuses to despair, that believes
to the end, will be justified. A reminiscence of this application, and a
recognition of the experiences that make such confidence difficult, are seen in
the words of Jesus with which Luke closes the story: ’ Howbeit when the Son of
Man comes, shall he find faith on the earth? “ (Luk 18:8). The criticism of this
parable on the ground that it teaches those “ vain repetitions “ in prayer which
Jesus denounced in the Sermon on the Mount has no substance. In so far as the
reference is to prayer at all, and this is only one of the applications, what is
inculcated is not that the followers of Jesus should badger God into answering
their prayers by the endless repetition of a meaningless prayer formula, but
that they should continue in expectant prayer, even though Qod delays to answer
them (the mistranslation of this last phrase at the end of Luk 18:7 has added to
the confusion). In spite of all appearances to the contrary we must never
abandon our conviction, a conviction that will be vindicated, that God’s purpose
for us, his purpose for the world, is a purpose of good; that he is working all
things together for good to them that love Him: we must never cease to identify
ourselves with that purpose, to pray to God, not with our lips only but with all
that we have and all that we are, for the consummation of the Kingdom. The
Christian usually thinks of his own immediate concerns; God has larger interests
to consider: the Christian, especially the Christian in distress, is usually in
a hurry; God can afford to wait. In Luke’s account of Jesus’ interpretation of
this parable there is a somewhat disconcerting feature. The saints of God are
not exactly represented as crying aloud to God for vengeance on their
oppressors, yet the impression left on our minds is that that is what they
persistently demand; and God is represented as avenging them. The difficulty is
not met by the suggestion that the avenging consists in “ preserving or rescuing
from evil; ’ it is more satisfactory to suppose that the word has its ordinary
sense. As it happens, there are several parallels in the parables. In Matthew’s
version of the Wedding Supper, the King sends his armies to destroy the
murderers and burn up their city (Mat 22:7). In all three versions of the
Vinedressers, the jealous tenants are destroyed. In Luke’s parable of the
Pounds, the rebels who protested against the coronation of the new King are
condemned to be brought and slain before him (Luk 19:27). It is of course
possible, though not very convincing, to say that in these parables the
vengeance section is just scenery, not to be interpreted. We cannot give the
same explanation in the Importunate Widow, since the “ avenging “ is not part of
the parable, but part of the interpretation ascribed to Jesus.

We have seen that the destructive vengeance in Matthew’s Wedding Supper has no
counterpart in Luke’s Great Supper, and this feature in Luke’s Pounds is absent
from Matthew’s corresponding parable of the Talents. In the Wicked Vinedressers
much will depend on whether the prophecy of doom was uttered in a tone of
gloating triumph or in pity. When the persecution of the Christians began, as it
did within a generation after Jesus’ death, Christian preachers would be tempted
to find consolation by giving to certain parables a turn which Jesus never
intended. Especially would they see the hand of God in the destruction of
Jerusalem, and this interpretation of history would naturally influence their
interpretation of the parables.

Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors.
Could the same Jesus be responsible for teaching that the elect, when oppressed,
should continue instant in prayer for vengeance, and that God would avenge them?
That in the fiery trial some Christians were capable of praying for vengeance on
their oppressors we know from the Revelation (Rev 6:9-10); but the New Testament
as a whole rises above this level. Paul’s advice to the Roman Christians on
behaviour under persecution is entirely in line with the Sermon on the Mount
(Rom 12:14, Rom 12:17-21). The Christians to whom I Peter was addressed are
called on to imitate in his infinite patience under suffering the Christ who
committed himself to Him who judges righteously, are taught that only that
unmerited suffering which is borne patiently is acceptable with God. The writer
“ To the Hebrews “ congratulates his readers on the joy with which they received
the spoiling of their goods, not on the ground that they were certain of revenge
on their oppressors, but because they realized that they had in themselves a
better and enduring possession (Heb 10:34). We cannot believe that the followers
of Jesus rose above their Master. In the lament of Jesus over Jerusalem, and in
the cry from the Cross for forgiveness for his murderers, we see the true
attitude of Jesus to those who persecuted and rejected him.


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  CHAPTER 35: 33 - CHAPTER 33
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CHAPTER XXXIII THE BRIDESMAIDS

Mat 25:1-13. No parable of Jesus has impressed itself more deeply on the
imagination of the Church. The story of the simple village wedding, the sleeping
bridesmaids, the midnight cry, the dismay of the unprepared, the flashing of the
wedding torches in the darkness of the night as one has so often seen them in
India, the shut door and the vain pleading of the laggards: these memories
enhanced by many a poem, picture, hymn and sermon, have become part of the
Christian consciousness. Nor is there any parable that leaves us in a more
critical mood. It is not so much that when the thoughtless five reach the festal
chamber they find the door closed; for that they have themselves to blame: what
puzzles us is the harsh answer given by the master of the feast to their
pleading: “ Verily, I tell you, I do not know you.” It is difficult to think
that these words formed part of the original parable.

However true they might be in the spiritual sphere, they could hardly be true in
the story.

We note also that a saying closely parallel occurs in a far more probable
context in Luk 13:25-27. As we have suggested, a wrong turn is given to the
parable by the epithets ’ wise ’ and ’ foolish “ commonly applied to the two
parties of bridesmaids. Nor is it correct to find the fault of the thoughtless
in their falling asleep.

What distinguished the two sets was that some made their preparations before
they slept; others slept unprepared. (In some manuscripts in verse I the party
goes out to meet “ the bridegroom and the bride,” but it was the custom of Jesus
to omit all reference to the bride.)

What did Jesus have in mind when he spoke the parable? We can be fairly sure
that, in the disciple circle, there was at least one who, when the time came to
start, was seldom ready, though he always had an excellent excuse for delaying
the others. The inconvenience to the others and the more serious consequences
that might result from this failure to make one’s preparations in time, would
suggest a lesson that might take the form of a parable. But Jesus was thinking
of something deeper than any one single point of character, however important.
In the Great Supper the invited guests had no desire to attend; they had more
important engagements. The rich ruler did wish to be a citizen of the Kingdom,
but he was not prepared to pay the price. The five careless bridesmaids were
eager to attend the wedding feast, were thoroughly loyal to the bride and
bridegroom; they did their best to remedy their mistake; to be shut out at the
end was a bitter grief to them; yet, when they arrived, the door was shut. In
our Lord’s parabolic teaching about the qualifications for citizenship in the
Kingdom, one important lesson remained. Luke quotes another reference of Jesus
to a wedding feast (Luk 12:35-38). This time it is the master of the house who
has been attending a wedding.

However late in the night he may return, he expects to find his servants on the
watch, their belts buckled, their lamps lighted, ready to open the door the
moment he knocks. The moral is the same as that which Matthew ascribes to Jesus
at the end of the Bridesmaids: ’ Be ever on the watch.” A general sympathy with
the aims of the Kingdom, a general loyalty to the King are not enough. The
citizen must be prepared to take the trouble to make his citizenship effective.
Good will is of no avail without good works, loyalty does not help the King
without loyal support in his time of need; admiration of the Good Samaritan does
not carry one far: ’ Go thou and do likewise..” The citizen of the Kingdom must
live his life in a state of expectant readiness. In the moral and spiritual
world there are no holidays, no occasions when we can safely relax. We cannot
live to-day’s life on the strength of yesterday’s prayer; we cannot face
to-morrow’s temptations on the strength of to-day’s Bible study. If we allow
ourselves little indulgences, occasional lapses, a lowering of the ideal in some
branches of life, for a time it does not seem to matter very much; but when a
crisis comes, a great and unexpected temptation, a sudden call for courage and
sacrifice, we find that our lamps are going out and our oil-flasks are empty.

We cannot burn our spiritual lamps any more than our oil lamps without constant
renewal. Our spiritual life is not a tank but a river; it cannot continue to
flow unless every day and all day it is renewed from on high.

Spasmodic religion means a life lived dangerously. Things may go on smoothly for
a time, even a long time, when nothing particular seems to happen, and the
warnings about watchfulness seem to have no special point. And then, in such an
hour as we think not, comes the midnight cry. If our belts are unbuckled, our
spiritual muscles out of training, our strength unrenewed, our condition finds
us out. The midnight crisis reveals us to ourselves; but God knows before the
cry comes that when it does come it will find our lamps going out. The unready
maidens took a gambler’s risk; had the bridegroom arrived at the expected time,
their slackness would never have been discovered, but God would still have
known. The parable has its lesson for every age. In our own day, as in Jesus’
day, the temptation is ever present to regard life as an easy business, to think
we can stand in our own strength, to make no preparation for the coming of storm
and stress. But from the position in which ’ Matthew ’ places it, it is clear
that in the apostolic age the Bridesmaids took on a more detailed, if more
restricted, significance. A number of parables seemed to point to a future day
of reckoning. The Sower and the Darnel among the Wheat laid stress on the coming
of the harvest; the Fishing Net spoke of a great separation; the Talents and the
Pounds specifically mentioned a Day of Reckoning and a Judgment. So did the
Vinedressers; so, though in a somewhat different form, did the Unfruitful
Fig-tree. We know from Mat 13:1-58 that the apostolic Church regarded the Darnel
and the Fishing Net as picturing the Last Judgment. These other parables, more
or less definitely, would be given a similar reference. That “ Matthew “
believes both the Bridesmaids and the Talents point to the Last Things is clear
from the position he gives them, just after the discourse on this subject in Mat
24:1-51, just before the picture of the Last Judgment in Mat 25:1-46.

Jesus had spoken of himself as the bridegroom (Mark 2:19). As time went on the
bridegroom of this parable would inevitably be identified with Jesus, the coming
of the bridegroom with the return of Jesus, for which the early Church, as we
know e.g. from the Thessalonian epistles and I Corinthians, was waiting. As year
passed after year and the expected return did not take place, some mocked at the
whole theory and sneeringly asked: ’ Where is his promised return; for since our
fathers fell asleep everything goes on just as it has done since the creation ’
(2Pe 3:4). Others, again, said: “ The delay, long as it seems to us, is just a
moment in God’s sight. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a
thousand years as one day. Wait, and the Day of the Lord shall come as a thief “
(2Pe 3:8-10). The fourth Gospel gave a third explanation, which has become
traditional among educated Christians, The Coming of the Christ is a spiritual
coming in the hearts of his followers, a coming present, gradual and continuous,
not catastrophic and relegated to some future date. By those who accepted the
second explanation importance would come to be attached to those features in
certain parables which, in allegorizing explanations, pointed to a delay before
the final consummation. In the Talents the master returns ’after a long time’
(Mat 25:19). In the Vinedressers the wicked tenants are given repeated respites.
The gardener in the Unfruitful Fig-tree pleads for a year’s delay. In the
Bridesmaids it was the unexpected tarrying of the Bridegroom that brought to
shame the five thoughtless ones. In the little quasi-parable at the end of
Matthew xxiv. it is the head-servant’s confidence that the master will not come
till late that encourages him to maltreat his fellowservants. As a matter of
fact in every case the delay in question is essential to the story, and need be
given no significance except on extreme allegorizing methods. In the Talents the
master must leave his servants a reasonable time for trading before calling them
to account. The point in the Vinedressers is not the delay but the matchless
patience of the owner of the vineyard; in the Unfruitful Fig-tree it is the
gardener’s eagerness that the tree be given a real chance to show what it can do
before it is condemned. Had not the bridegroom been delayed, the want of
forethought of the thoughtless bridesmaids would never have been discovered and
so the story could not have been told. We must look elsewhere than in the
parables for corroboration of materialistic theories of the Second Coming of
Christ.

IT seems worth while to take a retrospective glance at the parables in general.
In view of the variety of subjects covered, the care with which they were
composed, the accuracy with which on the whole they were preserved, and the
importance attached to them, it seems reasonable to believe that the bulk, if
not the whole, of what Jesus regarded as ’ ’ saving truth ’ ’ is embodied in the
parables. In them Jesus pictures a new ideal as having entered the world and a
new power to achieve that ideal. For those who appreciate and accept it, it
becomes the supreme object of existence. All the ordinary ambitions and even
affections of life must take a second place; many of them are good, but they are
not the good; to reach this ideal no price is too high to pay. The new way of
life is embodied in a community, whose members regard it as the object of their
existence to make the way prevail in their own lives, in the community and in
the world.

They are called on, not to obey certain rules, but to live in a certain spirit,
to judge not others but themselves, and to judge themselves by comparison, not
with others, but with the standard God has set for them (The Pharisee and the
Tax-collector). They find their welfare, not in what they have but in what they
are (The Rich Fool). Abandoning all self-centred demands, the thought of the
world as a pleasure-resort and life as a holiday, they conceive themselves as
living in their Father’s home, their one ambition to serve and to do the
Father’s will. In this home there are others besides themselves, and so they
have to learn the family spirit, the filial spirit, the brotherly and sisterly
spirit (Luk 15:1-32). On the way they will meet with many sufferers: every
sufferer they meet is an invitation to help, irrespective of the creed, race or
social class of the victim, and whether or no the afflicted one is wholly or
partially responsible for his plight (The Good Samaritan). No member of the
community can plead that his neighbour’s troubles are no concern of his. In
particular for the rich man to be indifferent to the distress of his poor
neighbour is a mortal sin against the community (Dives and Lazarus). A member of
the community may suffer wrong and insult: his feelings and his dignity are of
no account; the one thing that matters is the restoration of harmony in the
community.

Advances towards reconciliation made by the offender must be not only welcomed
but sought (The Unforgiving Creditor). No one works for glory or reward; every
gift of every member is thrown into the common stock, used for the common weal
(The Talents). A stern, though noble task this, to which these citizens of the
Kingdom are called, a task that involves trampling on many human emotions and
impulses, that demands grit and unwearied perseverance. Before enrolling one
must sit down quietly and consider whether one is prepared to pay the price (The
Tower and The Threatened King); but after one has enrolled, there is no more
counting of the cost; all that a man has will he barter for his citizenship (The
Treasure and the Pearl). When one has donned the livery (The Wedding Garment)
stores of reserve strength and a state of constant alertness and of readiness
which involves all needed preparations are imperative (The Bridesmaids).

Among the virile qualities required of the citizens of the Kingdom is dauntless
determination; and this determination is backed by the knowledge that the world
will respond to it. For the world is God’s world and the work is God’s work, so
that the citizens of the Kingdom are co-operating with God; they are indeed the
instruments through which he works. The petition for the necessary help is made
to one who is more than willing to respond, and who, being in supreme command,
is always able to respond (The Midnight Petitioner). However unpropitious the
occasion may seem, however impossible the demand, there is no door that will not
open to persistent knocking, no expectant, confident search that will not be
rewarded (The Unjust Judge). For this community is God’s community; he is the
Father of the family, the King of the Kingdom. It is he who inspires the ideals,
who guides and controls the workers and the work, who guarantees the
consummation. His thought of men and women is that of the shepherd for his
sheep, of the Father for his sons and daughters (Luk 15:1-32). Having thought
for them, planned for them, travailed for them, he would not have one sheep
absent from the fold, one child absent from the home. One wha- strays is
followed with grief and longing, is welcomed home with unrestrained joy. All
have sought in a hundred ways, by self-seeking or perversity, to thwart the will
of the King; when they confess their folly and acknowledge their allegiance, he
forgets their past. In gratitude at this unexpected forgiveness, for which he
can urge no plea save that atonement is beyond his power, the citizen enters the
service of the King with joyous zeal and devotion. It is indeed the King’s ready
forgiveness of his erring subjects that is the ground and inspiration of their
forgiveness of each other (The Two Debtors). The King would have the world
brought under the sway of the spirit of the Kingdom which has been established
in His world. The citizens of the Kingdom, with no thought of reward but only in
loyalty to the King, are to strain every nerve to mould the world after the
pattern of the Kingdom. The toil is for some strenuous, painful and dangerous;
others are called to lighter tasks in a pleasanter environment, all that the
King asks of each is whether he is doing with a will the particular bit of work
he has been given to do (The Labourers in the Vineyard). Brain as well as heart
must be dedicated to the work. If it does not seem to prosper, often the reason
is that we have expected to win a harvest without preparing the ground (The
Sower). There are, too, enemies as energetic and enthusiastic in trying to
thwart the growth of the Kingdom as its citizens are in fostering it (The
Darnel). Yet the gradual growth of the Kingdom and its ultimate conquest of the
world are as certain as the laws of nature.

God invites man’s co-operation, needs man’s co-operation; but God and God alone.
gives the growth: man does his tiny part; God does the rest (The Seed Growing
Automatically).

However apparently insignificant the Kingdom in its infancy, it will spread by
its own expansive force, subduing one region after another, one department after
another of thought and life, till it dominates the world (The Mustard Seed and
The Leaven).

Yet the world and the Kingdom will never be co-terminous. One of God’s
self-imposed limitations is that he will compel no man to accept his will and
become a citizen of the Kingdom. The presence of the Kingdom and its ideals
divides men into classes as the shepherd separates his sheep from his goats, as
the fisherman sorts out his catch into edible fish and inedible. Many refuse to
enter the Kingdom because they will not pay the price of citizenship (The
Tower); others are so much preoccupied with their own concerns, not necessarily
ignoble in themselves, that they have no thought to spare for the Kingdom (The
Great Supper). Some set themselves deliberately to oppose the growth of the
Kingdom and its ideals, because these will rob them of prestige, power or wealth
which they prize (The Vinedressers). They who ignore or oppose the very purpose
for which they were sent into the world have no justification for cumbering the
ground; yet God will condemn no man, and no institution, till it is certain they
have had their chance, that it is internal rottenness, not want of nourishment
from without, that is responsible for their failure (The Barren Fig-tree). It is
to no empty life that the citizens of the Kingdom are called, but to the
fulfilment of every worthy desire, to a life of light and joy and fellowship,
while those who refuse the invitation are left in darkness and loneliness.

(The Great Supper).

It may not be a complete Gospel; but it is a noble Gospel, which if it were
adopted throughout the earth would give us a vastly better and happier world.
The creed, it is true, is of the slenderest, even the doctrine of God; but if we
have not the metaphysical God, we have the ethical God. There is no doctrine of
the Trinity, but the Son has his rightful place. If we miss the resurrection of
Jesus, we have the continual working of God in human life. If there is no
explicit doctrine of Atonement, it is the murder of the Son that flings down the
barriers of the vineyard and opens the gates to the new vinedressers. There are
no sacraments in the parables, but there is the sacramental view of life, that
the world, and the labours and experiences of them that dwell therein, for those
that have eyes to see, are messages from God. The parables tell us nothing of
Church organization or of worship; yet there is revealed in them the basis of
all organization and of all worship, the members of the fellowship linked to
each other byties of affectionate service, because they are all linked to God
byties of reverent devotion as the children he loves.

If the parables do not give us a complete Christianity, they do give us a way of
life, a way of life which is making an appeal to-day far beyond the bounds of
the Christian Church; and, whatever be the value of the remark, it seems safe to
say that some at least of the features in metaphysical Christianity which have
proved the greatest stumbling-blocks among educated non-Christians are not found
in the parables. At first sight an element indispensable in any form of
Christianity seems to be lacking. The life to which Jesus invited men was one of
personal devotion to himself. ’ Bring him to me,” “ Follow me,” were two of his
most characteristic sayings. Shorn of this sense of personal loyalty to the
Lord, the Christian life would be immeasurably weakened; but, speaking
generally, our Lord does not figure in the parables. We may, if we so choose,
find him in the Good Samaritan; otherwise only in the Vinedressers is he
certainly present. If we may reckon among the parables (though this is not
justified) the picture of the Last Judgment at the end of Matthew xxv, in it the
Son of Man appears as King and Judge. In Matthew also, as we have seen, the
Great Supper becomes a Wedding Feast in honour of the marriage of the King’s
son. Quite apart from all such references, the world will never separate the
parables from him who told them. Great as they are in themselves, they are
infinitely greater as utterances of him who not only spoke the Word but was the
Word. Apart from all allegorizing, the story of the Good Samaritan owes the
spell it has cast over men to the knowledge that he who spake the parable did
for life’s wounded travellers all and more than all that the Samaritan did for
the half-dead trader on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.


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  CHAPTER 36: 34 - LITERATURE
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LITERATURE A study of the parables should not be confined to special books on
the subject, but should include the relevant sections of Commentaries on the
Gospels, general Commentaries on the Bible, and Bible Dictionaries.

Among books on the Parables may be mentioned, hilicher: Die Gleichnisreden Jesu.

Buzy: Introduction aux Paraboles Evangeliques.

Trench: Notes on the Parables.

Bruce: The Parabolic Teaching of Christ.

Weinel: Die Gleichnisse Jesu.

Fiebig: Altfudische Gleichnisse und die Gleichnisse Jesu.

Fiebig: Die Gleichnisreden Jesu imLichte der Rabbinischen Gleichnisse desN. T.
Zeitalters.

Various Authors: The Parables of Jesus (James Robinson).

Arnot: The Parables of our Lord.

Arnot: The Lesser Parables of our Lord.

Levison: The Parables, their Background and Local Setting.

Goebel: The Parables of Jesus.

Lithgow: The Parabolic Gospel.

Luccock: Studies in the Parables of Jesus (the best of the smaller books in
English).

Flower: The Parables of Jesus Applied to Modern Life.

A. T. Cadoux: The Parables of Jesus.

Quick: The Realism of Christ’s Parables.

Studies on the Parables of Christ (Student Christian Movement). THE MESSAGE OF
THE PARABLES Feldman: The Parables and Similes of the Rabbis.

Guthrie: Parables of our Lord.

Oxenden: Parables of our Lord.

Calderwood: Parables of our Lord.

Maturini: Practical Studies on the Parables.

Bourdillon: The Parables Explained and Applied.

Articles on the Parables in The Expository Times^ 1926.

H. H. Home: Jesus, the Master Teacher.

Dods: The Parables of our Lord (2 vols.).

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE DEVONSHIRE PRESS, TORQUAY


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