Jesus…told stories. Not just any old stories. These stories were, for the most part, not “illustrations,” preachers’ tricks to decorate an abstract or difficult thought, to sugarcoat the pill of complicated teaching. If anything, they were the opposite. They were stories designed to tease, to clothe the shocking and revelatory message of God’s kingdom in garb that left the hearers wondering, trying to think it out, never quite able (until near the end) to pin Jesus down. They were stories that, eventually, caused some to decode his deep, rich message in such a way as to frame a charge against him, either of blasphemy, sedition, or “leading the people astray.”
The stories were full of echoes. They resonated with ancient scriptural promises; they reminded their hearers of Israel’s future hopes and claimed by implication that these hopes were now being realized, even if not in the way they had imagined. These explanatory stories—the “parables”—were not, as children are sometimes taught in Sunday school, “earthly stories with heavenly meanings,” though some of them may be that, as it were, by accident. Some, indeed, are heavenly stories, tales of otherworldly goings-on, with decidedly earthly meanings. That’s exactly what we should expect if Jesus’ kingdom announcement was as we are describing it, with God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven….
The parables, in fact, are told as kingdom explanations for Jesus’s kingdom actions. They are saying: “Don’t be surprised, but this is what it looks like when God’s in charge.” They are not “abstract teaching,” and indeed if we approach them like that, we won’t understand them at all. Specialists who have studied the way in which Jesus’s language works describe a “speech-act” effect, whereby telling a story creates a new situation, a new whole world. That was indeed what Jesus was aiming to do, and by all accounts he was succeeding. But what such specialist studies do not always point out is what this new world actually was. It was the new world in which God was in charge at last, on earth as in heaven. God was fixing things, mending things, mending people, making new life happen. This was the new world in which the promises were coming true, in which new creation was happening, in which a real “return from exile” was taking place in the hearts and minds and lives of both notorious sinners and of people long crippled by disease….
Frequently, …the main thrust of a parable must be left unsaid. The parable of the prodigal son…is a case in point. The story ends without resolution, with the father remonstrating with the older son. We want to know what happens next, and presumably Jesus wanted his hearers to think it out and to apply what they were thinking to their own situation. Like a good advertisement, a parable may be much more powerful in what it doesn’t say than in what it does. But with Matthew 13 (and the parallels) something else is going on. Here we are faced not so much with “allegory” in some technical sense, but with something much more like an apocalyptic vision….
Apocalyptic visions are not simply special divine revelations for their won sake. Nor, on the other hand, are they about the “end of the world.” Apocalyptic visions of this sort are about the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. The point of “apocalyptic” is that the seer, the visionary—Daniel, Jesus—is able to glimpse what is actually going on in heaven and, by means of this storytelling technique, the strange-story-plus-interpretation, is able to unveil, and therefore actually to set forward, the purposes of heaven on earth. The very form of the parable thus embodies the content it is trying to communicate: heaven appearing on earth….
Not all stories, of course, work in this way. Jesus is anything but a wooden, stilted teacher, a one-string fiddle or a one-tune wonder…. Jesus’ stories build to a crescendo, keeping pace with the wider narrative of his brief public career. The kingdom is coming, on earth as in heaven; but the people of the kingdom, “the children of the kingdom,” are missing out on it! Everything is coming right at last—and everything is going wrong at the same time. There is a dark twist in the way God’s plans are working out, in the way that Israel’s destiny is being fulfilled.
All suggestions that Jesus was simply a “great religious teacher” telling his contemporaries about a new pattern of spirituality or even a new scheme of salvation must be set aside (unless, of course, we are to rewrite the gospels wholesale, which is what many have done in their efforts to domesticate Jesus and his message). Jesus’s parables, never mind for the moment anything else about him, tell us in their form alone, but also in their repeated and increasingly direct content, that the purposes of heaven are indeed coming true on earth, but that the people who in theory have been longing for that to happen are turning their backs on it now that it is actually knocking on their door….
If this is what it looks like when God’s kingdom comes on earth as in heaven—if this is what it looks like when God’s in charge—then there must have been more wrong with “earth” than anyone had supposed.
That indeed is the conclusion we are forced to draw at every turn. It isn’t that God, coming to rule on earth, is picky or grouchy, determined to find fault. It is, rather, that the patient is deathly sick, and the doctor must prescribe an appropriately drastic course of action…. Jesus had grasped that, if God was to become king on earth as in heaven, something deeper than outward reform would be required…. Jesus had a different sort of “moral reformation” in mind…[insisting] Hearts will be transformed.
N.T. WRIGHT is the former bishop of Durham in the Church of England and one of the world’s leading Bible Scholars.
Selection from Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters (Harper Collins, 2011), 87–88, 91–93, 95–96, 97–98, 99. Reprinted with author permission.
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