The Kingdom and the Parables

Mark sums up the whole message in one sentence at 1:15: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near. Counting only the fixed phrases, kingdom of God and Matthew's kingdom of heaven occur around eighty-five times across the three synoptic gospels, and sayings about the kingdom without either phrase push the total higher. Whatever else Jesus talked about, he talked about this, and a student who imports a modern sense of the word kingdom will misread nearly every parable in the New Testament.

The first correction is grammatical. Basileia in Greek, like malkut in Hebrew, denotes the exercise of rule before it denotes the territory ruled. It is closer to kingship or reign than to realm. Where the phrase means God ruling, a translation such as the reign of God or the kingship of God often reads more clearly, though the spatial sense is present too in sayings about entering the kingdom. Both senses are in play and a reader should keep both available.

The second correction is historical. The fixed phrase kingdom of God is surprisingly rare in surviving pre-Christian Jewish literature, while the idea of God reigning is everywhere: the enthronement psalms declare that the LORD reigns, Isaiah 52:7 has the herald bring that news to Zion, and Daniel 7 gives an everlasting dominion to one like a son of man. The Aramaic paraphrases of Isaiah used in synagogue, the Targums, render some of these passages with the wording that the kingdom of your God is revealed; the written Targums are later than Jesus, so this is suggestive of synagogue usage rather than proof of it. The expectation, however phrased, was of God acting publicly and decisively in history to end Israel's humiliation, deal with the nations, and put the world right.

Third, the expectation was not one thing. The Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish text from the first century BC, prays for God to raise up a son of David to purge Jerusalem of the nations. The Qumran community's War Scroll imagines a final battle with angelic armies fighting alongside the sons of light. Some hoped for a restored temple and priesthood, others for a prophet like Moses, others for direct divine rule with no human king at all. Some believed the arrival could be hastened by force, though the picture of an organised Zealot party as early as the twenties has been challenged by Morton Smith and Richard Horsley among others and should not be assumed. The point for a reader is that announcing the kingdom in Galilee was not introducing a new idea; it was making a contested claim inside an argument that was already running.

That is why the question at Acts 1:6, whether he will at this time restore the kingdom to Israel, is a reasonable question and not a stupid one. It is also why so much of the teaching is about what sort of kingdom it is: who gets in, what it is worth, what it looks like at the start, and why it does not look like victory.

The sayings do not line up. In Mark 1:15 the kingdom of God is near, in a Greek perfect (engiken) that means it has drawn near and arrived within reach. In Luke 11:20 Jesus says that if he drives out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you, using an aorist for something that has happened. In Luke 17:21 he says it is in your midst. Then the Lord's Prayer teaches disciples to ask that the kingdom come, and at the last supper in Mark 14:25 he speaks of a day, still ahead, when he will drink it anew in the kingdom of God. Matthew 25 describes a future separation of nations, and Mark 13 a future coming of the Son of Man.

Four broad answers have been given, and all four are still in circulation. Albert Schweitzer, in 1906, argued for thoroughgoing eschatology: Jesus expected the imminent, literal end of the age, sent out the Twelve believing it would arrive before they returned, and went to the cross in a last attempt to force it. On this reading he was mistaken, and the whole later history of Christianity is the church's adjustment to a delay. Schweitzer's account is uncomfortable for believing readers and it should be taken seriously rather than dismissed, because he was reading real texts, and Matthew 10:23 and Mark 9:1 and 13:30 are not easy for anybody.

C. H. Dodd, in the 1930s, argued the opposite: realised eschatology. The kingdom has fully arrived in the ministry of Jesus, and the future language is either the church's later addition or the pictorial language in which an ultimate reality is expressed. Dodd's reading has the merit of taking the present-tense sayings at full strength, and the difficulty that a considerable body of future sayings has to be reassigned. Joachim Jeremias offered a modification, an eschatology in the process of realisation, which tries to hold the tension inside a single process.

George Eldon Ladd's inaugurated eschatology, argued at length in The Presence of the Future in 1974, is the reading most widely taught in English-speaking churches: the kingdom has genuinely broken into history in Jesus, so its powers are at work now, and it awaits a future consummation. Already and not yet is the shorthand. Its strength is that it requires nothing in the texts to be explained away. Its weakness, according to critics, is that a formula which accommodates every saying may be describing the problem rather than solving it, and that it can flatten the real urgency of the imminent sayings.

A fourth line, associated with the Jesus Seminar and with John Dominic Crossan, reads Jesus as a sapiential rather than an apocalyptic teacher, whose kingdom is a present social and ethical reality of open table and reversed status, with the apocalyptic framing added by the early church. And N. T. Wright argues that first-century apocalyptic language was understood metaphorically from the start, as a way of investing historical events with theological meaning, so that the coming of the Son of Man in Mark 13 refers to vindication and to the fall of Jerusalem rather than to the end of the space-time universe. Each of these has serious support and serious opposition. What is settled is that both kinds of saying are in the texts. What is not settled is how Jesus himself held them together, and confident answers in either direction outrun the evidence.

Somewhere around forty parables appear in the synoptics, depending on what counts, and they are the most distinctive thing about Jesus' teaching. The Greek word parabole translates the Hebrew mashal, and the range of mashal is much wider than the word story. It covers proverbs, as in the title of the book of Proverbs, riddles and allegories, as in Ezekiel 17:2, taunts, bywords and prophetic oracles, as in Balaam's discourse in Numbers 23:7. Mark uses parabole at 3:23 for a short argumentative question about a divided kingdom, which is no kind of story at all. So the first rule is not to decide in advance what form a parable must take.

The second thing to notice is that a parable is not an illustration. An illustration makes a point already made more vivid; you could remove it and keep the point. The parables do the opposite. They are the argument, and they work by putting the hearer inside a situation and then requiring a judgement. Dodd's much-quoted definition captures it: a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. The doubt is deliberate. A parable that could be summarised without loss would have been delivered as a summary.

The mechanism is usually a hook and a turn. The hook is ordinary: a farmer sowing, a woman losing a coin, a man beaten on a road everyone knew was dangerous, an employer hiring day labourers. The turn is something that does not happen. Labourers hired at the eleventh hour get a full day's wage. A father runs, which men of standing did not do, to meet a son who has taken his share of the estate and squandered it. A Samaritan, of all people, is the one who stops. The hearer has already agreed with the setup before the turn arrives, and by then it is too late to disagree without also disagreeing with himself. Nathan's parable to David in 2 Samuel 12 is the classic Old Testament example of exactly this mechanism, and Nathan's You are that man (2 Samuel 12:7 in the BSB) is the model of what a parable is for.

Now the hard question: why teach this way? Mark 4:11-12 gives an answer many readers find intolerable. The mystery of the kingdom of God has been given to the disciples; to those on the outside everything is expressed in parables, so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, otherwise they might turn and be forgiven. The Greek hina is a purpose clause, and the BSB's so that follows the purpose reading, as most translations do (the alternative readings are set out below, and they are serious ones), and the passage quotes Isaiah 6:9-10, where the prophet is sent to a people who will not listen. Note as well that Mark's ending, otherwise they might turn and be forgiven, matches the Aramaic Targum of Isaiah, which reads forgiven where the Hebrew text reads healed (the BSB's Isaiah 6:10 has turn and be healed). That is a real and much-discussed observation about the form of the quotation Mark is using.

Matthew handles the same saying differently. At 13:13 he replaces the purpose clause with a causal one, literally because seeing they do not see, drops the clause about forgiveness, and then quotes Isaiah 6:9-10 in full. Luke 8:10 keeps a shortened form of Mark's purpose clause. The three are not saying quite the same thing, and any reading of why Jesus spoke in parables has to decide what to do about that. The main proposals are that the saying describes a judicial hardening on those who have already refused, in line with Isaiah's own commission; that the hina reflects a Semitic idiom in which purpose and result are not sharply separated, so that Matthew's causal rendering is a fair translation rather than a softening; and that Mark has framed the saying to serve his own theme of concealment before the cross. Each is defensible. What is clear from Mark 4:33-34 is that the parables were also spoken to the crowds to the extent that they could understand, which means concealment cannot be the whole account.

For most of Christian history, parables were read allegorically: each detail stands for something, and the interpreter's job is to decode it. The famous specimen is Augustine on the good Samaritan, in his Questions on the Gospels. The man going down is Adam, Jerusalem the heavenly city he has left, Jericho his mortality, the robbers the devil and his angels, the stripping his loss of immortality, the priest and Levite the priesthood of the Old Testament, the Samaritan Christ, the binding of wounds the restraint of sin, the inn the church, the innkeeper the apostle Paul, and the two denarii the two commandments of love.

It is easy to make fun of this, and much modern writing does. Resist that, for three reasons. First, everything Augustine says in the allegory is, taken by itself, true Christian teaching, which is why it persuaded people for a thousand years. Second, the method was not arbitrary in its own terms; it rested on the conviction that all of scripture testifies to Christ and that the Spirit intends more in a text than its first hearers grasped, which is a position with New Testament warrant, since Paul allegorises Hagar and Sarah in Galatians 4:24 using the verb for exactly that, allegoreo (the BSB, which has serve as illustrations, hides the word). Third, mockery is a substitute for argument, and the actual objection to Augustine's reading is precise and worth stating precisely: it produces a meaning that has nothing to do with the question the parable answers, which Luke 10:29 states outright as who is my neighbour, and it makes the lawyer's question disappear.

Adolf Julicher, in a two-volume work published between 1888 and 1899, mounted the attack that ended allegorical dominance in the academy. His thesis was that a parable is a simile extended, not an allegory, and that it turns on a single point of comparison; every detail beyond that point is scenery. He treated the detailed interpretations in Mark 4:13-20 and Matthew 13:36-43 as the early church's allegorising, not as Jesus' own words. The gain was enormous. Parables stopped being codes and became arguments again, and Dodd and Jeremias built the twentieth century's best work on that foundation.

The cost has been widely noticed since. Julicher's single point tended to come out as a general moral maxim: the parable of the rich fool teaches that greed is bad, the prodigal son teaches that God is merciful. Readers objected that this turns some of the sharpest stories in literature into platitudes, and that a man was not crucified for saying that God is merciful. The rebuilding has taken several forms. Craig Blomberg argued in 1990 that parables with two or three main characters make one point per main character, which allows a controlled degree of allegory without opening the door to Augustine. Klyne Snodgrass, in Stories with Intent in 2008, now the standard reference work in English, argues that parables are not allegories but that many of them have allegorical features, and that the rigid distinction Julicher drew does not survive contact with the Jewish parables that are the closest comparison, since rabbinic meshalim regularly have a king who stands for God. Others point out, simply, that a story in which a landowner sends servants and finally his son to tenants who kill them, in Mark 12:1-11, is an allegory by any definition, and that it opens by echoing the vineyard song of Isaiah 5 to make sure you read it that way.

Where does that leave a student? With this much settled: a parable is not a code to be decrypted detail by detail, and a reading that ignores the question the gospel says the parable is answering has gone wrong regardless of how edifying it is. Beyond that, genuinely unsettled: how far the allegorical features run in any given parable, whether the interpretations of the sower and the weeds come from Jesus or the early church, and whether the one-point rule is a useful discipline or an artificial restriction. The two practical habits that serve in every case are these. Find the question the parable answers, which the surrounding text often supplies. And find the turn, the moment the story stops behaving, because that is where the kingdom of God is being described.