Why Parables?

Editor’s note: Dallas Willard was a very much beloved philosopher and systematic theologian who had an uncanny knack of teaching complicated biblical truths in simple, understandable language for everyone to learn. The Scandal of the Kingdom (the follow-up to his seminal work Divine Conspiracy) is a call to live by the gems in Jesus’ parables. Enjoy this excerpt.

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As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving. —Colossians 2:6–7

When Jesus came, He essentially told people to forget what they thought they knew about God, because no one “know(s) the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27). This idea is crucial to keep in mind as we study the Bible. To say it a different way, we are not going to understand God or his Word by being clever, intelligent, and scholarly, or even by studying very hard because the interaction of God with us through His Word is a personal matter. It depends on the condition of our hearts, our minds, and our lives. As we study the Parable of the Sower, we will see just how important this is.

The First Parable

The three aspects of Jesus’ ministry during His earthly life included teaching, preaching, and healing:

Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. — Matthew 9:35, emphasis added 

The flow of Matthew’s gospel from chapters 4–12 shows us how this worked. In Matthew’s fourth chapter, we see that when Jesus preached and ministered the Kingdom of God, saying “Repent, for the Kingdom of the heavens is at hand” (Matthew 4:17, paraphrased), He drew in masses of people from all over the area. In Matthew 5–7, Jesus taught about the nature of the Kingdom of God in the Sermon on the Mount. As soon as He came down from the mount,* He began to heal, and we read stories of how He ministered the power of the Kingdom of God in His healing (Matthew 8–9).

Chapters 10–12 contain discussions about the continuation of His ministry and how He sent out His followers to do what He did.

That is the disciples’ way of ministry then and now — to do what Jesus did.

This aligns with Luke 10, where Jesus sent out His apprentices two by two, saying,

Now go do what I’ve been doing.

When they came back rejoicing that

even the demons are subject to us in Your name,

He responded,

Don’t rejoice over that. Rejoice that your names are written in the Book of Life. — Luke 10:17, 20, paraphrased

An extended record of Jesus’ teaching, especially about the Kingdom of God, begins in Matthew 13, where the Parable of the Sower appears to be the first recorded parable. That’s not to say He never told a parable before, but it does mark a significant change in His teaching ministry.

As Jesus’ ministry had progressed to this point, He began to notice people’s varied reactions to what He was saying. Not everyone could receive His words, and those who did receive them received them in different ways. Those whose hearts were set against God and concerned simply to have their own way were hardened by the message of Jesus. He sensed their resistance, and the Parable of the Sower portrays the different reactions to His teaching.

Seeds Everywhere

As Matthew 13 opens, we see that large crowds followed Jesus  because of His teaching, preaching, and healing: 

On the same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea. And great multitudes were gathered together to Him, so that He got into a boat and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow.” — Matthew 13:1–3

To “sow” seeds meant to scatter them where they would have a chance to germinate. It was a common occurrence that his listeners frequently saw. Everyone knew what sowing was. Jesus continued: 

And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. — Matthew 13:4–7

Jesus may have paused between these descriptions because it was likely people were nodding and saying, “Yes, we know what that is. We’ve seen that happen.” He concluded:

But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear! — Matthew 13:8–9

• Now you’ll notice there’s not one religious word in that story. Jesus didn’t read Scripture; He didn’t pray; He didn’t sing a hymn. He just told them a story in the context of the ordinary life of a farmer who was sowing seed.

It appears that His disciples got worried about this. They may have said among themselves, “Uh- oh! What’s happening here? He’s slipping! Something has gone wrong!” So when they got Him alone later, they said, “Jesus, why did you do that? Why did you just tell that story?” (Matthew 13:10, paraphrased). Jesus offered the following explanation. 

Seeds Versus Weeds

The “seed” in this parable is the Word of God:

Therefore hear the parable of the sower: When anyone hears the word of the Kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside. But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy. — Matthew 13:18–20

When the Word of God comes into an individual’s life, it begins to feed upon the soil that is there. This is why it’s so important to understand the Parable of the Sower. If the person is too busy with other things to receive the Word of God, the Word will not take root. Or if it does take root, it will be starved and anemic.

I’m something of a farm boy myself, and I have done a lot of planting and harvesting. I remember going down into the creek bottoms in South Missouri where we plowed in the spring and planted corn. The dirt was so black; it was like chocolate. It had so much good stuff in it. But the weeds seemed to know about that rich soil too, so they came and occupied the same ground. By the middle of July, we could hardly tell the corn stalks from the weeds because the corn stalks were little starved, spindly things. They were not able to produce any good corn. In the fall, we picked the corn, but when we pulled the husks off, there were only three or four grains of corn on each cob because the plants were starving to death. A lot of folks are like those starving plants today.

Free Will

The Parable of the Sower is one of the most important parables Jesus gave about the Kingdom of God because it answered the question, “Why doesn’t the Word — the logos — have the effect on people we might hope for?” It moves us to ask again why God doesn’t just change people.

This does not reflect a lack of power on God’s part. In fact, if God wanted to turn me into a helicopter and fly me out the window, He could do it. Please understand that if God wanted to, He could have rewired every one of us to be faithful followers like Job, Hannah, and Daniel.

This is not a question about what God can do; it is a question about what God will do. It is a question about the precise manner of how God chooses to interact with people to accomplish His purposes. It’s true that the God of all the earth can do anything He wants to do, but there are a lot of things He doesn’t want to do. If we’re going to work with God in the Kingdom of God, we have to find the ways He has chosen to work, and then work with Him in those ways.

The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of love and understanding and maturity, where people live together under the governance of the most glorious Being in all of reality — God Himself.

It will never be a Kingdom of people who are knocked on the head or rewired to become religious robots. It is a Kingdom of God’s creatures whom He made to learn and grow freely.

* Editors’ note: Dallas believed that Matthew 5–7 are the contents of one sermon, not a collection of Jesus’ sayings See Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 132–34

Excerpted with permission from The Scandal of the Kingdom by Dallas Willard, copyright Willard Family Trust.

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Your Turn

Why did Jesus teach in parables? Has that question ever confused you? Doesn’t it make sense that Jesus would teach people what was commonly understood by them in stories that made sense to their personal lives? Just like we try to communicate clearly, so does Jesus! He loves us enough to speak in ways that we can plainly understand. ~ Devotionals Daily