But What Does It Mean?
And the disciples came up and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Matthew 13:10 NASB
Parables – Read the rest of the passage (Matthew 13:10-16). Yeshua’s remarks are particularly discouraging! What he essentially says is this: If you haven’t been granted the ability to understand, you simply won’t. Furthermore, only some have been granted this ability. All the rest have no clue. Is that true? Can you really imagine that God does not want people to understand His message? Do you think Yeshua really meant that what he has to say was only for the “chosen,” whoever that might happen to be? And even worse, doesn’t this imply that you are not responsible for your own spiritual knowledge? If you haven’t been granted the ability to understand, then there’s really nothing you can do about it. SOL! (Sorry, out of luck).
There’s something very odd about Yeshua’s remark. Perhaps we need a much deeper appreciation for the rabbinic nature of his teaching. Zornberg’s comments on midrash seem appropriate:
“ . . . it is impossible to imagine that meaning is somehow transparently present in the isolated text.”[1]
“The blurring of boundaries between revelation and interpretation, between the written and the oral Torah, is a fundamental mode of the rabbinic imagination.”[2]
“The notion that knowledge of reality is singular, absolute, static, and eternal is tested in these midrashic narratives of the foundational events in Jewish history. The midrashic versions convey a plural, contextual, constructed, and dynamic vision of reality. The ‘Platonic ideal’ in the history of philosophy is described by Isaiah Berlin: it posits:
‘. . . that all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another—that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution to the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.’”[3]
But Yeshua isn’t a Platonist, and neither were the rabbis. Truth with a capital T (the ideal that Berlin describes) wasn’t a Jewish idea. Judaism views truth as dynamic, a dialogue, contexual, conversant, communal. Truth isn’t transparent, permanently residing in any given text. It must be teased out through investigation and, especially, conversation. It flutters, floats, and flows, providing hints here and slices there, moving toward us and then away, beckoning, retreating, seductive, and terrifying. Who can know it?
Well, those who are willing to be battered, bruised, burned, and buried. Parable seekers. Who are the chosen? The word warriors. The ones who recognize themselves in Heschel’s statement:
“It is not enough to have met a word in the dictionary and to have experienced unpleasant adventures with it in the study of grammar. A word has a soul, and we must learn how to attain insight into its life.”[4]
Who does the choosing? Who grants the gift of perception? The parable itself. Woman wisdom calling in the street. The word that won’t leave you alone.
“Our dogmas are allusions, intimations, our wisdom is an allegory, but our actions are definitions.”[5]
“Who is a Jew? A person in travail with God’s dreams and designs; a person to whom God is a challenge, not an abstraction. He is called upon to know of God’s stake in history; to be involved in the sanctification of time and in building of the Holy Land; to cultivate passion for justice and the ability to experience the arrival of Friday evening as an event.”[6]
And just in case you need a bit more investigation:
Topical Index: parable, midrash, Matthew 13:10
[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 2.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., pp. 4-5.
[4] Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, p. 78.
[5] Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p. 5.
[6] Ibid., p. 32.
