The Beauty of Parables

Perhaps because I became familiar with parables at Sunday School, I have in the past tended to think of parables as a simplistic and patronizing form of teaching, but having shaken off the things of childhood, I have changed my view. It now appears to me that the parable is an ideal tool for the teacher when their students are not simply one grade, but generations, and not only generations but centuries of students.

The parable, because it finds its illustrations from human experience, speaks across centuries with the same relevance today as when it was first spoken. Jesus, for example was not speaking only to his disciples, or a few shepherds on the hill. He was speaking also to Mohammed’s contemporaries, and with such relevance that Mohammed found no need to abrogate any principle they illuminated. Instead He was able to refer His followers to the Bible for those homilies, and occupy Himself with the particular needs of His time.

In confessing my childish understanding of parables, I do not mean to denigrate Sunday School. On the contrary, and despite the fact that imperfect teachers were seeking to inculcate the wisdom of a Perfect Teacher into imperfect children, nevertheless they managed to impart an essence of the role religion should have in the functioning society. It was the parable that allowed me to recognize this despite my tender years. But this understanding was tempered by the equal realization that those same adults who considered Sunday School valuable to children, had themselves forgotten or had chosen to ignore the principles they still thought were necessary for children in the community to learn.

They, it seemed, were too caught up in the humdrum of a material world in which they had to earn a living and survive. In the face of these exigencies, the big picture of the parable soon narrowed into various forms of selfishness. It went from the selfishness of states, with their claims of sovereignty and nationalism, to the selfishness of races with their prejudices and ideas of supremacy, to the selfishness of vested interests with their political parties restraining democracy, to the selfishness of families with their arranged marriages, to the selfishness of individuals in their willingness to compete, to cheat, and to lie.

Such was the contradiction between the deed and the word that in a child’s eyes it came to appear that the principles and morals exemplified in the parable were for children only, and their necessity was outgrown by adults, who found new rules to follow, more suited to their adult world , but which could not be ascribed to any known scripture or revealed Word. Nevertheless, we children noticed that adults followed these alternative rules religiously in their habits, rituals and promptings, and at the expense of worship in Church. While they sent us to Sunday School, they preferred to polish the pews at the Pub or the race track.

The circumstances of my life eventually drew me back to the Scriptures and the parables they contain, and I found I could read them with renewed respect and insight, despite the injuries suffered on my road to Damascus. Now I have opportunity to reflect on the dichotomy I observed as a child, and find it an accurate observation. Moreover, I can declare that it represents an enormous human tragedy when so many supposedly devout adult believers, of all the major religions, who for whatever reason, have failed to heed their Scripture and have chosen a text of their own devising, according to their own appetites and promptings.

Any student of religious texts cannot fail to be amazed at the consistency with which spiritual principles are enunciated and affirmed in the Scriptures of all the major Religions, and regardless of whether their particular declared adherents are seeking each others blood. In regard to spiritual principle, the unknowable essence of God, the necessity for an intermediary between God and man, they are in complete agreement. It soon becomes apparent also that all the religious strife and conflict which may presently be observed and which had blighted human history for centuries has no true basis in Scripture, and represents a complete denial by those zealots who claim license for their brutality from any Revealed Text.

The consequence has been to bring religion into disrepute as a means to social order and harmony, and has prompted a fruitless search for alternative materialist ideologies which might provide a surrogate for Divine guidance. None have proved efficacious, and on the contrary, have themselves become the excuse for atrocious crimes and injustices against countless innocents. And the pattern continues into this 21st Century unabated. As one ideology loses ground, another gains sway, but since all are grounded in material and humanist ideology, and none acknowledge either the existence of God or the essential spiritual nature of humanity, they fail to solve the social ills they claim to understand, nor to satisfy the hunger of the masses for meaning, for truth and above all, for justice.

Perhaps it is time to put aside adult pride, to put aside our investment in various religious establishments, dogmas, ideologies, traditions, all the accretions which might stand between us and the true meaning contained within parables and all revealed Scriptures and look at them again with eyes innocent of any prejudice or presumption, and seek an answer to this question. Why are these Scriptures of the great Religious movements of the world in complete accord, while we, their supposed followers, are not?