RESISTING INTERPRETATION

For my on-again, off-again, series of posts on renewing theology, I have been thinking lately about salvation. Salvation is at the heart of Christian theology, but what does it mean? How should it be understood? There’s much to consider in those questions. But sitting in church this morning past, the lectionary and the sermon turned to parables, and I began thinking about how and why parables resist interpretation and what that might mean for the Bible as a whole. And so, instead of salvation—which will come—a few thoughts on parables and interpretation.

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The gospel lesson this morning, following the Revised Common Lectionary, was Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23, the Parable of the Sower and the earliest interpretation of the parable. Our preacher, filling in at the last moment, read a sermon written by a colleague, the Reverend Courtney Jones, and a fine sermon it was. The sermon pointed out that the sower in the parable, Jesus perhaps, is notably profligate with the seed. Throws it everywhere, some on the path, some on places where the soil is thin, some among the weeds, and some where the soil has been properly prepared. Not good agricultural technique that. Not, as the sermon pointed out, “efficient,” in the modern sense of efficiency. Not, as some church growth expert might point out, strategic. As much as anything, the parable is about the profligate grace of God.

You might not notice that profligacy part of the parable at first. Most of us are not sowers of seed. Hearing the parable, we tend to focus on the soils. Which soil am I? we ask ourselves. The hard ground, the thin soil, the soil choked by weeds, or the good soil, producing the fantastic multiples mentioned in the parable: 100-, 60-, and 30-fold. And that’s okay, the parable is about that, too. Good parables are not reducible to single meanings. If they have single meanings, they are not parables at all; they are merely illustrations for some point that can be made without a parable.

Good parables usually have in them something that resists interpretation, something that leads us to say, “What’s that about?” This is true of Jesus’s parables. In his gospel, for example, Luke stacks up three Jesus parables about lost things: the lost sheep (Luke 15:1-7), the lost coin (15:8-10), and the lost son (15:11-32). In each of them, there is something that doesn’t quite make sense. In the first, the shepherd abandons the flock to find a single sheep. In the second, the woman who loses her coin, on finding it, throws a lavish party paid for, one supposes, by the lost coin. And in the last, the father, ignoring the unpleasantness about the inheritance and to the chagrin of the faithful older brother, prepares a welcome home feast for the son who ran off and squandered his money. All parables more difficult and interesting than would appear on first reading.

Parables are like that. They resist interpretation. They force the interpreter to slow down, ponder what’s being said. They require conversation. It’s notable, at least, according to Mark and Matthew, that parables were characteristic of the teaching of Jesus. The lectionary this morning left out of the reading the sections of Matthew 13 that speak to why Jesus used parables. The easier of these is found in verses 34-35, where the text tells us that in the speaking to the crowd, “aside from parables, Jesus told them nothing.” It goes on to quote loosely from Psalm 78:2. The more difficult explanation comes between the Parable of the Sower and its interpretation, in verses 10-17, where Jesus quotes from Isaiah words to the effect that his parables are intended to make it hard for people to hear. It’s as if these words about parables were themselves parables, requiring one to read and reread them, trying first this interpretation, and then that, never sure that one has fully grasped the significance of what Jesus is saying.

Pondering this, a few lines from the poet W.H. Auden came to mind. In the poem, “The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning,” Auden talks about poetry, not scripture, but then much of scripture is in fact poetry, and parts that are not poetry often require a poetic sensibility to read them. The Auden lines I have in mind come near the beginning of the poem. He has this advice for us:

. . . Do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks. . .

Much of what passed for scripture interpretation in the tradition from which I come was “plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.” I was taught—perhaps you, too—that biblical texts have single meanings, meanings that just happen to align with Reformed theology. We were taught that there was a single line through a given text. Given the proper use of the proper exegetical technique, one should be able to discern that single God-inspired meaning. This may work in some parts of the Bible, but for much of the Bible, the words and stories invite multiple interpretations. They are not plain cooking, nor do they give themselves up to plain cooks.

It’s this Jesus seems to have had in mind with his parables. He speaks to things that do not readily lend themselves to plain words. The things of which he speaks, what he calls in a kind of theological shorthand, “the reign (or kingdom) of God,” require imagination. More than imagination, they require formation. We have to think our way into them, practice them, be changed by them. Pondering the parables is part of this practice.

The parables resist interpretation in part because they are intended to deny us our too comfortable truths about ourselves, about our world, and about God. Jesus wants to disrupt our thinking, slow us down, make us recognize what we otherwise would not recognize.

This is the way not only of Jesus but of other traditions. Lately, I’ve been reading David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Daoist scripture. Hart credits the Dao with bringing him back to Christianity. It begins, in Hart’s translation:

That Way that abides forever is not a way that can be trodden,
that Name that abides forever is not a name that can be uttered. . .

This is meant to be jarring, to raise questions: How can a way be a way if it cannot be trodden? And how can a name be a name if it cannot be uttered. The Dao pushes toward humility, emptiness. It’s our knowing that gets in the way of another kind of knowing.

I suspect that Jesus also had this in mind. It’s our knowing—our insufferable sureness about things theological—that gets in the way of our knowing at a deeper and different level. The parables jar us loose from our too easy conceptions. To follow Jesus is follow him into places we have never gone, into truths we have not fully understood. Or, in lines from another poem by Auden:

He is the Way.
Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
(W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being”)

Clay