But the extraordinary thing is, he didn't. Instead, he told them a story. Can you imagine it, this great crowd coming to him from town after town, full of expectancy, hanging on his every word, longing to be moved with emotive oratory and impressed by supernatural power—and he sits down and tells them a story! A bizarre, perplexing riddle of a story at that: a 'parable', he calls it.
Even his closest friends were utterly bewildered by his behaviour. 'What on earth are you doing, Jesus?' they asked him. 'What is this parable business all about?' That's when he explained it to them.
The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,
'though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.'
(Luke 8:10).
Unpopular and controversial words. They contradict the popular view of parables as moralizing stories told in picturesque imagery to aid the understanding of simple, unsophisticated rural people. On the contrary, Jesus says he speaks in parables not to make it easier for people to understand, but to make it harder. 'Though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.'
Whatever you make of that, it's quite clear that Jesus was not as impressed by these crowds, streaming out of all Galilee to see him, as we might have been if we'd been there. He was not at all convinced that they were really on his wavelength. He'd grown up among them, you see. He knew perfectly well what their ideas of the kingdom of God were, and they were as different from his own ideas as chalk from cheese. The last thing he wanted to do was to foster their mistaken notions by courting popularity with them. He hints, in fact, that he feels rather as the
