Opening the Parables

Opening the Parables

M. D. Hayden

Opening the Parables

Copyright © 2024 M. D. Hayden. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Biblical citations throughout (unless otherwise noted) are from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE). Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Extracts from Through the Valley of the Kwai by Ernest Gordon used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com.

Pine Creek Meeting story used by permission of the Meeting and individuals involved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Abbreviations

BOOK I THE SEARCH FOR CONSISTENCY

Chapter 1: Influences on This Book

Chapter 2: The God of the Good News

Chapter 3: Why Parables?

Chapter 4: Ears to Hear

Chapter 5: Traditional Interpretation vs. Quaker Application

BOOK II THE PARABLES IN REAL LIFE

Chapter 6: The Kingdom Within

Chapter 7: The Good Samaritan

Chapter 8: Lost and Found

Chapter 9: The Pharisee and The Tax Collector

Chapter 10: The Vineyard Workers

Chapter 11: Who’s Welcome in The Kingdom?

Chapter 12: How the Kingdom Grows

Chapter 13: The Parable of the Talents

Chapter 14: The Unmerciful Servant

Chapter 15: The Dishonest Manager

BOOK III THE CHURCH, THE QUAKERS, AND THE PARABLES

Chapter 16: George Fox and Experiential Christianity

Chapter 17: Jesus Un-Churched

Chapter 18: Opening Parables: Discussion, Advices & Queries

Appendix: Traditional Interpretations Vs. Quaker Applications

Bibliography

To the Southern Baptists of my childhood who gave me a firm, though flawed, foundation.

To the Early Friends whose writings confirmed my belief in the Inner Teacher/Spirit of Truth.

To the Pen Man who helped me write this book.

At another time I saw the great love of God, and I was filled with admiration at the infinitude of it; I saw what was cast out from God, and what entered into God’s kingdom; and how by Jesus, the opener of the door, with his heavenly key, the entrance was given . . .

—George Fox, Journal of George Fox, 1647

God hath communicated and given unto every [one] a measure of the light of his own Son, a measure of grace, or a measure of the Spirit, which the Scripture expresses by several names, as sometimes of the seed of the kingdom, the Light that makes all things manifest, a talent, a little leaven . . .

—Robert Barclay, Apology, Proposition VI

Preface

When I was five, I went to church and heard about Jesus for the first time. Grandma took me to the Prince Street Baptist Church in Clovis, New Mexico. We went downstairs where she left me in the Sunday School classroom with a nice teacher who gave me crayons and a little picture to color. A few more children my age gathered and then it was time to start. The teacher read stories from a picture book about this wonderful, kind, and loving man named Jesus who only helped people. It made me feel good to hear those stories.

Just as she finished and it was time to leave Sunday School and go upstairs to church, one of the kids said, And then they crucified him.

What does crucified mean? I asked.

Another kid volunteered cheerfully, It means they killed him by driving nails into his hands and feet and hanging him up on a cross.

What??! Why would anyone kill such a good person? I wouldn’t believe it. A couple of kids followed me down the hall, insisting it was true. Why did they tell about it with such apparent glee? I was angry and outraged.

This was the beginning of my doubts about the Church.

I kept going to church with Grandma though. She died when I was nine, and I changed to another Baptist church where my parents dropped me off each Sunday morning. When I was eleven, my non-churchgoing mother gave me a little zippered Bible so I could participate in Bible drills at Sunday School, but I don’t remember reading it. Around that time, I became more and more aware of hypocrisy in the church. Some of the adults I knew from Sunday mornings, who warned us kids against smoking, drinking, dancing, movies, etc., my Aunt Connie knew from Friday and Saturday nights at the bootleg joint where she tended bar. When the church fired its beloved minister because he and his wife were getting a divorce, I felt sorry for their daughter whom I knew slightly from school. She looked so sad all the time. And then the church decided to take away the car they had given the minister because they loved him so much. In a small, strange way, it was Jesus all over again. Once again I was outraged. I stopped going to the Baptist church. That fall, I switched to the liberal church in town, Trinity Methodist, in part because some of my friends were Methodists.

The summer I was thirteen, between the Baptists and the Methodists, I decided to read the Bible on my own. Much of it just confused me, but the cynicism of Ecclesiastes spoke to my early teen self (I memorized passages like For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow). Skimming through the pages, I finally became curious about the red letters. Why were some sections of the New Testament printed in red? I discovered they were supposed to be the words Jesus spoke! I searched the red-letter passages and read them carefully. Some parts in red letters seemed to be clear instructions for how to live. Some parts in red rankled; they contradicted other parts that seemed more like I imagined Jesus to be.

A year later, I told a minister at a youth retreat that I could not be a Christian because I could not do what Jesus said I should do. I could not give up everything to follow Jesus. I wanted to have fun, go to college, and travel the world. I was pretty sure I could not love my enemies. I was too selfish to be a Christian. The minister smiled broadly and said, "Oh, don’t worry about that. Jesus didn’t really expect us to do those things. He could because he was the son of God. But it’s beyond human beings to do things like love our enemies."

If the minister’s intent was to win me over to Christ, his words had the opposite effect. I was more certain than ever I could not join the Church. My sense was that if God sent a beloved child to earth with a singular message of love, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness, can he have known what humanity would do with that message? I still have that question: did God know that we would modify Jesus’ message to justify wars and hatred, advocate for judgment and punishment, and establish hierarchies in heaven and earth? I have always struggled to reconcile the Christ the Church promotes with Jesus the teacher whose words, when we find them, are so simple and so powerful.

When I was nineteen, I left the Church for good, but not God, and not the teachings of Jesus. For decades I avoided Christianity, but I could not dismiss all the words in red letters. Some of them were simply too good and too true.

More than forty years later—in one of the Divine’s fine ironies—I was led to attend a Quaker seminary. Inspired in large part by the early Quaker understanding of scripture and Jesus’ message, I am today a follower of the way of Jesus. The essence of Jesus’ way remains in scraps of his authentic parables, proverbs, and aphorisms, fragments preserved by the gospel writers. It remains in stories passed on by early Christians and included in the gospels about the way his life preached what he taught: his compassionate treatment of people regardless of their social status, his insistence on love as the highest value, his challenges to authorities (religious and political), his willingness to die rather than to kill or provoke violence. It remains in individual spiritual experiences and direct encounters with the Divine by any name: the Light, the Holy, the Spirit, God . . . Such is the way of Jesus, from whose spoken teachings over two thousand years ago came a paradigm shift we humans still struggle to absorb.

Opening the Parables is a work of considered opinion about what Jesus taught in his parables. I make no pretense of being a biblical scholar, theologian, or historian. My qualifications for writing this book are (1) I am an educated, experienced, and curious reader; (2) I have always mistrusted interpretations made by religious authorities with a theological agenda; and (3) I am convinced Jesus’ parables contain a key to his intentional and consistent message.

I encourage you, the reader, to question my conclusions and explore for yourself the thousands (probably millions) of interpretations of Jesus’ parables. I hope this book will lead you to look more closely at what Jesus said (as far as we can know) and to question what the Church has said he said.

—MDH, 2024

Acknowledgments

My deep gratitude to those who shepherded me through the writing of this book. Thank you to my daughter and grandsons for their patience and loving support. To my Quaker seminary friend and pool-player extraordinaire, Debbie Faith Stanley, who provided invaluable feedback, great conversations, and sorely-needed encouragement. To my Scottish Zoom friend, Valerie Dearnley, (who lives in the Light and reads from the heart) who inspired me to make insightful changes and additions. To my brilliant Buddhist historian friend, Tom Davis, who apparently found nothing to disagree with in what he read, an encouragement in itself. Finally, thank you to Shelley Newby, who introduced me to the Pen Man; to Eric Muhr of Barclay Press who encouraged me to contact Wipf & Stock Publishers, and to Wipf & Stock editor Matthew Winer, who patiently answered my many questions.

Introduction

The Kingdom of God is like . . . Jesus taught his Kingdom of God lesson consistently and repeatedly, inductively, deductively, in as many ways possible, to address all learning styles. His lessons focused on his students, on ways to behave, here and now, in a way beneficial to humanity and pleasing to God. Many of his first students seemed to grasp the concept and applied it to their lives.

As time passed, however, other teachers took over Jesus’ lesson plan, often without fully understanding his lesson or intention. Beginning with the gospel writers, these later teachers changed the focus of the lesson from the students to Jesus himself, and from the Kingdom of God to Jesus as Christ/Son of God. Eventually they added material about Church doctrine and practices based on worshipping Jesus, modifying his original lesson for their different intentions. Perhaps by the grace of God, the essence of Jesus’ original lesson remains—buried, hidden, and obscured—but still there in the New Testament text.

In seminary, almost everything I read about Jesus and his teachings, even scholarly works by agnostics, was filtered through what the Church said about him. When I read The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus), it became my New Testament. The work is based on the research and findings from over a decade of work by more than two hundred biblical scholars from various denominations. Using specific objective criteria to identify words Jesus probably said (or very close to something he said), the scholars were able to separate what Jesus said from what the Church said he said. Roughly 80 percent of the New Testament contains words by others ascribed to Jesus. The words most likely to be authentic to Jesus are found in his unique aphorisms and puzzling parables.

In my own journey with the parables, from the red letters I found as a teenager to The Five Gospels I found in seminary, I am convinced that Jesus meant what he said about love and the Kingdom of God, a concept at once so simple but so difficult we still don’t fully grasp it.

Concentrating only on what Jesus said in the parables, without the accoutrements of traditional Christian interpretation, what do his parables teach us? Surely someone has done this. In searching, however, I found no interpretation that focused only what Jesus focused on in his authentic teachings, i.e., compassionate love and the God of the Kingdom (which is Love itself). Scholarly works spend a lot of time analyzing the historical background of the parables as used by early Christians; on language issues in translation; on the structure of and figurative language in the parables. Theological works focus on the parable’s meaning in Christianity (which did not exist when Jesus told the parable); spiritual writings too use language and images from the Christian tradition to talk about Jesus’ parables.

Every interpretation I found looked at the parables, one way or another, through the filter of Christian tradition and doctrine. Of course, I could not possibly read all the millions of interpretations of Jesus’ parables, but if an interpretation using only the authentic words of Jesus (as far as we can know) does exist, it seems to be not readily available. Opening the Parables is my attempt at such an interpretation. Others may exist; others may do it better; but for those who have not yet found the parables interpreted using the unadulterated words of Jesus, this is a beginning. Since many, if not most, of his remaining authentic teachings begin with The Kingdom of God is like . . . we will take him at his word, i.e., that he wants to teach us to understand a divine dimension or realm unlike our normal reality but intertwined with it, the part that compassionate love plays there, and how we can become conscious citizens in that realm.

The power of the parables, of course, is that they work in different ways for different people; the Holy speaks to us in whatever language we can hear. Many who love the traditional Christian religion, who are deeply moved by its rituals and liturgies, who are lifted by its symbols of glory and majesty, who resonate with its central figure, Christ the sacrifice, may prefer the allegorical interpretations of traditional Christianity. This book may not be for them. But for those put off by what Christianity has become, my hope is that this book will open discussion of the original source of that faith, the way of Jesus.

Opening the Parables is really three books, so I divided it that way. Book I: The Search for Consistency is written from my intellect and education. Book II: The Parables in Real Life is written from my heart and personal experience. Book III: The Church, the Quakers, and the Parables is written from the spiritual understanding and affirmation I found in the writings of Early Friends. The Appendix, Traditional Interpretations vs. Quaker Applications, is for those interested in the Early Friends’ approach to using scripture.

Throughout the book I capitalize the word Church to signify the institution of Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) as it developed over the centuries, becoming more and more distracted from the teachings of Jesus about love in the Kingdom of God, which he said is here, now, among us—not there, then, with the elect.

Abbreviations

NRSVUE New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

YLT Young’s Literal Translation

QBI Quaker Bible Index

BOOK I THE SEARCH FOR CONSISTENCY

1

Influences on This Book

[I would] that all women [could] read the Gospels and Paul’s epistles, and that they be translated into the common language so that they be read and known not only by the Scots and Irish, but also by the Turks and Saracens. . . .I would that the plowman sing a text of the Scripture at his plow, that the weaver at his loom use it to drive away the tediousness of time, or that the traveler make the time pass and rid his journey of weariness . . .

¹

—Desiderius Erasmus, 1529

The Bible, George Fox, and Early Friends

For centuries, the New Testament existed only in various Latin translations used by the Church and inaccessible for anyone who did not read or understand Latin, which was most people. Handwritten translations of the Bible into English existed as early as the 1300s, and the 1560 Geneva Bible translation into English (based on Erasmus’ earlier translation into Greek and updated Latin) was the Bible of choice for educated English-speaking Christians for a hundred years or more. (Shakespeare, for instance, quoted from the Geneva Bible.) But the translation commissioned by King James I of England and published in 1611 (i.e., the King James Version) was the first Bible printed in a form small enough for an individual to own and read it.

Widespread availability of individual Bibles in English allowed even common people to read the text for themselves, among them, George Fox, son of a weaver in the English Midlands. Fox was a religious seeker in Puritan England and is acknowledged as founder of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers). For centuries, those like George Fox and early Friends who sought and found consistency in the teachings of Jesus, also found themselves at odds with Christian doctrine and the institutional Church.

Fox knew the Bible so well, tradition says, that if it were lost he could have written it down from memory. Having studied it deeply, Fox became suspicious of religious authorities who knew church doctrine but struggled to explain Jesus’ teachings. Disappointed, and in a period of intense seeking, he heard a voice tell him there was one who could speak to his condition (address his concerns), and that was Jesus Christ himself.

Fox went to scripture with new eyes to see what Jesus said, alert for a consistent Truth rising out of the words. Fox wrote in his journal that he esteemed the Holy Scriptures highly: they were very precious to me, for I was in that spirit by which they were given forth, and what the Lord opened in me I afterwards found was agreeable to them.²

What the Lord opened in him led Fox to emphasize that scripture is understandable only if read in the same spirit in which it was written, i.e., a Spirit of Truth (the Spirit of Christ, the Light of Christ Jesus). Fox and early Friends called spiritual insights gleaned from this Spirit of Truth openings, beckoning entrance to a higher understanding. One such opening held that Truth, unlike humanity, is consistent, unchangeable, and does not contradict itself. As Fox wrote in his journal:

But while people’s minds run in the earthly, after the creatures and changeable things, changeable ways and religions, and changeable, uncertain teachers, their minds are in bondage; they are brittle and changeable, tossed up and down with windy doctrines and thoughts and notions. . . . the Light of Jesus Christ . . . would keep them to the unchangeable.³

The group of early Friends, including Fox, who wrote a letter to King Charles II in 1660 to assure him they were not involved in a plot against him, did so by declaring their abhorrence of all violence, saying:

That Spirit of Christ by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil, & again to move unto it;⁴ And we do certainly know, and so testify to the world; that the spirit of Christ which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward Weapons neither for the Kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.⁵

Early Friend William Penn described Fox as having an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures. He would go to the marrow of things and show the mind, harmony and fulfilling of them with much plainness and to great comfort and edification. When Penn says that Fox’s approach to scripture led to harmony, much plainness,⁶ great comfort and edification, this suggests Fox could interpret in simple language the often disquieting or baffling inconsistencies in biblical text.

Those who followed him called themselves Followers of the Way, Publishers of Truth, and eventually The Religious Society of Friends. George Fox opened the scriptures in a way that led them to read the Bible for the teaching of Jesus and to question interpretations imposed by church doctrine. In essence, if it wasn’t specifically in the Bible, or if it contradicted what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God, it was debatable.

To early Friends, baptism, communion, etc. were sacred, inward, spiritual events—sacramental because they came from inward conviction, not simply because it was on the church calendar. John the Baptist had differentiated between the water baptism he performed and the spiritual baptism Jesus brought,⁷ and Friends understood baptism to be an inward experience of the Holy Spirit that could happen any time, especially when a person was still and attentive. Communion, too, was understood as an inward encounter with the divine, a direct spiritual experience more powerful than any ritual imposed by the Church. When Jesus told his followers, Remember me when you eat and drink, that meant remembering Jesus (alive and teaching) and his message several times every day. Shattered by Jesus’ crucifixion, early Christians made the communion meal a reminder of his death. But to Fox and early Friends, communion was a spiritual encounter with the living Inner Teacher/the Inner Christ, who, Fox said, has come to teach his people himself.⁸

Ultimately, the first Friends rejected much of what the Church taught, which was mostly about itself, its doctrines, rituals, sacraments and even terminology. The word church, for instance, a translation of the Greek word, ekklēsia, is used in the New Testament to mean a gathering of those summoned but never refers to a building.⁹ Purists that they were, Fox and early Friends did not refer to places they gathered as churches, but simply as meeting houses. They reserved church for the people called together by God/the Holy Spirit/the Light—something holy, and wholly beyond humans.

Early Friends allowed space for the Inner Teacher/Inner Christ/God to work in individuals rather than through church structure, doctrine, and authority. In the two quotations below, William Penn expresses the Quaker understanding of faith and worship:

God visits and appears to people in ways that are appropriate to their spiritual states and conditions and in ways in which they are prepared to receive him. For some it has been outward and sensibly; for others inward and spiritually."¹⁰

and:

The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls everywhere are of one religion and when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the diverse liveries [different costumes] they wore here make them strangers."¹¹

Understanding scripture required reading it at the same spiritual level as its source, and teaching people why and how to do this was part of Fox’s gift for opening scripture. As he wrote in his journal:

I turned the people to the Spirit of God, which led the holy men of old to give forth the Scriptures and showed them that they must also come to receive and be led by the same Spirit if ever they came to know God, and Christ, and the Scriptures aright.¹²

By 1678, this was an established and fundamental belief of early Friends, as Robert Barclay explains in his Apology: This is the great work of the Scriptures, and their service to us, that we may witness them fulfilled in us, and so discern the stamp of God’s spirit and ways upon them, by the inward acquaintance we have with the same Spirit and work in our hearts. . . . it is only the spiritual man that can make a right use of them.¹³

The ways Fox opened scripture led his followers and other seekers to