"For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. 13 Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. 14 In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,
‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
You will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
15 For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they would see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart and return,
And I would heal them.’
15 For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they would see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart and return,
And I would heal them.’
16 But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear."
A standard interpretation of this text is that Jesus parables, then, are a kind of judgment on the world. The world is somehow not ALLOWED to understand the parables, and thus they are condemned. But there are other ways to approach this text that I think make more sense, and are more fruitful:
In the original Isaiah passage, Isaiah has been preaching the same message for years and year: don't put faith in money and politics, but trust in God alone to be your savior. Yet no matter how long he preaches, and no matter how evident it becomes that the threats God preaches to him are coming to pass, nobody is listening. Isaiah is frustrated: he preaches a message that is by his lights obvious, simple and true, and yet nobody is responding in any kind of significant way. Oh people listen to him, as they did many of the prophets. But they mostly just come to get a kind of emotional rush... to feel religious...but they don't take what he says seriously and they don't seem to really 'get it'.
Many of us have had profound encounters with the divine that we then have a hard time communicating to others. And even when we are heard and understood, rarely does this have the effect people desire. People never seem to really change. There are many ministers who could share in Isaiah's frustration. Indeed, it is possible that Jesus was complaining about the same thing. People came to hear Him speak and were entertained, but they were not moved to the new relationship with God He wanted for them.
Another possibility is that Jesus is talking in riddles to hide His message from the authorities. He speaks in such a way that the Jewish and especially Roman authorities would be confused. This would explain why so many of the parables are about the Kingdom of God, which has the biggest political connotations.
I simply love this stuff.
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