There are two main teaching methods, discovery (Socratic) or direct instruction (sermon, lecture). Jesus’ parables combine both methods, using familiar stories with a key that he supplies to directly teach something new. Like all good teachers, Jesus knew his audience. “On the same day” (13:1) Jesus left the house in Capernaum and taught from a boat. There were four sorts in his audience: Pharisees, family, crowd, and disciples. Without any introduction, he told them a prosaic story about a farmer, who rather carelessly threw seed not only on good soil, but on the road, in weeds, and on stony ground. Not surprisingly, only the seed on good soil produced any crop. Then he ended with a cryptic, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Jesus’s disciples came and asked, ‘Why do you teach with parables?” Jesus’ answer was, “So they won’t get it.” He quoted from an Isaiah passage quoted in each of the first six books of the New Testament, that because the hearers were deaf and blind and slow-witted, they would be punished with teaching they would not understand. But to the disciples, who came and asked the meaning of the parable, Jesus would explain it. They would get to hear the mysteries of the Kingdom that even the prophets wished to hear, but did not.
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Bill Edgar has been the pastor of the Broomall Reformed Presbyterian Church since 1981 and a teacher of mathematics at East High School in West Chester, Pennsylvania since 1980. He was graduated from Swarthmore College in 1968, attended the Reformed Presbyterian Theological...
