Parables of Jesus
“All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.”
Definition
The parables of Jesus were his characteristic teaching method, using everyday images (a sower, a lost coin, a mustard seed) to teach about the kingdom of God. Jesus himself explained that parables serve a double purpose: revealing the kingdom’s secret to disciples while leaving it hidden from those outside. When his disciples asked about the parables, “he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that “they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven”’” (Mark 4:10-12).
Biblical Basis
Jesus’s own account of his parables draws directly on Isaiah’s commission, where the prophet is sent to a people who will “keep on hearing, but do not understand,” lest they “turn and be healed” (Isa. 6:9-10). Matthew reads Jesus’s use of parables as itself a fulfillment of prophecy: “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world’” (Matt. 13:34-35, quoting Ps. 78:2). The same teaching that draws responsive hearers deeper into understanding functions as judgment on those who refuse to hear, consistent with the same hardening pattern Isaiah’s own commission describes.