Thursday, May 18, 2006

Is Jesus hiding something?

No I'm not talking about the DaVinci Code here, rather I had a thought this morning about why Jesus told parables.

Matthew 13:9-11:
9Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.
10And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
The reason I thought of this was that yesterday I found myself giving someone advice in parable form. Afterwards I was reflecting on this and my immediate reaction was to think "Oh no, I didn't explicitly give them any advice, I didn't spell things out for them, I didn't tell them what to do". The next thought I had was that Jesus told stories so maybe it's ok to not give people advice. Maybe Jesus was hoping people would clue in without him having to spell things out? If people asked him to tell them the meaning of the parable he would but rarely does he treat people like we do and blurt out advice. Was he trying to hide things from people? Was he playing a spiritual game of cat and mouse? Why wouldn't he just tell them things plainly?

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