In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells several parables in which he invites the hearers to dwell on the Kingdom of Heaven.
What Jesus means by the Kingdom of Heaven unfolds throughout the whole gospel, but its character is first established in the Beatitudes. In that passage he describes the Kingdom as the possession of the poor in spirit and the persecuted.
This opening reveals as much about how Jesus sees our relationship to the Kingdom of Heaven as it does about the Kingdom itself. That it is both the true manifestation of God’s dream for creation and a disappointment in needing to fix things.
Throughout the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells several parables about the Kingdom.
Learning along the Journey
The first batch come to us during the heart of the gospel.
- The Parables of the sower, mustard seed, et al – Matthew 13
- The Parable of the Unforgiving Servant – Matthew 18:23-35
- The Laborers in the Vineyard – Matthew 20:1-16
In these parables, Jesus articulates a curious character for the Kingdom of Heaven. In one place, it is like seeds scattered. Or it is like a servant that forgives because he has to. And lastly, it is like a place where all people can work and make a day’s wage.
The picture these parables paint isn’t rainbows and puppies. It isn’t perfect eternal happiness.
What we see is work. And compassion. Persistence and equality.
Reading through this stuff, we should start to get a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps we don’t get it all, but enough to understand the fundamental character of it.
The Dark Parables
When Jesus enters Jerusalem with his disciples, we have the famous events of the Triumphal Entry and the Cleansing of the Temple. Then Jesus returns to be confronted by the Temple’s leadership.
And here is where it gets interesting.
Jesus tells four parables in Jerusalem. And all of them are dark and twisted.
What connects these dark parables is that, with each, Jesus invites us to compare the Kingdom of Heaven to the parable he is about to tell.
Two of the parables occur during the confrontation with the leaders:
- The Parable of the Wicked Tenants – Matthew 21:33-46
In the first one, Jesus directly compares the Temple leaders to wicked tenants who plot to kill the landowner’s son. Afterward, he says that the Kingdom of Heaven will be taken from them. It’s like an anti-beatitude.
- The Parable of the Wedding Banquet – Matthew 22:1-14
In the second, Jesus invites us to compare the Kingdom of Heaven to a king who hosts a wedding banquet for his son. While this story can read like a teaching about radical welcome, it sounds more like raging tyranny of a frustrated monarch.
And two of them occur after Jesus describes an apocalyptic future.
- The Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids – Matthew 25:1-13
After detailing the apocalyptic fallout of human violence, Jesus announces that “Then the Kingdom of Heave will be like this” while proceeding to tell of frightened bridesmaids waiting in the dark for a callous bridegroom.
- The Parable of the Talents – Matthew 25:14-30
The final parable is the most easily misconstrued teaching about exploiting people with interest (usury) so that a greedy slaveowner can maximize his profits. And it ends with the eternal torture of a slave who refuses to go along with the exploitation scheme.
It is tempting to read these dark parables wrong.
Not because we intend to. But because the idea of them fits weird. And our minds want to interpret them directly. But Jesus tells them slant. The added dimension distorts and confounds the teachings. Rendering them far from straight-forward.
Of the dark parables, the one that should be easiest to diagnose as problematic is the last one, the Parable of the Talents. Because any Jewish person in the first century who heard this would immediately go
Wait a minute…We’re not actually supposed to behave this way!
This leaves us deciding:
…whether this is a story saying that God really does want us to charge sky-high interest to benefit the Kingdom of Heaven (and enrich God with largesse)
or
…if maybe the slaveowner isn’t God and the slave he condemns isn’t actually lazy and bad.
Teaching with an unreliable narrator
In one sense, these parables are meant to trip us, confound us, and make us think. And the technique Jesus uses in them sounds a lot like the unreliable narrator—the literary device of having a narrator tell a story that the reader isn’t supposed to trust.
The beauty of the unreliable narrator is that we are forced to determine what is true and what is false. Because not everything is true and not everything is false. But enough is false to make anything hard to believe.
But we already have a sense of what is true.
This is what all of that teaching before Jerusalem was for. Jesus was teaching his followers about the work: what they are up to and why. He teaches them about the Kingdom of Heaven and why they even want to inherit it.
It is about grace, generosity, and love.
So when they come to the end of the line, Jesus hopes they’ve paid attention along the way. That they’ve listened and can reason it out.
Imagine that what he’s saying is this:
Compare all that you know about this concept to a dark story of suffering I’m about to tell you. How does it sit with you?
And if we want to take it one step further, Jesus really starts to come off like the spiritual genius we take him for.
Ask yourself where God really is in this?
Is he the one that tortures?
Or the one who takes on torture for the sake of love?
The Dark Parables are amazing.
They are brilliant and incomparable teaching. They are vivid and elegant. And unfortunately, they are also deeply misunderstood.
Even the vision I’m offering is imperfect.
Parables are wonderfully rich and offer many ways for interpretation and revelation. We can learn much from them and keep finding new learnings.
I suspect, however, that we must start, not from what we think the parable says, but from what we know about the one saying it. And about how his disciples would receive these words.
A final thought.
The kicker for the dark parables, and why I’m convinced they are intended as a test is what Jesus teaches after the final one.
He speaks to treating Jesus well—by treating strangers in need well. And saying that they will be judged for ignoring him by ignoring strangers in need.
Living out the Kingdom of heaven, then isn’t doubling investments, remembering to bring lamp oil, or wearing the right clothes.
It’s feeding hungry people.
And most of us actually do understand that really is the point.