WHAT IS THE PARABLE?

"Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and Scribes murmured, saying. This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. And he spake this parable unto them." — Luke xv. 1-3 (A.V.).

"Now all the publicans and sinners were drawing near unto him for to hear him. And both the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. And he spake unto them this parable."— (R.V.)

The common title of the parable The Prodigal Son is misleading, as the centre of interest in the parable is not the son who left home at all, but the contrast between the attitude of the father and the elder brother to him on his return; and this contrast I have sought to express in the longer subtitle chosen for this volume, God's Humanity and Man's Inhumanity to Man, while the briefer title indicates the common thought of the three parables in the chapter. The occasion that the evangelist who alone records the parable gives to it confirms this view. Jesus is defending Himself against the charge of "keeping bad company," and His answer is that His attitude, and not His • critics', corresponds to God's.

1. The Companion Parables.

The two companion parables which the evangelist assigns to the same occasion are also a defence of Jesus' care for sinners; but the point of comparison is not exactly the same. The emphasis in each is on sorrow in the loss and joy in the recovery of one of many possessions, one sheep out of a hundred, and one coin out of ten.

The value of the individual soul is emphasised as a reason for the endeavour to seek and save even the socially outcast, the morally depraved, and the religiously indifferent. As the point of comparison is not the same, it is doubtful whether the three parables were spoken at the same time.

The evangelist's method of composition does not necessitate any such assumption, as in this part of the Gospel he is not following any distinct chronology, and is often grouping his material according to the subjects. If this be so, then it is evident how unwise it is to treat the three parables as they have been treated, as complementary to illustrate the function of the three persons of the Trinity in man's salvation, the shepherd as the Son, the woman as the Spirit, and the father in the parable as God the Father. It is certain that the doctrine of the Trinity was not in the mind of Jesus, and that such a distribution of functions is remote from the realm of moral and spiritual reality in which He moved. The parable of the Lost Sheep is found in Matthew's Gospel also (xviii. 12-13), and then in a still more appropriate setting as illustrating the reason why "the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost" (ver. 11),1 namely, that "it is not the will of your Father, which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish" (ver. 14). The companion parable of the Lost Coin is peculiar to Luke; but it need not, because mentioned by one evangelist only, on that account be regarded as unauthentic; it does not bring out any fresh aspect of the subject; but Jesus for the sake of emphasis may have presented the same truth in two different forms. The parable which we are studying so bears the impress of the spirit and purpose of Jesus that we need have no hesitation about its authenticity.

There is one thought found in the three parables: their common refrain is, lost and found. It is of interest and importance that we should clearly see and firmly grasp the truth Jesus would teach. When we think of sin as loss, we think of what it costs the sinner. From this point of view we might regard the three parables as teaching the loss of sin to man as danger, as disuse, as disappointment; and each of these is true as an aspect* of human experience. But this is not the standpoint of Jesus. He feels the sorrow, shame, and suffering of sin as our brother; but in His judgment of sin He sees it as the Son of God. It is the shepherd, not the sheep, who sorrows and rejoices; the woman, not the coin; the father assuredly more than the son. It is the loss of sin to God on which He who knew the heart of God lays all the stress. It is heaven's, and not earth's, joy and sorrow with which He is concerned, because He shares it. Jesus does not represent God — as Christian theology, following pagan philosophy for centuries, insisted on describing Him — as impassible. What was a nickname of heresy in the third century was for Jesus the truth about God, which was the motive of the ministry: He was a patripassian;2 for Him it was no monstrous heresy to represent the infinite and eternal God as so loving man as to feel man's sin as a loss, and to rejoice in man's recovery.

2. The Significance of the Details.

It is very properly insisted that the parables are not allegories, but that each is a complete and consistent story illustrative of one point. The point illustrated by the parable has already been indicated: Christ's attitude to sinners, and not the Pharisees', corresponds to God's, because God rejoices in the recovery of the lost. But this canon of interpretation cannot be applied rigidly to this parable. Christ's elaboration of the narrative shows that it had an interest for Him in its details; for here the truth illustrated and the tale illustrating are not accidentally associated; there is an essential identity. It is the story of a sinner told to show that God treats sin as a loving father does; and so all the details are significant, and we can without any forced ingenuity regard the parable as giving us Jesus' view of God and man, sin and judgment, repentance and forgiveness, the bliss and the woe of the soul. There is suggested to us in this parable the content of the Gospel of Jesus; and in the exposition of it we need not confine ourselves to what is explicitly stated, but may from the other teachings of Jesus illustrate and complete what is implicitly suggested. In so doing we have, however, to be careful to distinguish in our own minds what is stated and what is suggested, and to avoid a confusion in our exposition. On the one hand, it must be maintained that in the study of any portion of Scripture we may allow ourselves to follow the lead of suggestion, and need not confine ourselves to the narrower path of statement, so long as we keep the distinction clearly before us, and accept only such suggestion as is accordant with the statement of any passage. We must not give as the exegesis of a passage thoughts that in our minds spring out of, because they are rooted in, the truth that is taught; but we must not refuse to allow our minds to go beyond the direct teaching of a passage, so long as these thoughts are controlled by that truth, and bring into association with it truths that are elsewhere taught in the Scriptures.

3. The Interpretation Through the Mind of Jesus.

In dealing with the teaching of Jesus we may supplement one saying by other sayings from His lips, for we may be sure that for His mind truth was a unity, and in so doing we are only seeking to recover that unity for our own minds. The writer ventures to labour this point, as there is a pedantic scholarship that disregards the interests of living piety in its exposition of the Scriptures. All exposition of the Scriptures must be consistent with, but it need not be confined by, scholarship. We" may bring the whole mind of Christ to bear on each of the sayings of Jesus for its adequate interpretation. This does not mean that we allow freedom to a vagrant fancy or to a wilful dogmatism; but that we see each part of the New Testament in the light of the whole Gospel of which it is the shrine. The more at home we are in the New Testament as a whole, the more will each passage we study legitimately suggest the truth to our minds.

We must, however, in dealing with this parable especially avoid the common assumption that it is, or claims to be, a complete statement of the Gospel. Because there is no mention of the atoning sacrifice of Christ Himself in the parable, it is sometimes very arrogantly declared that this evangelical doctrine lacks the authority of Christ. It would be beyond the purpose of this volume to offer the abundant evidence there is elsewhere in the New Testament for the significance and value of that doctrine for Christian faith, or even to quote the sayings of Jesus Himself which confirm the Apostolic Gospel. It is sufficient here to insist that a parable, however rich in suggestion, is not a system of theology; and the silence of a parable about a doctrine does not and cannot involve its exclusion from the Gospel. It is true that any view of the atoning sacrifice that represents God as other than the Father who seeks the recovery of His lost son is inconsistent with this parable, and so must be rejected as contradicting the Son's testimony. It may be demanded that evangelical doctrine shall not be inconsistent with the representation of God given in this parable; but only a caricature of the true teaching about the Atoning Sacrifice can be made to appear inconsistent. As will be shown in the subsequent exposition, there is implicit in the Father's sorrow for the loss of His son, and in His forgiveness of the penitent that atoning sacrifice, for to know sin and to know forgiveness is to know also the Cross.

1 This verse is omitted by the R.V., and it may be an insertion here from Luke xix. 10.

2 The Patripassians taught that Father, Son, and Spirit were successive modes of God; and were accordingly charged with teaching that the Father suffered on the Cross.