Parables Don't Teach Anything

Parables don't teach anything.  A "parable" is based on a comparison--and the only test of the validity of the comparison is the listener's receptivity to the message.  Listening to a parable might be of some value--a value that we might put under the heading of "education," but only insofar as we call it "education" to be reminded of something one knows already.

Parables are at most ancillary to education, as prophecies are ancillary to anticipating the future.  Parables remind one of truths, as prophecies remind one of the tendencies of God's judgment--tendencies that play out in more complex and organic fashion than can be accounted for in any catalog of prophecies.  An example of each of these realities is the Parable of the Rebellious Husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-46), who brazenly and violently defied their master:

When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen?  They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.

When the "chief priests and the Pharisees"--the target of the parable--heard it from the lips of Jesus, all that they learned anew was that Jesus was capable of such effrontery.  Everyone in the audience would have known "what will he do unto those husbandmen," and any of them at all familiar with the scriptures would have known with what mundane regularity goods were--upon God's judgment--taken from the wicked and given to those more deserving.

An even more striking example of the "non-teaching" quality of parables is the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24-43 which, incidentally, touches on end-time prophecy in Jesus' characteristically non-specific way--"until the harvest".)  All that one might "learn" (in a straightforward educational sense) from The Wheat and The Tares is the rather unsettling fact that "servants of the householder"--even at God's direction and with such aid as he might provide--could not be relied upon to tell wheat from tares.  (Proponents of an inerrant Bible--in the "autographs" or not--might want to take note.)

Of course, at the end of the parable, the angels ("reapers") will perform precisely that sifting operation.  If the "servants of the householder" from before are not angels as well, then it is truly a puzzle who they are, since "the children of the kingdom" are busy being "the good seed."  Clearly this parable is meant to be evocative--as parables will be--rather than didactic.

Parables don't teach anything.