Parables

John Dominic Crossan Rowan Williams' and Paul Ricoeur's emphasis on the parable has got me to thinking further about parables, their nature and significance. Certainly, the impact of a parable is not found in a single acicular message, contra the assertions of Jülicher last century, but in what it suggests. The reader/listener has to fill in the missing referents.

Now, modern and post-modern critics have found fertile ground in this uncertainty. Much of the debate centres around the Sower parable of Mark 4:1-10, naturally enough given Jesus' statement in 4:13:

Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?

For John Dominic Crossan the very point of Jesus' parables is their polyvalence, their lack of closure. He says:

Since you cannot interpret absolutely, you can interpret forever.

Yet Crossan has painted himself into a corner by dismissing Jesus' interpretation in 4:13-20 as inauthentic. It suits his reading (and his view of Jesus as a hip post-modern dude) to do so! For Crossan, the interpretation is inauthentic by definition. It also happens to disrupt the 'serenity' of Crossan's beloved polyvalence.Or should that be “the polyvalence of his beloved serenity”- 'serene' being a ubiquitous Crossanism and a yardstick of virtue: "serenly multiple image". "startling and unnerving serenity"(!), "serene plurality"? [in his book Cliffs of Fall]

The general impulse of literary critics has been to agree with Crossan as to the open-endedness of the parables, but to re-insert them in their context: the narratives of the gospels. In his agnostic, agonistic but erudite reading of Mark, The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode despairs of finding meaning at all, with the Sower parable as "the great crux" - a promise of meaning never delivered. He too finds "the authorised allegory seems inept”. This only seems enticing to a post­structuralist critic like Stephen D. Moore, who in a virtuoso performance of high deconstruction bungee-jumps gleefully over the “cliffs of fall” that so daunt Crossan and disappoint Kermode:

Parabole unsettles speech. It inhabits the oppositions of inside and outside, speech and writing, but only that it might... shake the interpretative (bed)frames so as to keep the interpreters restlessly turning over.

Ironically, it is critics such as Moore, Kermode and Crossan have taken the teasing language of the parables too one-dimensionally. Just because they don't produce meaning as ordinary texts do, does not mean they are meaningless, or endlessly polyvalent, or impossible to confine. It merely indicates that other reading strategies have to be engaged to understand their importance.

Sir Frank Kermode