Parables are stories

The Parables of our Lord are the most beautiful and meaningful talks in history. They are matchless in their depth. While the great third-century theologian Origen and the fourteenth-century poet Dante said that there were four levels of interpretation, G K Chesterton (the English Roman Catholic essayist from a century ago) said that he could count, in the Lord’s Parables, at least seven levels of meaning.

There’s no doubt about that.

Still, the Parables are simple and immediate. They “come at you” with personality, with familiar experiences, and concrete images. In style and approach, these are not like St Paul’s epistles, which are filled with doctrinal and propositional presentations. 

No, parables are meant to be experienced as stories, first and foremost. While one is meant to take St Paul’s epistles, and the Lord’s addresses (like the Sermon on the Mount), with every sentence as a proposition, the parables are different.

No matter how deep they are, the Parables of the Lord are always fresh, ever new. 

With parables, one has to look for the moral of the story, which usually comes at the very end. Then, one reads that moral back into the story, and the whole thing opens up in depth and clarity.

This is important. It should be easy to tell the difference between a parable and a doctrinal exposition, because the simple experience of the two is sharply different. An exposition proceeds by logical argument, point by point.

But a parable proceeds by the building up of drama in the narrative. The listener or reader is meant to be “hooked in,” his attention focused on the characters and the chain of events. And then the crisis of the story and the climax, and the conclusion where everything is made clear.

The main point

I propose to read with you the great Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. We will try to pay attention to the story, and to look for the “main point,” the moral of the parable. What was the Lord’s main intent in telling this story? What does the whole parable say, the whole narrative? What is the main concern of this Scripture?

These questions differ from the unfortunately common attempt to construct a dogma about the afterlife out of details from the story. I understand that a number of writers in Holy Tradition have made inferences from this parable, and they have taken from the story a number of eschatological propositions. 

Some writers in Holy Tradition have taken from this parable some difficult, if not unfeasible, eschatological interpretations: they teach that the angels take up the souls of the righteous to the “bosom of Abraham” … that the souls of the unrighteous are sent to torment in the fires of Hades … that there is an uncrossable chasm between the bosom of Abraham and Hades.

In general, such writers like to see this parable as referring to the “intermediate state of the soul” – that is, the bodiless existence of the soul in the interval between physical death and the general resurrection at the Last Day.

Such an interpretation is a difficult case to make. For one thing, it is attempting to force out a  literalistic reading of a parable, which is a perilous thing. But at the same time, these same writers interpret “the bosom of Abraham” in this parable as symbolically referring to the intermediate state of the soul in fellowship with Christ. So already, the strict “literalistic” interpretation is left behind.

But also, it is plain, for any reasonable eye to see, and any open heart, that parables must be taken in a literary sense, not literalistically. Stories are full of symbol and metaphor. They rely on rhetorical tropes like overstatement (hyperbole) and understatement (litotes). Everyone knows that in Aesop’s Fable, the fox moaning over sour grapes is not mainly about a fox denouncing grapes simply because he couldn’t get at them, but about an all-too-human and all-too-common defect. 

Everyone knows that Jesus really did not expect someone to literally pluck out his eye because it offended them.

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