The appeal of the Parables

Come with me into the exciting world of the first Christian community in the years immediately after Easter.

These Christians wanted to tell others about Jesus. But they had very few tools for the job.

No established church organisation, no written accounts of Jesus’teaching, and no management structure to keep the church ticking over.

But they had to take major decisions on some fundamental issues.

At first they had assumed Jesus’ message was meant for only the Jewish people.

A firebrand preacher from Tarsus called Paul was to make the question of preaching to the Gentiles as well as to the Jews a fundamental issue.

By persuading the church that the gospel of Jesus was meant for every nation Paul made Christianity a universal faith

The Early Church had to achieve two major objectives. First it tried to persuade the Jews that the crucified Jesus was indeed their God-given Messiah. We have an insight into their efforts in the Acts of the Apostles.

On the day of Pentecost Peter addressed the scoffing crowd: “Men of Israel, hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God, you crucified and killed, but God raised him up.”Read the entire address in Acts 2,22-24. We think this was the core message of the Early Church to the Jewish people.

But the young church faced another, happy, challenge.

Non-Jewish people, the Gentiles, were attracted to the gospel and wanted to follow Jesus. How was the Early Church going to teach them about Jesus?

If we visit to a cosmopolitan seaport north of Jerusalem we see how the Christian community coped. Antioch was a thriving commercial city.

In Antioch you could hear every foreign language.

It was a golden missionary opportunity. Paul and Barnabas seized their chance and the Christian community exploded into life.“In Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians”(Acts 11.26). Christianity had arrived.

Then what tools did these first Christian possess? They only had the collective memories from the disciples and those nearest to Jesus.

These recollections included his dealings with the religious authorities, his healing of the sick and his help for the poor and dispossessed.

But supremely they declared Jesus’final passion, death and resurrection.

However, they also possessed Jesus’teaching, his many lessons and innumerable parables.

So the Christian community in Antioch over time collected Jesus’ teaching into blocks in order to instruct the new converts about their faith in Jesus. Their efforts gave us our written gospel of Matthew.

We believe that Matthew’s gospel probably originated within the Christian community in Antioch.

Bear in mind that no written account was made of his teaching as Jesus delivered it. In our day we would use a battery of technological devices to record Jesus’every word and deed.

The first Christians simply told people about Jesus as they remembered what had happened.

So they gathered Jesus’ parables into collections. In Matthew 13.1-33 contains a collection of seven parables with the summary:“All this Jesus said to the crowd in parables” (Matthew 13.34). We know that Jesus probably did not teach these seven parables all at the one time.

Just imagine if your minister or priest preached seven sermons to you one Sunday morning .

But to help them in their missionary and teaching efforts among new converts the Early Church grouped these parables together.

Read that wonderful series of parables in Matthew 13. A common theme rings out in every verse:“The kingdom of God.”This had been Jesus’magnetic message to the people of Galilee.

This same theme became the missionary message of Jesus’first followers as they proclaimed the gospel story.

Surely there is an urgent lesson for to-day’s Christian church in its worship and witness.

These first Christians simply told people about Jesus, they repeated his own lessons and teaching, they demonstrated Christianity by simply being followers of the Lord.

They possessed a vitality of faith – let us grasp it.

They lit a spark of love and light in the lives of others – let us do the same.

Let us do what they did, and proclaim with our lives what Jesus declared.

“The Kingdom of God is here. Follow me”(Mark 1. 15-17).