Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

That—Jesus wants to tell his listeners—is just how you must act in the face of the reign of God. It is offered to you, now, today. But it will only come to you if you engage your mind, your imagination, your passion, your whole existence. By far the best explanation of the parable is given in the last of the commentaries: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16:13).

That is: those who want to live in the reign of God can only have God as their master. Only God may they serve—with their whole will, all their strength, their whole lives. If they have other masters besides God they are divided, pulled here and there, have no drive. Then they do not really engage, they risk nothing, they do things only halfway. Then their lives lack all inner strength and all the brilliance that belongs to the reign of God.

The swindling manager did nothing halfway. He went all the way. He risked everything and invested everything. For that, and only for that, Jesus admires him and says: if only my disciples—on their own terms—would act as sensibly as this manager!

So Jesus in his parables not only depicts the world of the good and respectable but also that of the shady and the hypocritical, the swindlers and the tricksters. He does not depict a holy and intact world. Not even the world of children is polished up. In the parable of the “children playing” Jesus tells how a group of children cannot agree what to play. There are a bunch of spoilsports who are not happy with any suggestion. They don’t want to play wedding, but they don’t want to play funeral either. Nothing pleases them. There is a loud argument, and in the end no game is played at all. The spoilsports have succeeded. Those who wanted to play say to them: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn” (Matt 11:17). The following commentary is then given: they didn’t like John the Baptizer with his asceticism and preaching of repentance. Then came Jesus. He ate and drank with the sinners, but they didn’t want him either and called him “a glutton and a drunkard!” (Matt 11:18-19). The parable of the children at play shows how closely Jesus observed everything. He knew that children already practice the bigger quarrels of adults. And he must have had painful experience of the disunity in the people of God, the rivalries among the various groups in Israel and the strife over his own person.

The Parable of the Sower

Jesus observed his surroundings carefully and lovingly. In the so-called parable of the sower (Mark 4:3-9)³

the enemies of the seed are first depicted: the birds who peck up part of the seed; then the rocky ground bearing only a thin, quickly drying layer of soil; then the thistles that grow tall and smother the sprouting wheat so that it cannot develop grain. And yet: “other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold” (Mark 4:8).

This parable has created great difficulties for modern interpreters. These are connected in the first place with the notoriously incorrect translation of the parable’s ending. The Greek does not have “thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold,” but rather “a part [of the grain sown on good ground] yielded thirty, part sixty, part a hundred.”

A hundredfold yield? That seemed to many interpreters very far from reality, well outside any ordinary experience. Jesus was exaggerating, pushing the soil’s yield into the realm of fantasy because he wanted to say that the reign of God, with its abundance, surpasses all human experience.

But did Jesus really inflate his parables, or similitudes, in that way? His audience were altogether familiar with this subject. Most of them were small farmers, tenants, and day laborers in agriculture. If Jesus had told unrealistic stories about their own realm of activity he would have deprived his parables of any persuasive power. In fact, the parable of the sower achieves the pinnacle of its realism at the end, with the series thirty, sixty, one hundred, for this series incorporates the biological phenomenon of “stocking.” What is that?