The Teaching by Parables.
We have, on our way to this point, while tracing the course of Christ's Schooling of the Apostles every now and then caught sight of the working of the principle, “to whomsoever hath, shall be given.”
This apopthegm is recorded to have been three times spoken; first, as has been just mentioned, when our Lord gave to His disciples His reasons for teaching in parables, and again as the moral at the end of the parables of the talents and of the pounds. We draw from it that our Lord was about to exercise selection and deal with different hearers in different ways. Up to this time He had put His lessons into terse sayings, like pearls strung on a string; a hearer could easily carry a single one away, he had only to listen and learn. For a multitude who came and went like the [pg 312] shifting atoms of a cloud, this was the most that could be done. But among those who now listened to the parables at Capernaum were apostles, disciples, and listeners variously disposed, and they received a lesson from which different hearers drew profit in very different degrees.
The time now began to draw in sight when the most momentous duties that ever fell to men, would be laid on the Twelve, and to them our Lord now turned with an interest which daily grew more intent. The Apostles were not mere recipients as the crowd had been. They were not mere passive hearers receiving and storing wise sayings. What they heard was meant to set their minds at work, and the good they got from it depended on themselves.
In the crowd on the Lake shore which stood listening to our Lord as He spoke from the boat, there were characters of all sorts disposed towards Jesus in every variety of way. There were many followers and some foes, while perhaps nearly half were neither the one nor the other, but merely the loiterers who throng every eastern town: these would go where others went, glad of anything which broke the sameness of the day. They had come to listen—after their way of listening, taking no heed how they heard—many a time before, and no good had come of it, though the teaching was so plain that he who ran might read; with all their opportunities they had got nothing, and so [pg 313] from them was taken “what they seemed to have,” that is to say, these very opportunities themselves. They now heard only what appeared to be the story of an every-day event, and they wondered what good it could do to them. Thus, this mode of teaching sorted out its auditory by a self-acting mechanism. It threw off the light, while it attracted earnest and enquiring minds who, never doubting of a deep meaning in all our Lord said, asked themselves and one another what this meaning could be.
The aphorism “that to him who had, more was given” was, as applied to material wealth, in some form or other probably familiar to the shrewd men of the time, just as the saying, that “nothing succeeds like success” is among ourselves now. But what was startling was, that this principle should be adopted by Christ and laid down as one of those upon which God's government is carried on. For this inequality in human conditions, and the tendency to rise faster the higher one gets and to sink faster the lower one falls, was a thing that was commonly regarded as a defect in the world's arrangement, due to some inherent perversity in matter or in man.
People's minds, in those days, were possessed by the notion that God must have intended to make things fair and equal for all, but that inequality had slipt into the world in the making, when God's eye was off it for a moment: soon, [pg 314] however, the Messiah would come and set this right among other things. Hence it startled our Lord's hearers to find this defect, as they deemed it, in the order of the world brought forward by Him, and not only not explained away as they would have expected, but set forth as among the Laws according to which the Spiritual Order of the world was carried on. From the prominence given to this statement in the narrative of the three earlier gospels we see what a deep impression it made.
Our Lord applies this aphorism, solely, to the advantages and opportunities which men should have for learning the ways of God. But the analogy between this principle and some observed principles of economic and organic science is very striking and interesting, to say no more; while in education the working of this rule is abundantly obvious in every school. That the world is ordered on a basis not of equality but of inequality, is a patent fact; and lately it has been shewn that it is of inequality that all progress comes. One little superiority, due to what seems an accidental variation, gives an advantage for gaining a greater superiority and so on. Uniformity, indeed, implies stagnation. If all men had just the same powers and minds and characters, would not such a world stagnate from its insupportable dulness and the want of stimulus for the faculties of men? If, at every step, it grew harder to get farther on, then [pg 315] no one could go very far. A bullet fired into a tree, which hardens from the bark to the core, is brought to a standstill very soon. Such a state of things would preclude exalted eminence; mediocrity would reign supreme and the onward march of mankind would be checked.
Our Lord, as a fact, asserts not only that inequalities widen, but also that they are purposely so widened. As the explorer advances, he is brought into more open ground and is better recompensed for his toil. Spiritual progress was to be brought about after the plan upon which all other human progress proceeds. It was to originate in individuals, who should push forward, seize upon posts in the foreground and hold them till the rest came up: it is not the way of Humanity to advance in line along the whole front. All progress comes of individual excellence and the world is so ordered as to favour the growth of one beginning to out-top the rest. It is an aid in this direction, that in education advance becomes commonly easier, and always more pleasurable as we proceed. Education moreover sorts out men. A hundred boys, near of an age, thrown together in a school seem at first nearly on a par; but an aristocracy develops itself wonderfully soon, both in the school and out of doors, and every half year the distinctions between boy and boy grow wider and become more strongly marked. However conscientiously [pg 316] the teachers may distribute their pains, the abler boy gets more attention, because he asks more intelligent questions and, seeing his interest in his work, the teacher's thoughts in spare moments revert to him. The same holds of spiritual life, for when a man attains a sense of communion with God he becomes conscious of an inward joy, which illuminates his life, and this helps him on. Nothing is more striking in the Acts than the “exceeding great joy” which with the Apostles was the habitual state.
A very material point as to the bearing of this principle is brought out in the two parables in which it occurs. What is spoken of as that which a man hath, is not what has been given him or what he has inherited, but only what he has acquired for himself. It is not so much the possession of the pounds or the talents which is the ground of reward, as the assiduity, energy and intelligence, by which they have been earned.