Opening the Parables

By M. D. Hayden. Wipf & Stock, 2024. 242 pages. $47/hardcover; $32/paperback or eBook.

The reader gets a glimpse of what is to come in this engaging book when M. D. Hayden declares in the preface her qualifications for writing it: “(1) I am an educated, experienced, and curious reader; (2) I have always mistrusted interpretations made by religious authorities with a theological agenda; and (3) I am convinced Jesus’ parables contain a key to his intentional and consistent message.” Early on she shares the lovely passage from Erasmus’s Paraclesis exhorting people of every station to read and live the gospel message. This is her hope too: to encourage readers to join her in engaging with these stories, so that everyone can meet and make their own sense of Jesus’s teaching.

Hayden’s readings of the parables are deeply informed by The Five Gospels and other work of the Jesus Seminar, that long-running effort which sought to methodically evaluate all the sayings attributed to Jesus for evidence of authenticity. According to the Seminar, only a small proportion of the sayings in The Five Gospels can reliably be attributed to Jesus, the others being the result of the Jesus movement’s thinking and preaching about Jesus—and those sayings and stories often were shaped by the developing church to fit the presuppositions and needs of the community. In the ensuing centuries, on this theory, layer upon layer of interpretation (and sometimes polemic) accumulated, to such an extent that it became difficult for the individual seeker to look past all this teaching to hear Jesus in his own words.

Whether one agrees with the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions or not, reading and grappling with the parables is a way to cut through to the radical, unsettling, and exciting core that is authentically in Jesus’s voice. For Hayden, when scholarship has done its best to identify the reliable material in the gospels, we still are left with the challenge of understanding. When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom, of lordship as servanthood, of the pearl of great price, or the meaning of “neighbor,” how do we decipher what his words mean? Hayden sees love as the key to unlocking these riddles, and the boundless love of God, freely available to all who hunger for true freedom, as being the central message of Jesus.

Opening the Parables is divided into three books. In Book I, “The Search for Consistency,” Hayden brings to bear the fruits of her readings in biblical scholarship and exegesis about the parables, and it is especially in this section that her axioms or working theories about the gospel material are laid out. Hayden ends this section with a first exploration of how early Friends “opened” the parables in ways that moved past the traditional interpretations to rediscover the radical heart of Jesus’s teaching.

Book II, the longest section, is titled “The Parables in Real Life.” Here Hayden reads several parables (e.g., The Good Samaritan, How the Kingdom Grows, The Parable of the Talents, The Unmerciful Servant, Lost and Found). She adduces background information that helps readers “hear” the parable as they might have when Jesus was telling it, and then offers an illustration of a contemporary enactment of each parable’s meaning.

In Book III, “The Church, the Quakers, and the Parables,” Hayden describes the ways in which the early Quaker focus on the the core of the gospel—direct encounter with divine love—enabled them to look past the centuries of commentary and dogma to understand the authentic teachings of Christ and to use them for the renewal of society. A lengthy appendix contrasts traditional commentaries on selected parables with their use in Quaker writings. Hayden draws her Quaker witnesses from George Fox, Katharine Whitton, James Nayler, William Penn, and others.

Opening the Parables is a thought-provoking and richly developed book that could be of much interest and value in small group study at meeting; there is even a chapter of discussion prompts, advices, and queries to use as a guide. If readers take the time to read the parables deeply and examine and consider Hayden’s assumptions, methods, and readings, as she herself encourages, the result is likely to be an intellectual and spiritual enrichment.

---

Brian Drayton is a member of Weare (N.H.) Meeting, and blogs at Amorvincat.wordpress.com.