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Singular
In the western world, a person’s first introduction to parabolic teaching is through children’s stories. In particular, Aesop’s Fables are introduced when a student is around seven years old. There is a great advantage to this introduction – it emphasizes that story contains one big idea. For example, the dog who drops his bone to grab another bone [which turns out to be a mere reflection in the water] displays the perils of greed. No one feels the need to develop “hidden meaning” based on the deep water, the bridge, or the bone. Such thinking is rightly seen as absurd.
In this sense, the learner is prepared to sit as Jesus’ feet and learn from His object lessons expressed parabolically. They likewise have one point and are warped when analogies are “discovered” in every item.
But not simplistic
However, there is a grave weakness in the typical introduction to parabolic thinking through children’s stories. It can leave the learner with the mistaken idea that parables are simplistic, even childish. This assumption tragically removes the person from a humble position of learning, banishing him or her to the hubristic outer darkness reserved for the supposedly wise who are “above” such things. J.R.R. Tolkien understood this danger, and in 1939 gave a lecture in which he warned against missing the depth of a story merely because it seems singular or even simple. He said:
If left altogether in the nursery, [the story will] become gravely impaired. So would a beautiful table, a good picture, or a useful machine (such as a microscope), be defaced or broken, if it were left long unregarded in a schoolroom. Fairy-stories banished in this way, cut off from a full adult art, would in the end be ruined; indeed in so far as they have been so banished, they have been ruined. – Tolkien “On Faerie Stories”
Parables are, at least in Tolkien’s definition, a type of fairy story. Their pointed meaning is singular and while they are accessible by all, only a fool relegates them to the nursery.
God bless,
Wayne