"To you it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom"

"To you it has been given to know the secrets of the Kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have in abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand."

~Jesus Christ, Matthew 13

It's a rather cryptic passage, isn't it? Jesus' answer to His disciples' question "Why do you speak to them in parables" has always puzzled me. It does seem as if He's speaking in code.

A question rings in my mind: if the disciples already understand Jesus, and the people are altogether deaf and blind to the mysteries of the kingdom, why does it matter what Jesus says to them, whether He speaks in parables or not? Couldn't He just as well speak the plain and simple truth?

And yet, I have heard my creative writing instructors, including Robert Olen Butler repeatedly appeal to Jesus' use of parables as evidence of the effectiveness of storytelling.

I'm reminded of the time a professor of mine asserted the importance of fairy tales in developing childrens' moral imaginations: "Fairy tales cut a groove for truth." (I think it's an argument he borrowed from Tolkien's "Tree and Leaf.")

Not to put parables on the same plain as fairytales, but isn't Jesus using them similarly, "to cut a groove for truth"?

The stories Jesus tells, likening the Kingdom of Heaven to the Sower, the Weeds, the Mustard Seed, the Leaven, the Hidden Treasure, a Pearl, a Net, possess an immediate appeal because they link the abstract unknown with tangible reality.

Jesus asks His disciples if they understand Him. And they say yes. Whether they have understood the deeper significance of His parables or not, they have certainly made some sense of the stories, which deal with physical objects and familiar settings while engaging the imagination. And on some level, Jesus' larger audience has heard these stories, too. And it's the first faint etching in that groove for truth that may over time deepen into a trench.

It's a fundamental principle of effective teaching: to take the student from the known and to the unknown and seemingly unknowable by explaining the unknown in known familiar terms. When you begin to build a bridge, you use the materials on this side of the river.

• How can our use of storytelling reflect the divine purpose for story?
• By communicating the tangible, is there also a way to hint at "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"?

Image: Emile Claus (1849-1924), A Meeting on the Bridge, ArtRenewal.org