Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer addresses Christ’s use of parables in the Gospels and the contention around apparent biblical ambiguities as they relate to Protestants, Catholics, and non-Christians.
Transcription:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I was recently asked a really interesting question, why wasn’t Jesus clearer? And the person who asked me, I don’t actually know their faith background. So I can imagine two versions of this question. One would be the non-Christian or the non-believer of whatever Stripe who says, why doesn’t God manifest himself a little more? If he wants me to believe in him, why not give me a little more to go off of? The second person could be a Christian who says, look, as Christians we’re divided over all these important doctrinal issues. And it often seems like with a little bit of work, Jesus could have resolved these issues before they arose. So he didn’t give me this one. But the one I thought of immediately was in Matthew chapter 16, where there’s this famous passage that generally Catholics and Protestants read very differently.
Where Jesus says to St. Peter, you are Peter, a name meaning rock, and upon this Rocco build my church. It’d be great. I think everyone would agree. It’d be great to have another line where Jesus says, and by rock I mean Peter or Faith or myself or Peter’s confession or whatever else. Then you don’t have to spend all those time writing articles debating this issue and you can move forward. There’s all of those kind of things. And frequently as a Catholic I get accusations like, well, if the papacy is true, why doesn’t Jesus say Peter’s the first Pope and it’s going to be called the papacy and give us this really super explicit sort of thing, just like what an atheist says. Why doesn’t Jesus make the resurrection so clear that it’s unavoidable and undeniable? And this is a totally reasonable question and I think it has a biblical answer.
Number one, though, we should ask why does God reveal himself at all in the first place? And the Bible is pretty clear about this revelation of whatever form is directed towards us, believing, directed towards or having faith. So for instance, at the end of John’s gospel, he points out that there’s many other things Jesus did that he didn’t write down and he doesn’t think you could write them all down. There’s so many things you could potentially write down about Jesus. There’s no way he was going to do it all. So why did he choose the things that he did? Well, at the end of John 20, he tells us that he did many other things that are not written down, but these things are written down that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
So the evidence that he gives you, he’s not just randomly telling you his favorite stories about Jesus. He’s telling you things that he hopes will lead you to believe. So revelation is oriented towards faith. Now, maybe that seems obvious, but that is important because what then is faith? Well, faith, one way of describing it is reasonable trust. Hebrews 11 puts it like this, faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen. And then it points out that by it the men of old receive divine approval. So faith is really, this is what we want to have. We want to have the kind of faith that God is pleased with in which we’re assured of the things we’re hoping for in which we’re convicted of things we haven’t seen. So then what’s the relationship between faith and evidence and trust? On the one hand, we know we don’t get everything.
There’s still things we haven’t seen. This is why we need faith. On the other hand, we do get something. Remember John says, these things are written that you may believe we’re not invited to make an act of blind and irrational faith, but rather we’re given sufficient evidence to make a reasonable yes to God. Think about it this way. I trust my wife, I believe her. I am not worried if she goes out with friends that she’s secretly having an affair, anything like that. Now you can imagine on a spectrum here, at the one hand you have someone who makes a totally irrational declaration. I trust my wife. It might be irrational because your wife is openly cheating on you or she says she’s not married to you, she’s married to somebody else and she doesn’t even know why you keep calling her your wife. You’re just like a creepy guy who just won’t leave her alone.
Though that’d be irrational to say, I trust my wife when she’s like, no, this is, I don’t know, you get away from me creep. That would be irrational, right? At the other extreme, you could say, I trust my wife, not because I believe her, but because I’m tracking her every movement, reading her every text and email and everything else, all the evidence I could ever need, I couldn’t possibly doubt her. Now, neither of those is a healthy trust, right? It’s something in between that I have enough reason to be able to say, look, all the evidence is there. I’ve got good reason to believe my wife is who she says she is. She’s faithful all of these things. And so I trust that I don’t have any reason to doubt. I’ve got no reason for anxiety. At some point though, a desire for more and more and more evidence hurts that relationship of trust.
If I said, honey, I love you, I trust you, but I’d really like to read all your emails. I’d really like to check all your text messages that would do some actual damage to the relationship of trust. The constant demand for more evidence, although it’s understandable in one way actually does damage at a certain point because it is no longer an act of trust, right? If you say, I trust you, but I’m going to constantly verify everything you’re saying to find out if it’s true or not, the person can come back and reasonably say, what do you mean that you trust me? That doesn’t look like trust. Well, likewise, in our relationship with God, we are not called to blind and irrational faith on the basis of no evidence. But we’re also not called to constantly get all of the demands for evidentiary rigor that we might call for.
There’s something in between, and the precise contours might be hard to define just as they are in a relationship in terms of a human relationship. But somewhere in there we’ve been given enough evidence that we can in conscience say, yep, that makes sense. That checks out, I’m going to trust. So it’s not an irrational act, but it is still an act of trust, which means that there is something unseen. If I could see everything going on, if I could see all the mysteries of the universe, I would have no basis for trust. I would have no basis for faith because I wouldn’t need those things anymore. One of the great mysteries, one Corinthians St. Paul talks about this, that faith, hope and love are the three greatest gifts God gives us. The greatest of them is actually love. Because in heaven, when everything is seen and fulfilled, faith and hope go away.
There’s no longer any reason for faith, no longer any reason for hope because they’ve been fulfilled. But here below, when we don’t experience that, we still have good reason to hope and good reason for faith, which means we’ve been given enough to say yes, but haven’t been given so much that we’d have nothing to say yes to anymore. So given all that, I’d like to suggest that more and more proof isn’t what’s needed. And in fact, we’re told that pretty explicitly there’s a parable that Jesus gives called Lazarus in the rich man or sometimes Lazarus in divas, which is just a way of describing the rich man in Greek. And in there the rich man is in suffering. He’s seemingly in hell and he’s praying to Abraham in heaven and he’s begging him, father Abraham, to send Lazarus to my father’s house. I have five brothers so that he may warn them, let’s say also come into the place of torment. And Abraham says, no. He says they have Moses in the prophets. Let them hear them, right? So they’ve been given enough evidence, they’ve got all of these prophets. And if they’re going to ignore that, why should they be given a guy come back from the dead as a messenger just to go let them know, Hey, all this stuff, Moses in the prophets said, you should have listened to it.
And the rich man says, no, father Abraham. But if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. And Abraham says, no. If they do not hear Moses in the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead. And of course with the vision of the resurrection, we can say that’s exactly what happens. Jesus rises from the dead, gives a sufficient reason to believe that he rose from the dead. And plenty of people still don’t believe. The people who before the resurrection might’ve thought, well, I would believe in this Messiah, Jesus if he rose from the dead, well then he did and they didn’t. That’s the idea that we might think we would just believe with one more piece of evidence. And the biblical evidence is no, that’s probably not true. We can think about this in a few other ways. So because I mentioned some of the intra Christian disputes, let’s talk about a couple of those. There’s this passage in John six where Jesus says, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man
And drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I’ll raise him up at the last day and it’d be great if in the next verse, Jesus explained whether he meant this as a metaphor or not, then right? We would all believe. Well, the thing is he does say in the very next verse, for my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. In other words, he gives us that evidence. He’s not just speaking metaphorically, he’s really stressing that he means what he’s saying in a non metaphorical sort of way. Does that move the dial? It doesn’t seem to right. Or there’s this big debate about baptism. Do you need baptism to be saved or do you just need faith alone? And in Mark 16, he says, he who believes will be saved and who does not believe will be condemned.
It’d be great if he said he who believes and is baptized that would really clarify things, right? But here’s the thing. He does say that and people still say, yeah, you don’t actually need to be baptized even though he says you need two things, belief and baptism. They say, no, no, you actually need one. If you just have belief, then you’ll be saved and then you’ll go get baptized. Was there something clearer he could have said? Could he have said something like baptism which corresponds to Noah’s Ark now saves you because that’s what St. Peter says in one Peter 3 21. The idea is it’s not in many of these cases a simple lack of clear evidence that clear evidence is there and we still fight about it. Why is that? Well, spiritually, we can say in Galatians five that these are works of the flesh.
Things like enmity and strife and dissension and party spirit. I might even add jealousy, anger, selfishness, and envy. The reason we fight with each other is often not evidentiary. It’s not that we’re these cool, rational, logical creatures who are deeply in love with God and are humble and are only pursuing the truth and we’re just reading the data slightly differently. So often what happens is our sinfulness, our closed-mindedness, our envy and our strife and our jealousy, our dissension, our party spirit, our desire to be right and have somebody else be wrong, that creeps in and that is of the devil. It’s a work of the flesh. And those who do such things won’t inherit the kingdom of God. St. Paul’s quite clear about this. Now, he’s talking pretty clearly to Christians. He’s not worried about party spirit among pagans. Oh no, this pagan religion went into different denominations.
That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s warning us that we can have this spiritual impulse and if we give into it, it’s not of God. So I would suggest both to the non-believer that God has given you enough evidence to say yes, and to the Christian, God has given you enough evidence to know what to do. Now, I would even suggest this is why Jesus spoke in parables and that he’s pretty clear about this. In Matthew chapter 13, the disciples ask him, why do you speak in parables? Why do you speak to the crowd in parables? And he says to them, to you has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. Now that is a really shocking sort of answer. What does he mean by this? That the nature of parables are that those who have this disposition of trust and openness to God will see in the parable something rich and beautiful.
But if you’re cynical and skeptical and not trusting, the parable just looks like a silly story. The parable is designed in such a way that if you’re open to it, it’s incredible and rich and profound. And if you’re not, you’ll get nothing out of it. And if you’ve experienced this, if you’ve gone from being a nonbeliever to a believer, you may know this viscerally personally, but this is how parables work where you say, oh my goodness, I get something more and more out of the parable of the two sons or any number of these parables or on the outside looking in, you’re like, I don’t get the big deal about saying the kingdom of heaven’s like a net with good and bad fish. That seems like just a silly image of fishermen from the first century. Well, this is exactly what Jesus tells us. He says, seeing the crowds do not see hearing.
They do not hear nor do they understand. And then he quotes to this effect, Isaiah one, when God sends Isaiah out to a people he knows aren’t going to listen. So if that was all that was said in Matthew 13 about the role of parables, it might sound like the point of parables is so that people just don’t understand that it is intentionally confusing. But that’s not quite right. At the end of Matthew 13, Matthew tells us that the reason Jesus spoke in parables is in fulfillment of Psalm 78, verse two, I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world. So parables are a real form of revelation and one that we’d been promised the Messiah would use, but they are set up in such a way that they really only make sense through the eyes and ears of faith.
And if you don’t have that, they can seem ridiculous and that that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Because the point of revelation is to build up faith, not to eliminate it by giving you all the evidence you would possibly need. I’ve heard atheist say, why doesn’t Jesus give us something like e equals mc squared would be this undeniable proof of his divinity. He’s got some mathematical knowledge we couldn’t have figured out. Now, I’m not actually convinced that would’ve worked. No one comes away thinking Einstein is God because he figured out he equals mc squared. So I’m not sure if Jesus announcing it would’ve revolutionized our ability to recognize him as God, but if it did, it wouldn’t be because of faith. It would just be because of reason that there would be no actual place for faith in that. I hope that makes sense.
So this is why Jesus speaks in parables. We have what we need already. This is particularly true for us as Christians. I’ve been talking about non-believers coming to belief. But I want to focus here on believers in general because as I mentioned, we have all these things that we fight about. What do we do with that? And so in response to the person who asked me this question, the place I turned was John 17, and the reason I turned there is that Jesus prays not only for those present with him, the last supper, the 12, he also prays for those who believe in him through their word. In other words, this is one of the very small handful of places in which we are directly being prayed for in the Bible by Jesus. I’m not aware of a second one. And so Jesus, he’s God.
He knows everything that’s going to happen. He knows all of the things we’re going to divide about. He knows about the great schism that you’re going to have the Catholic church in the West and you’re going to have Eastern orthodoxy with Russian orthodoxy and Byzantine Orthodoxy. And then you’re going to have Oriental Orthodoxy and you’re going to have all of these different divisions within Christianity. And then you’re going to have the Protestant Reformation and you’re going to have the break off of Lutherans and reformed Calvinists Presbyterians. You’re going to have Anglicans, you’re going to have Methodists, Mennonites, Quakers, every denomination under the son. He knows all of that. He also knows all of the arrogance in scandals and corruption in the Catholic church that make people say these things are necessary. These are justified. We have to go into schism here because things are so bad.
He knows all of that. And what does he pray? He prays that we will all be one, even as the Father is in him and he’s in the Father that we also may be in the Father and Son. So the world may believe that the Father has sent the son that is our massive evangelization is so much clearer if we are not constantly fighting with one another. And so he prays again that we’ll be perfectly one that the world can know that the Father sent him and has loved him and has loved us even as he has loved Jesus. So I would suggest there that we have everything we need. If you’re a Christian and you’re wanting to know, should I be Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, I would lay out this simple test if we’re to be perfectly one. This includes amongst other things, certainly bigger than this, but it includes amongst other things, the fact that there should be one church, not a bunch of churches.
Will we find that one church in your local Bible believing denomination? Will we find that one church in your offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of the reformation? Will we find that one church in your national version of Orthodoxy, Greek or Serbian or Russian or whatever, or will we find that one church in the universal Catholic church where that unity was preserved for centuries? I would suggest that the only way we can live out what Jesus is calling to is by being Catholics, by being in one holy Catholic church, united as a single denominational, if you want to call it that church throughout the world, founded by Jesus Christ, not founded by your local guy, not based on your personal reading of scripture. That’s party spirit. That’s the kind of stuff we’re supposed to avoid, but rather being part of the thing Jesus set up and created this is he’s given us all the tools we need to know this is what he wants us to do. It isn’t like he would’ve prayed something different if he’d known how corrupt things were going to get in the church. It’s not like he would do something different if he knew how brilliant your preferred reformer was. He knew all of that stuff and this is what he prayed for. So I don’t think Jesus needed to be any clearer. I think he’s perfectly clear about this, and I think the problem might be on us that we don’t want to say yes to that for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.