How to teach the unknown

Jesus was very serious about telling stories. In Matt. 13:35 we learn that “he always spoke in parables,” because that was the best way to explain “things unknown since the foundation of the world.” It occurs to me that this is an extraordinary claim. Remember, it was early in his ministry and he was simply a Galilean peasant who only recently had left the carpenter’s bench and gone out to the people to declare that the kingdom of God had come. So, as he went from village to village he taught “things unknown from the very beginning.” The people who stopped to listen were bound to ask, “Who did you say he is?” and “How does he teach things that have never been known before?” And the answer, at least as to how he did it, was to use the parable, a short allegorical story, undoubtedly the most effective method to teach a truth, religious principle, or moral lesson.
       How would we have done it? And what would we want people to know about that world of undiscovered reality? What would you say to your class?  I’m stretching the point of course, but it is important to understand that ultimately essential truth doesn’t come through the procedures effective for understanding things like quantum physics and molecular biology. The yet to be realized insights of reality that Jesus taught were not so much about some thing as they were existential involvement with that thing. For instance, we know the love of God, not as something that has been described to us and that we can visualize as though it were part of our world, but as an experience of being swept up into the very arms of the eternal God whose active compassion for us has no bounds. That is what it means to learn God’s love. It isn’t out there to be analyzed, but in here to be experienced 
       And did Jesus teach these ultimate truths by using the more erudite professors of the Harvards and Yales of the day. No, he told stories. In the current chapter of Jesus, In His Own Words (“My Parables,” pp. 91-17) we have a group of rather simple parables: one is about the sower, another about a seed that grows whether we watch it or not, and others about weeds that come up at night and kill the crop, a tiny little mustard seed that becomes the largest bush in the garden, fermented dough of all things, hidden treasure, and finally a great big net used to catch fish. These are the stories, the allegories, used by Jesus to teach what are the most important truths that man will ever know: ”truths that will change human nature, redirected western culture, and most importantly, offer eternal life to those who believe.” The parable; sort of a simple little thing , , , but, WOW.