Parables Are Not Illustrations

What this means for the modern reader is that the question to bring to a parable of Jesus is not what is the moral? but what was being shifted in the listener? The two questions can sometimes have overlapping answers. They are not the same question. The first one closes the parable. The second one keeps it open. Open is the parable's natural state.

II. The road to Jericho

The Good Samaritan is the story most readers know, and it is the story Crossan returns to most often, because the gap between what the story says and what it has been taught to say is so wide.

In Luke, the parable arrives inside a frame. A lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back on him; the lawyer answers correctly — love God, love neighbor — and then asks, by way of self-justification: and who is my neighbor? Jesus answers with the parable. After the parable he asks the lawyer which of the three travelers was a neighbor to the man in the ditch. The lawyer says, "the one who showed him mercy." Jesus tells him to go and do likewise (Luke 10:25–37).

The frame is Luke's. The parable inside it, on Crossan's reading, is older.[^5] Luke has used a separate dialogue about the great commandment — the dialogue Mark places elsewhere, in chapter 12 — as a setting for the parable, and in doing so has converted what Crossan reads as a challenge parable into an example parable. Strip the frame and look only at what happens in Luke 10:30–35:

A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.[^6]

To a first-century Galilean or Judean audience, this story is doing something an English-speaking modern reader has been trained, by long use of the phrase good Samaritan, not to register. A priest passes by. A Levite passes by. The third character, by every convention of folkloric storytelling — Crossan invokes the work of folklorist Axel Olrik on the "law of three characters" and the "law of contrast"[^7] — should be a Jewish layman, a third member of the same religious-ethnic community as the first two, the one who succeeds where his higher-status compatriots failed. That would be an example parable. Even ordinary Jews can do what priests and Levites failed to do. It would have been a competent story. Nobody would have argued with it. Nobody, after one hearing, would have been disturbed.

What Jesus does instead is make the third character a Samaritan. To grasp the force of this move requires some unlearning. The phrase good Samaritan, in modern English, is a redundancy: a Samaritan is, in our usage, by definition someone who helps. In first-century Jewish usage the phrase would have been, if not quite a contradiction in terms, then very close to one — like good tax collector, like honest mercenary, like a phrase whose two halves are not supposed to fit. Samaritans and Jews shared a partial ancestry and a long, hardened ethnic-religious estrangement; Luke 9 records that, when Jesus tried to enter a Samaritan village shortly before this episode, the village refused him because his face was set toward Jerusalem. The Samaritan is not, in the audience's ear, a neutral outsider. He is the audience's bad guy.

Crossan's argument, against the long allegorical tradition that read the Samaritan as a figure of Christ and the road to Jericho as a figure of the soul's exile (Augustine's elaborate version of which Crossan quotes in detail and treats as "brilliantly clever, but also brilliantly — what do I say — inadequate or incomplete or incorrect?"[^8]), is twofold. First, that Jesus could have written an example parable about helping the wounded, and would not have needed the Samaritan to do so:

Had Jesus intended an example parable about helping somebody in distress, he could easily have done so by telling his story with unspecified characters, such as: "A man was going down,…a first traveler,…a second traveler,…a third traveler." Had he wanted to insist that such help applied even to enemies in distress, he could have done it: "A Samaritan was going down,…a first traveler,…a second traveler,…a third traveler." Those would have been classic example parables, but as soon as Jesus specified the reputable clergy as nonhelpers and the disreputable Samaritan as helper, we have — as he intended — a classic challenge parable.[^9]

Second, that the only plausible reason to deploy the specific reversal — good characters fail, bad character succeeds — is that the reversal is the parable's actual work. The story is not about helping the wounded. The story is about the audience's category for who is, in advance and without examination, on the side of the good. The story takes that category and breaks it. The break is the encounter.

If the story is read as challenge rather than example, the question to leave the room with is not am I being a good Samaritan? It is something more difficult: who, in my own world, is the Samaritan I have not yet noticed has been doing the work of compassion my own people are failing at? The question generalizes. Every audience supplies the contemporary content. A first-century Judean audience supplies the historical Samaritan. A first-century Christian audience under Roman persecution might have supplied a sympathetic pagan neighbor. A twentieth-century American audience supplies — well, what it supplies depends on the audience, and that variability is not a defect of the parable. It is the parable's design.

The crucial thing is that the question cannot be permanently resolved. Good Samaritan as a closed category — as an honorific the modern reader applies, with a small interior glow, to the ambulance driver and the bystander who calls 911 — has reabsorbed the parable into the moral economy the parable was designed to disturb. The category has become safe. The parable has been re-domesticated. Crossan's reading is an attempt, eighteen centuries late, to let the parable do its original work: to make the listener notice a person they had been counting on not having to notice.

Two notes belong here, in fairness. First: the example reading is not a Lukan invention so much as a Lukan reception. Luke had reasons for framing the parable as he did, and within his theological project the framing is coherent. The stripped reading Crossan recommends is not an attack on Luke; it is a reconstruction of an earlier stratum that the gospel form preserved even while reframing it. Second: the historical-Jesus enterprise has its critics, some of whom would resist the entire move of separating an "original" Jesus from the gospel testimony that brings him to us. I will name those critics in the closing section. The challenge-parable reading does not depend, in its essentials, on the most contested aspects of historical-Jesus reconstruction. It depends on attention to the social context the story presupposes — and that context can be reconstructed with a confidence that does not require subscription to any particular larger Jesus-portrait.

III. The two sons, and the brother who is missing

The Prodigal Son is the parable that, in Western culture, has done the most work as a picture of forgiveness. Luke 15 places it as the third of three "lost-and-found" parables — the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son — each of which ends in a celebration. Within Luke's frame, the Pharisees and scribes have grumbled that Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners; the parables are Jesus's defense of the meal practice. The younger son who returns is, in Luke's allegorical reception of the story, the tax collector and sinner welcomed home; the elder son who refuses to enter the feast is the Pharisee who cannot accept the inclusion. Read this way, the parable is example-and-allegory at once: example because the father's welcome is what we should imitate, allegory because each character points to a referent in the dispute Luke is staging.

Crossan's question — which he develops by way of an oblique route, through a 1907 retelling of the parable by André Gide — is whether Jesus's own version was that simple. Gide's "The Return of the Prodigal Son" expands Luke's two sons into three. The oldest son never leaves home. The middle son, Luke's prodigal, leaves but returns. The youngest son, invented by Gide, is the climax of the retelling: he is preparing, at the moment of the prodigal's homecoming feast, to leave in his own turn — but to leave with no inheritance, no plan to return, and the prodigal's blessing. I am what you were when you left, the youngest tells the prodigal. I have no share in the inheritance. I leave with nothing. The prodigal, who has himself just returned from a life he no longer endorses, sends his younger brother out the door anyway, with a single warning: "be careful on the steps."[^10]

Crossan reads Gide's version as a counterparable — a parable that challenges another parable. Luke's parable is about returning. Gide's is about leaving, and not returning, and being right to do so. Crossan does not propose that Gide has somehow recovered the historical Jesus's intention; what Crossan does propose is that Gide, from twenty centuries away and with his own search for honesty driving him, has demonstrated something about how the parable form works. The same story that Luke received as an example of homecoming can be retold to challenge homecoming itself — and can do so without "proposing counterabsolutes," without saying the leaving is right and the returning is wrong, without resolving the question. The story now is about whether home, as the audience has understood home, is the only place a life can rightly end.

What this opens up, when we go back to Luke 15:11–32, is a different question than the one the example reading invites. The example reading invites: am I the prodigal who needs to return? Or, if we take the elder brother seriously: am I the elder, refusing the celebration, hardened against the unworthy welcome? These are real questions and they have produced real spiritual work for many readers. They are not the questions Crossan thinks the parable's form is designed to make unavoidable.

The form, on his reading, is doing something stranger. The story ends without telling us what the elder son does. The father has gone out to plead with him. The elder son has spoken his complaint — for all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends (Luke 15:29) — and the father has answered with what is either a magnificent gesture of inclusion or a bland reassurance, depending on the reading: you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found (Luke 15:31–32). And then the parable simply stops. We do not learn whether the elder son enters the feast or whether he turns and walks away into his own kind of self-imposed exile, this one within the family compound rather than far from it.

Crossan's point is that the unresolved ending is the parable. The audience is the elder brother. The audience must decide. The audience cannot get out of the parable by identifying with the prodigal, because the prodigal has already done his return; his question is closed. The audience also cannot get out by identifying with the father, because the father has already extended his hand; his question is closed too. The only character whose question is still open at the moment the parable ends is the elder. The audience, accordingly, is left holding the elder's choice — and the parable does not tell the audience what choosing rightly would even look like. What does it mean to be the one who stayed and is now being asked to celebrate the return of the one who left? If you give a full answer to that question, the parable has stopped being a parable and become an example. If you cannot give a full answer to that question, you are still inside the parable, and you will be inside it for a while. That is the work the form is doing.

The Lukan frame, with its allegorical grafting of younger-as-tax-collector and elder-as-Pharisee, does not destroy this work; it supplies a particular interpretive overlay that, for Luke's purposes, was useful. The work survives the overlay. It survives because the parable's last sentence is not a verdict; it is the father's plea, with the elder's response left out. Two thousand years later, the unresolved ending still functions. A reader who has been the elder brother in some specific situation in their own life — who has watched a celebration thrown for someone whose absence had been a load they themselves carried — will recognize, when the parable lands, that it has not told them what to do. It has only made them notice that the choice is theirs.

IV. The eleventh hour

The parable in Matthew 20:1–16 is shorter than the other two, sharper, and the one most likely, in modern reception, to leave the reader subtly uncomfortable in a way the reader cannot quite name.

A landowner goes out at dawn and hires day laborers for his vineyard, agreeing on the standard daily wage — a denarius. He goes out at the third hour (around nine in the morning) and finds others standing idle in the marketplace; he sends them too, promising "whatever is right." He does the same at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth (three in the afternoon). At the eleventh hour (about an hour before sunset) he goes out one more time, finds others still standing around, and asks them, why are you standing here idle all day? They answer: because no one has hired us. He sends them too.

When evening comes, the landowner orders his foreman to pay the workers their wages, "beginning with the last and going to the first." The eleventh-hour workers receive a denarius each. The first-hour workers, watching this, expect more — but each of them also receives a denarius. They grumble. The landowner answers one of them: Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you, and go your way; it is my will to give to this last, even as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Or is your eye evil, because I am good? Matthew closes: So the last will be first, and the first last.[^11]

The dominant Christian reading, sustained from Augustine to the modern lectionary cycle, treats this as a parable of grace — the kingdom of God operates by an arithmetic of generosity that exceeds, and ought to embarrass, the audience's instincts for proportional reward. Latecomers to faith receive the same eternal life as those who labored from the beginning. Murmuring against the householder's generosity is the spiritual error of the elder brother in Luke 15, generalized.

This is a coherent reading and Crossan does not, in the strict sense, refute it. What he does is ask whether it is the only thing the story is doing — and in particular whether the first-century Galilean day laborer in the original audience, hearing the story in the context of an actual vineyard economy where being unhired at the eleventh hour was not a moral failing but a structural reality, would have heard it the way later Christian moralists would teach their congregations to hear it.

Crossan's close reading turns on a small detail most modern readers overlook. The frame of "standing idle" appears three times: at the third hour (one mention), and at the eleventh hour (two mentions: standing around and standing here idle all day). The landowner's question at the eleventh hour — why are you standing here idle all day? — is, Crossan observes, "outrageously provocative." It is the landlord blaming the unhired laborer for being unhired. The laborer's reply — because no one has hired us — answers the accusation as plainly as the structure of an oral parable will allow.

If the story is about the master's generosity, those accusatory words about "idleness" are not actually necessary. But they are vitally necessary to provoke the audience — or at least day laborers in it — to protest against them and, thereby, raise the issue of — in my words — the distinction between personal and individual justice or injustice (the master) and structural and systemic injustice (the economy).[^12]

The audience that contained day laborers — and in a Galilean village in the 20s of the first century, most of the audience contained day laborers — would have heard the eleventh-hour exchange not as a touching demonstration of patience rewarded but as a sharply familiar piece of social comedy: the kind of question well-fed people ask underemployed people about why they are not, at this hour, gainfully busy. The answer is, has always been, and remains: because no one has hired us. The hiring is not the laborer's to do. The structure of the labor market has produced the idle hours, and then the structure of polite economic conversation produces the question that blames the laborer for them.

Crossan's reading does not deny that the householder, at the end of the day, behaves with surprising generosity. It asks whether the parable is only about the householder, or whether the parable is also about the system within which the householder is the only available source of relief — and within which the laborer's only options are to wait standing in the marketplace, to take what is offered, and to accept being asked, at the end of a long day of nothing, why he is standing around.

If Crossan is right that this is a challenge parable — and the textual cues, on his reading, point that way — then the parable's question to the audience is not can you celebrate the householder's grace? (which would be an example-parable question), but can you see, behind the householder's grace, the system whose ordinary operation makes that grace necessary? The two questions are not opposed. They are layered. The example reading lives on the surface; the challenge reading lives one layer down. A parable that is doing both can survive intact in an empire that has only the patience to read the surface — and can, when conditions change, recover its depth.

Crossan is alert to what happens when an audience refuses the challenge:

If everyone talked only about the owner and not the system, Jesus's challenge would have failed. Move on Jesus, try it again somewhere else, or remove it from your repertoire forever.[^13]

The parable was not, on this reading, a guaranteed success. It was a test of the audience's capacity to think about a structural problem when the surface of the story offered them an emotionally satisfying alternative — the householder's open hand, which would be enough for most listeners most of the time. That such alternative was enough, that most listeners most of the time would prefer the surface reading and stop there, was a fact Jesus presumably knew. He kept telling the parables anyway. The parables remained available, in the text, for whatever listener in whatever century would eventually be ready to take them up at the level they were originally pitched.

V. Why this kind of story

The natural question, at the end of close readings like the three above, is why. Why did Jesus, on the historical-Jesus reconstruction Crossan and others propose, tell stories of this kind — challenge parables rather than example parables, encounters rather than illustrations, problems-to-keep-thinking-about rather than morals-to-take-home?

Crossan's answer, in the chapter of The Power of Parable that closes his treatment of Jesus's own parables, is that the form fits the message. The message — the central message attributed to Jesus across the synoptic gospels and reconstructed by historical scholarship — was the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God, on Crossan's reading, was not something Jesus described as future and inevitable, an intervention God was about to perform on a world still essentially the world of Tiberius and Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate. The kingdom of God was something Jesus described as already present, requiring human collaboration to be made visible — what Crossan calls a "collaborative eschaton":

The Great Divine Cleanup will not happen without God, but neither will it happen without us. It is about a divine-and-human collaboration and not about a divine-only intervention. John is the tradition's paradigm, and this is his message: "The kingdom's train is entering the station. Be on it or be under it." Jesus is the tradition's paradigm shift, and this is his countermessage: "You yourselves are the kingdom's train. God is the tracks. And what good are tracks without train or train without tracks?"[^14]

If the message is collaboration, the medium has to be collaboration too. A teacher who told his students the kingdom is built by human participation could not consistently teach by the method of dictating verdicts the students were expected to absorb. A teacher who proclaimed a kingdom of God whose mode was non-violent — and Crossan's larger argument about Jesus's life and execution rests heavily on the historical evidence that Jesus's resistance to Roman imperial order was non-violent[^15] — could not consistently use a violent rhetorical mode, the mode of attack-by-words, to inculcate it. The parables had to do their work by something gentler than command. They had to do it by invitation. They had to do it by what Crossan calls participatory pedagogy.

It is precisely in such audience interaction that orally delivered challenges attempt to raise the consciousness of listeners by luring and leading them into thinking for themselves. In other words, challenge parables are a participatory pedagogy, a collaborative education. (In Latin docere means "to teach" and ducare means "to lead." Our word "e-ducation" means "to lead thought out" rather than "to push thought in.")[^16]

There is something both philosophically satisfying and historically plausible about this fit. Philosophically, because it explains why the parable form, which is in many ways an inefficient way to convey moral content, kept being chosen by a teacher who had access to plainer rhetorical instruments and used them when he wanted to (the prophetic woes of Matthew 23, the imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount, the direct teaching about love of enemy). Historically, because it accounts for the textual fact that the parables, alone among the strata of Jesus material, are difficult to retrieve as straightforward propositional teaching even centuries after they have been written down. They keep their resistance. They do not collapse into their morals, even when the moral has been printed in red letters above them. There is always something residual.

What the early church did with this — and Crossan does not flinch from naming the trajectory — was a partial defanging. The gospel writers, working in the interpretive idioms of their own communities and in some cases under the pressure of internal disputes (Luke against the Pharisees, Matthew defending the church's authority structure, Mark insisting on a misunderstood Jesus whose meaning is hidden until after the resurrection), sometimes received challenge parables and re-presented them as example parables or even as riddle-allegories. They did not delete the parables; they framed them. The frames are, in some cases, removable. Crossan's method for removing them — careful attention to social context, to oral folkloric form, to internal narrative cues that resist the framed reading — is what produces the recoverable encounter the parables originally were.

The encounter, on this account, was the gospel. Or rather: the encounter was the form of the gospel that the parable was specifically designed to deliver. There were other forms — the meal practice of eating with sinners, the healing actions, the sayings, the lived community — and Crossan does not claim the parables exhaust Jesus's teaching. He claims they are the place where the medium is the message with the most precision. A teacher who taught a kingdom of collaboration through a method of collaboration. A teacher who taught a non-violent God through a non-violent rhetorical instrument. A teacher who taught that the kingdom is already present through stories that required the listener to begin enacting it in the act of receiving them.

VI. Where the field disagrees

It would be unfaithful to Crossan, and unfaithful to the reader who deserves to know the state of the conversation, to leave the impression that the reading offered above is uncontroversial. It is not. The historical-Jesus enterprise to which Crossan has been a central contributor has been the object of serious and sustained criticism, and the criticisms come from several directions at once.

The most prominent in the academic guild is N. T. Wright, whose multi-volume Christian Origins and the Question of God — and especially Jesus and the Victory of God (1996) — argues for a Jesus much more deeply embedded in Jewish apocalyptic expectation than Crossan allows, a Jesus whose kingdom-of-God language is in continuity with first-century Jewish hopes for the actual restoration of Israel under God's anointed king. On this reading, the parables are not principally instruments of consciousness-raising; they are announcements that the climactic act of God in history is happening now, in and around Jesus, and that the listener is being invited to recognize and align with that act. Wright is a careful close-reader of the parables in his own right, and his readings often agree with Crossan on local exegetical details while disagreeing strongly about the larger frame.

Other criticisms are methodological. The Jesus Seminar, with which Crossan was associated, conducted its work by voted color-coding the authenticity of individual sayings — a procedure many scholars regarded as theatrically reductive. Crossan's own method has been criticized by Luke Timothy Johnson, in The Real Jesus (1996), for what Johnson reads as an excessive confidence in the recoverability of strata behind the gospel texts. Dale Allison, in Constructing Jesus (2010) and elsewhere, presses a different methodological worry: that the historical-Jesus quest tends to produce Jesuses that resemble their reconstructors, and that the criteria of authenticity used to discriminate "authentic" from "inauthentic" material are not as objective as the practitioners typically present them as being.

There is also a deeper criticism, articulated most forcefully by Richard Hays in The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) and elsewhere, that the entire procedure of separating an "original" Jesus from the gospel testimony is theologically misconceived — that the church's reception of Jesus is the only Jesus we have, and that the gospel writers' framing of the parables is not a corruption of an underlying original but a faithful rendering of what the parables meant within the community that preserved them. On this reading, Luke's example-parable framing of the Good Samaritan is not a softening; it is an authoritative interpretation, and the modern scholar's attempt to recover a different "original" reading is an act of interpretive overreach.

These criticisms are real, and the reader should know about them. They do not, in this writer's judgment, disable the central claim Crossan makes about the parable form. Even if one accepts Wright's larger reconstruction of the Jewish-apocalyptic Jesus, the close-reading method Crossan brings to the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Workers in the Vineyard remains useful — and often produces, on the small scale of local interpretation, readings even Wright would acknowledge as illuminating. Even if one accepts Hays's theological worry about the separability of an "original" Jesus from the church's Jesus, the literary distinction between an example parable and a challenge parable can be applied to the canonical text as it stands, without any historical-reconstruction commitment. And even if one accepts Johnson's or Allison's methodological skepticism about strong claims of recoverability, one can still, with appropriate humility, find that this story shifted this audience this way is a more intellectually honest reading than this story illustrated this moral.

Crossan is not the last word. He is not the only word. He is, on the specific question of what a parable of Jesus is, a sufficiently sharp word that any later reader has to deal with him.

VII. What is left to do with them

The three parables remain. They were always going to remain. They will outlast Crossan's reading of them, as they have outlasted Augustine's and Luther's and the pulpit homiletics of every century in between. The readings layer; the stories survive the readings.

What Crossan offers — and what this piece has tried to surface — is a reading method that recovers something of the parables' original capacity to do something to the listener. Not to inform the listener of a moral the listener could have arrived at on their own. Not to confirm the listener in a piety the listener already had. To unsettle the listener gently, with a small fiction of a hundred or four hundred words, in a place where the listener had not realized they had a settlement that could be unsettled.

A reader who comes to the Good Samaritan after reading Crossan will not, the next time they hear the parable in church or read it in a book, simply think be like the Samaritan. They will think, instead, about who in their own life and their own community plays the role the Samaritan plays — the unexpected helper from the despised side of the line — and they will think about what the noticing of that person costs the noticer, and what the noticing might require of them. They might also think about the priest and the Levite, and about the structural reasons (ritual purity, professional caution, fear of being late for an obligation) that those characters had for not stopping. The structural reasons were not foolish. Many modern readers would, in the priest's place, behave as the priest did. That is the parable's point. The Samaritan disrupts the structural reasoning by being someone the listener did not have a category to expect compassion from — and, in supplying it anyway, makes the listener's category visible.

A reader who comes to the Prodigal after reading Crossan will not simply think welcome the lost home. They will think about the elder brother, and about the choice the parable refuses to make for them, and about the situations in their own life in which they have stood, like the elder, outside a celebration that someone else's return has occasioned, with the older grievance still in their hand and no clear instruction about what to do with it. They will sit with the unfinished ending, which is the parable's actual gift.

A reader who comes to the Workers in the Vineyard after reading Crossan will not simply think grace is generous. They will think about the eleventh-hour worker's reply — because no one has hired us — and about every small contemporary version of the householder's accusatory question, and about the structures of an economy in which idle laborers stand all day in marketplaces because the hiring decisions are not theirs to make. The householder's generosity is real, in the parable as in the world. The structure within which it operates is also real, in the parable as in the world. The parable does not collapse the two into one another. It holds them in a single small story, and asks the listener whether the listener can hold them too.

This is not, finally, a different moral from the moral the example reading supplies. It is a different kind of question. The example reading hands the listener a verdict: be the Samaritan; welcome the prodigal; rejoice in the householder's grace. The challenge reading hands the listener a problem the listener will have to keep working on. The verdict can be received and put down. The problem stays open as long as the listener is alive. That, on Crossan's reading, is what the parables of Jesus were originally for.

It is also — this is a side observation, not a thesis — what the best literary fiction is for. A story whose effect on the reader can be summarized in a sentence is a story whose form was adequate to a sentence and not to a story. A story that requires its full form to do its work is a story that does what a sentence cannot do, by producing in the reader the experience of a problem rather than the summary of one. The parables of Jesus, on Crossan's reading, are doing the work of literary fiction at the scale of a hundred words. That is part of why they have survived.

The early church inherited them, framed them, in some cases re-domesticated them, and preserved them. The preservation is the gift. The framing is removable, when one wants to remove it. The encounter is still in there, available for whoever is ready to be encountered.

That is what a parable is.