Why Did Jesus Teach in Parables?

By Pastor Duke Taber Jun 23, 2026 0CategoryBible TeachingsTag - Parables of Jesus

By Duke Taber

In This Article

Most of us were handed a simple answer to this question somewhere in Sunday school. Jesus told stories, we were told, because stories are easier to understand than lectures. He wrapped heavenly truth in earthly pictures so ordinary people could grasp it. A farmer scattering seed. A woman sweeping for a lost coin. A father running down the road to meet a wayward son. The reasoning seems airtight. Who could miss the point of a good story?

Then you actually read what Jesus said about why He used them, and the simple answer falls apart.

Because when His own disciples asked Him this very question, Jesus did not say, “I tell stories so everyone can understand.” He said almost the opposite. He said He spoke in parables so that some people would not understand. That answer has unsettled readers for two thousand years, and it should unsettle us too. If we are going to make sense of the parables at all, we have to be honest about the strange, two-edged purpose Jesus assigned to them. So let me take you into the moment the question was first asked.

The Question the Disciples Themselves Asked

Picture the scene in Matthew 13. A crowd so large has gathered along the shore that Jesus climbs into a boat and pushes out a little from the land so the whole multitude can hear Him. From that floating pulpit He tells the parable of the sower. The crowd disperses. And then His closest followers come to Him, clearly puzzled.

“Why do You speak to them in parables?” — Matthew 13:10 (NKJV)

That single question is the door into everything. Notice the disciples were not asking what the sower parable meant. They were asking about His whole method. Something about the way Jesus taught struck them as deliberate, even odd. Why veil the message at all? Why not say it plainly to a crowd that hungry?

His answer divides the rest of the chapter, and it divides interpreters to this day.

“Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” — Matthew 13:11 (NKJV)

Read that slowly. Jesus is telling His disciples that they have been granted something the crowd has not. The parables were not merely a clever delivery system. They were a sorting mechanism. To understand why, we first need to understand what a parable actually is.

A Word That Means “Thrown Alongside”

The English word parable comes from the Greek parabolē, and the picture inside it is vivid. The word combines para, meaning “beside,” with ballō, meaning “to throw.” A parable is literally something thrown alongside something else for the sake of comparison. The old Sunday school definition still holds up remarkably well after centuries of scholarship. As pastor David Guzik notes, a parable is “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning,” a familiar scene laid down next to a spiritual truth so the one helps us see the other.

The Greek term was actually broader than our modern word suggests. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, parabolē rendered the Hebrew mashal, which covered proverbs, riddles, and wise sayings as well as stories. That is worth remembering, because some of Jesus’ parables were one-line comparisons and others were full narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. There are a few simple rules for reading them well. A parable usually drives at one main point rather than functioning as an elaborate code where every detail hides a secret. Most of the trouble people get into with parables comes from treating them like allegories and squeezing meaning out of every leaf and stone. If you want to go deeper on the categories Jesus used, this overview of the different types of parables is a helpful place to start.

There is also something God-designed about choosing stories in the first place. Modern research has confirmed what every preacher learns by experience. People remember narratives far better than they remember bare facts. In one widely cited Stanford study by professor Jennifer Aaker, only about five percent of listeners recalled a statistic afterward, while sixty-three percent remembered the story. Stories light up more of the brain, attach themselves to emotion, and lodge in long-term memory in a way that propositions rarely do.

I have preached for more than thirty years, and I can tell you plainly that nobody has ever come up to me after a service to thank me for a tidy three-point outline. They remember the story I told to illustrate the point. Jesus knew the human heart better than any communication researcher ever will. He chose the form that would burrow in and stay.

But the memorability of stories was never His only reason. It may not even have been His main one.

The Answer That Surprises Us: To Reveal and To Conceal

Here is where we have to slow down and let Jesus say what He actually said. The most common explanation you will hear is that parables were illustrations, the way a good teacher makes a point and then adds a picture to make it stick. The trouble is that this reading collapses the moment you keep reading the passage. As D.A. Carson points out in his examination of the parables, the “they were just illustrations” answer cannot account for verses 11 and 12, where Jesus draws a sharp line between insiders and outsiders.

“For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” — Matthew 13:12–13 (NKJV)

Stop and feel the weight of that. Jesus says parables both reveal and conceal. The ministry GotQuestions summarizes it well: Jesus used parables to make truth clear to those who were receptive and to hide it from those hardened in unbelief. The same story functioned as light for one person and as a locked door for another. To the disciple who came back asking, “Lord, what does it mean?” the parable opened up like a treasure chest. To the scoffer who heard a quaint farming tale and walked away unchanged, the parable simply sealed his blindness.

This is not the gentle, everyone-gets-it Jesus we sometimes imagine. This is a Jesus whose teaching sorts hearts. And it raises a question that troubles a lot of sincere believers. Why would the Savior of the world ever want to hide anything?

Why Would Jesus Hide the Truth?

We cannot dodge this. It is the hardest part of the passage, and if I gloss over it you will rightly stop trusting me. So let me name it directly. Jesus tied His use of parables to a prophecy from Isaiah, and that prophecy is about judgment.

“And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled, which says: ‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand, And seeing you will see and not perceive; For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, And their eyes they have closed, Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, So that I should heal them.'” — Matthew 13:14–15 (NKJV)

Look closely at the order of cause and effect. The hearts of the people had already grown dull. They had closed their own eyes. The hardening was not something Jesus did to innocent, eager seekers. It was a confirmation of a resistance that was already there. By the time Jesus reached this point in His ministry, He had healed the sick, cast out demons, fed the hungry, and taught with stunning authority. The religious leaders responded by accusing Him of working through the power of Satan. They had seen the light and called it darkness.

So the concealment is judicial. It is God giving people more of what they have already chosen. “Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” The man who refuses the truth he has been shown does not get to keep coasting on it. He loses even that. This is a sobering principle that runs all the way through Scripture, and you can see how a stubborn refusal to listen connects to quenching the Spirit’s voice over time.

And yet, if we stop here, we miss the mercy hiding inside the severity.

Parables as Mercy, Not Only Judgment

Read those last lines of Isaiah’s prophecy one more time. The eyes are closed “lest they should see,” and the ears are stopped “lest they should understand with their hearts and turn, so that I should heal them.” There is heartbreak in that. The door to healing was still standing open. The “lest they turn” describes what these hardened hearers were avoiding, not what God was forbidding them.

Now consider what a veiled message actually accomplishes for a hardened person. In Scripture, the more truth you receive and reject, the greater your accountability before God. To whom much is given, much is required. So when Jesus speaks a truth in a form that a resistant heart can ignore, He is in a real sense restraining the full weight of judgment that would fall if that person heard the truth plainly and trampled it. The parable becomes a kind of mercy. It does not pile up condemnation on people who are not ready to bear it. It leaves the door cracked, the riddle unsolved, the invitation still hanging in the air for the day they might finally have ears to hear.

There is also a forward-looking purpose. Matthew connects the parables to another prophecy, this time from the psalmist Asaph.

“All these things Jesus spoke to the multitude in parables; and without a parable He did not speak to them, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying: ‘I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things kept secret from the foundation of the world.'” — Matthew 13:34–35 (NKJV)

Notice the phrase “things kept secret from the foundation of the world.” Parables were the vehicle for unveiling truths about God’s kingdom that had been hidden for ages. They did not only conceal. They disclosed mysteries that the prophets longed to see. The parables of Jesus genuinely reveal the heart of the Father to anyone willing to lean in and seek. Both things are true at once. The same story that hardened the scoffer opened heaven to the seeker.

Parables Demand Something From the Hearer

This is the genius of the method, and it explains why parables still work on us today. A plainly stated proposition asks nothing of you. You hear it, you file it, you move on. A parable, by contrast, leaves you holding a question. It does not hand you the answer. It hands you a story and waits to see what you will do with it.

The crowd heard about a sower and four kinds of soil and went home thinking they had heard a pleasant agricultural observation. The disciples heard the same words, felt the gap between the story and its meaning, and came back to Jesus to ask. That difference is everything. As GotQuestions observes about the kingdom mysteries, receptive people receive even more understanding, while the unreceptive lose what little they grasped. The parable separates the curious from the casual, the hungry from the indifferent.

Jesus made this explicit with a tiny picture buried in the middle of His kingdom parables.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” — Matthew 13:44 (NKJV)

The treasure was hidden. The man had to find it, and finding it cost him everything he had. That is a parable about parables. The truth is there, real and priceless, but it is not lying on the surface for the careless to scoop up. It rewards the one who searches. This is why the parable of the hidden treasure cuts so deep. The kingdom belongs to those who will sell out for it, not to those who merely overhear it.

Storytelling was Jesus’ signature method for exactly this reason. Mark tells us how thoroughly He committed to it.

“And with many such parables He spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it. But without a parable He did not speak to them. And when they were alone, He explained all things to His disciples.” — Mark 4:33–34 (NKJV)

Some scholars count more than thirty parables in the Gospels, and broader definitions push the number well past forty. By many estimates, parables make up roughly one-third of all of Jesus’ recorded teaching. This was not an occasional flourish. It was central to how He worked. If you want a fuller picture of the scope, this guide on how many parables Jesus taught lays out the counting question in detail, and the cluster of kingdom parables in Matthew 13 shows the method at full strength.

What This Means for You

So why did Jesus teach in parables? He did it to reveal the kingdom to hungry hearts and to conceal it from hardened ones. He did it to fulfill prophecy. He did it because stories lodge in the soul and demand a response. And He did it as an act of severe mercy, leaving the door open for people not yet ready to walk through it.

But here is the part that should land closest to home. The variable in every parable was never the sower and never the seed. It was the soil. It was the heart. The same words fell on every listener, and the harvest depended entirely on the ground they fell into. That principle has not changed. When you open your Bible to one of these stories, the question is not whether the truth is there. It is. The question is what kind of soil you are bringing to it.

Are you reading like a member of the curious crowd, content to admire a nice story and move on? Or are you reading like a disciple, willing to come back and press in until the meaning opens up? Jesus ended His explanation of the sower with a benediction over His followers that still describes the difference.

“But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear.” — Matthew 13:16 (NKJV)

That blessing is on offer for you. It comes not to the clever but to the willing, not to those who skim but to those who seek. The same Lord who said “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” is still speaking, still sorting, still rewarding the heart that leans in. These ancient stories continue to transform lives today precisely because they were built to. Do not settle for hearing them as folklore. Ask the Lord for ears to hear, and then go searching for the treasure He buried in the field, because He buried it on purpose, and He meant for you to find it.

Keep Going Deeper

If this stirred something in you, do not let it stop at a single article. The parables reward sustained, prayerful study far more than a quick read.

Explore the famous parables of Jesus and what each one reveals about the kingdom.
See how the parables speak to everyday life right where you live.
Work through the 13-lesson Parables of Jesus Bible study with your small group, home group, or in your own quiet time.

Pick one parable this week. Read it slowly, ask the Lord what He is showing you, and refuse to leave until the treasure surfaces.

Resources

Why did Jesus teach in parables? — GotQuestions.org
The Purpose of the Parables — D.A. Carson, The Gospel Coalition
Matthew 13 Commentary — David Guzik, Enduring Word
Matthew 13 Study Guide — Blue Letter Bible
The Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven — GotQuestions.org
List of Parables in the Bible — Alabaster

Keep seeking, and you will find. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The Hidden Purpose of Jesus' Parables Truth for the Hungry Heart

Bible Teachings

How to Interpret the Parables Without Getting Them Wrong

Last updated: June 2026 By Duke Taber If you have ever closed your Bible after reading one of Jesus' parables and quietly wondered whether you understood…

By Pastor Duke TaberJun 22, 2026