A parable is a true-to-life short story designed to teach a truth or to answer a question. In Jesus’ teaching the parable had an additional purpose. He told us, as we have seen, that one purpose was to obscure the truth from the unresponsive, while making it plain to the responsive. We noted in the last chapter that the parable is part of a distinct form of literature called “figures of comparison.” It is kin to the metaphor, because usually the comparison is implied rather than stated. We must distinguish