Article June 15, 2015 Issue

Parenting lessons from a parable

Marilyn Wallace

A parable is a short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson that is typically easy to understand and remember. Both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible contain these lessons, many of them delivered by Christ Jesus to large groups of people or to his disciples. Through this kind of oral storytelling, which included familiar elements of ordinary Galilean life, Jesus lifted listeners’ thought to new views of their relationship to God and to one another. The wonderful thing about Jesus’ parables is that, while he shared them over two thousand years ago, they can guide our behavior in most helpful ways today.

As a parent and lifelong educator, I found his parable of the tares and the wheat invaluable in raising our two sons and in my work (see Matthew 13:24–30). The landowner in this parable sowed “good seed” in his field. So, too, do Christian Science parents naturally endeavor to instill in their children the elements of good character and spiritual receptivity that will enable them to progress, heal, and mature into successful adults. As Proverbs has it, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6). However, we do see “tares,” or undesirable characteristics, spring up from time to time, and we often wonder where they came from. Heredity? The influence of other children? The media?

The landowner gives us the answer. He resisted the temptation to blame anyone or anything by name, identifying the culprit only as “an enemy.” Impersonalizing evil is always the best way to make nothing of its attempts to invade and dominate. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes: “Evil has no reality. It is neither person, place, nor thing, but is simply a belief, an illusion of material sense” (p. 71).                                       

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