“Do we really have to go through?” groaned the hobbit. 

“Yes, you do!” said the wizard, ​“if you want to get to the other side. You must either go through or give up your quest. And I am not going to allow you to back out now, Mr. Baggins.”

Somehow I made it four decades without reading The Hobbit, a defect of character I’m now joyfully putting to right by reading it aloud to my son. We just left off at the part quoted above, and we’re eager to join Bilbo and the dwarves tonight as they plunge into the dark forest of Mirkwood.

Tolkien famously disliked allegory, so his characters don’t symbolize something specific. He preferred applicability, a quality stemming from a story open to interpretation. ​“I think that many confuse applicability with allegory,” he said, ​“but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

There is an age-old debate among scholars whether the parables of Jesus are allegorical. My take, based on years of Gospel reading and ten minutes of Googling people smarter than me, is not really but sometimes. Each of his stories communicated meaning as a whole, but usually most of its elements weren’t code for something else (the parable of the sower being an exception).

Allegories or not, stories were one of many ways Jesus honored the freedom of his hearers. Listen to him teach, invite, even command. He does so without coercion, caveats, or overexplanation. He knows humans are made to seek and choose, that ​“it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (Prov. 25:2). Not denying us the dignity of this glory is one reason why ​“he did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Mark 4:34). 

Stories not only respect free will, they are the heart’s native language and are more able carriers of reality than abstract concepts. Using many words to explain something may make us feel like we know the thing, understand it and have it within us, but this is simply not always the case. Whether in life with God or life in general, we often mistake explaining for attaining. And while there are many benefits to dissecting and inspecting parts pinned to a board, you do have to kill a thing to take it apart. A story, even a fictional one, gives us something whole and alive to enter into.

Entrepreneur Bob Buford became friends with Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management. On a visit to Peter’s home, Bob scanned the bookshelf expecting to find them lined with business books. Instead he found novels and histories, books from Shakespeare and Dickens and de Tocqueville. Not able to contain his curiosity, Bob asked why Peter didn’t have more books related to his discipline.

“Books about business deal with functions and strategies — the mechanics of running a successful company,” he said. ​“Fiction teaches you about human beings — how they think, how they behave, what’s important to them. I’m more interested in people than I am in how businesses work.” 

Stories, as Jesus knew, teach us about people and God and God’s Kingdom in a way nothing else can. They linger in your imagination and shape your thinking long before you understand their full meaning (if the full meaning can really ever be fully understood). 

Even now, ringing inside me are the parting words of Gandalf as he galloped away on his horse, leaving Bilbo and the dwarves to face what they did not want to face without him.

“Good-bye! Be good, take care of yourselves — and DON’T LEAVE THE PATH!”