Jesus gave the form to the crowd, the content to his disciples, and he revealed the meaning to St. John

"By using parables, stories drawn from the occurrences or events of everyday life, Jesus was able to teach the crowds of simple people who came to him and, at the same time, those who were spiritually more advanced. And it was to his disciples that Jesus gave the meaning of these stories, for instance the parable of the sower or the one of the wheat and the chaff.

‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ the disciples asked Jesus one day after he had just addressed a great crowd. And Jesus replied, ‘To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given’. So, to the crowd, Jesus spoke in images and stories, but to his disciples he explained the correspondences between these images and stories and moral realities. And from among his disciples, he chose to reveal their deeper meaning to St. John. So we can say that he gave the form to the crowd, the content to his disciples, and he revealed the meaning to St. John. Because that is how it always is: the crowd are satisfied with the form, disciples work on the content and initiates discover the meaning."