Jesus: The Story-Tellin’ Man

One of my daughters has been singing a song about Jesus that contains the line “Jesus was a story-tellin’ man.” When I first heard that line it seemed a bit flip, as so many contemporary Christian songs are. But as I thought about it I realized that it contains a real truth: though Jesus was much more than a storyteller, He was at least that, and as a result the people of His day flocked to Him and heard Him gladly. 

Christ’s words were always picturesque. He spoke of camels creeping through the hole in a needle, of people trying to remove specks from another’s eye when a plank was in their own. He referred to a house divided against itself, destined to fall down, to tossing children’s bread to dogs. He warned against the “yeast” of the Pharisees. Strictly speaking, however, those are not stories. The stories Jesus told fall into a particular category of story known as parable. 

A parable is a story taken from real life (or a real-life situation) from which a moral or spiritual truth is drawn. Examples are many: the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the tax collector, the wedding banquet, the sheep and the goats , and others, including the parables of the kingdom that will occupy our attention in this first set of studies. By my count there are about twenty-seven parables, though some are closely related and may simply be different versions of the same story.