The Parables of Jesus: Weekly Summary

Sunday
We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and in everybody else.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
Parables are a wisdom genre. They belong to mashal, the Jewish branch of the universal tradition of sacred poetry, stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed.
—Cynthia Bourgeault

Tuesday
Jesus says that God is like the shepherd, seeking always to find those who are out of community with their fellows, and when they have found it, when they have found their community with their fellows, then all the world seems to fit back into place, and life takes on a new meaning.
—Howard Thurman

Wednesday
Do we want to be a part of the wedding feast to which all are invited? The only people who don’t get in on the party are those who don’t want to come—so I guess we have to ask ourselves, “Do we want to come?”
—Richard Rohr

Thursday
If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere.
—Barbara Brown Taylor

Friday
When we expect, we’re soon going to resent it when we don’t get what we think we deserve. So, what the Gospel says is “Stop expecting!” Everything is a gift.
—Richard Rohr

Lectio Divina with the Parable of the Prodigal Son

Cynthia Bourgeault unpacks how the parable of the Prodigal Son challenges our typical forms of judgment. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Luke 15:11–32), and pay particular attention to the older brother’s response.

The egoic operating system will always get stuck in judgment and self-meritoriousness. The older brother with his indignant “This isn’t fair!” is a textbook example of the egoic operating system at work. Through him, Jesus is asking us to look closely at that part in each one of us that insists on keeping score, that can’t let go into the generosity and the blessedness. The parable’s concluding image—of the older son standing alone outside, refusing to join the party because he feels he has been slighted—is a vivid symbol of the way the egoic operating system holds us back from joining the dance of Divine Mercy in full swing all around us. If we’re stuck in the ego, we can’t hear the music. . . .

When we look closely at this parable, we discover . . . it’s a challenge to the basic structures, assumptions, and beliefs about ourselves that keep the binary mind firmly in place. It’s supposed to challenge you; it’s supposed to make you angry—and it’s supposed to make you look at yourself more closely. This parable provides particularly rich ground for lectio divina. . . . As you sit with it in meditation, see if you can discover where all three of these characters—older son, younger son, and father—live within your own being and what part each one plays in your life. Allow the parable to become a mirror that reflects back to you your own state of consciousness. If you work with it that way, you’re using it the way Jesus really intended it, as a tool for personal transformation of consciousness. [1]

If you are new to the practice of lectio divina, we offer these instructions from Father Richard:

Read the selected passage slowly four times. With the first reading (perhaps aloud), listen with your heart’s ear for a phrase or word that stands out for you. During the second reading, reflect on what touches you, speaking that phrase or word aloud or writing about it in a journal. Third, respond with a prayer or expression of what you have experienced and to what you are called. Fourth, rest in silence after the reading. [2]

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:

[1] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 2008), 49–50.

[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 30.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Richard’s homily “The Prodigal Father.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Carrie Grace Littauer, Untitled 12 (detail), 2022, photograph, Colorado, used with permission. Claudia Retter, Bexley Park (detail), used with permission. Claudia Retter, Oak and Moss (detail), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: Parables require us to take a second look. These images make us pause and wonder, “what is that, really?” Perhaps it’s my own shadow, responding from the subconscious with knee-jerk reactions and judgments.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Everything Is a Gift

Father Richard preaches about Jesus’ invitation to undeserved mercy, a worldview at odds with our entire economic system. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Matthew 20:1–16).

Another familiar parable is the story of laborers who arrive at the last hour and get paid as much as the ones that began work at the first hour. Let’s be honest: None of us who are “worker-bees” appreciate this story. All of us would think that if we bore the burden of the day’s heat working than we would deserve more than someone else. Yet this passage makes it clear that the landowner promised them what was fair, they agreed to the deal, and he gave them the usual wage.

We call this reaction a sense of entitlement. Many Americans have it, especially if we grew up rather comfortable. When we grow up comfortable, we think we deserve. We think we have a special right. We would be offended if we didn’t get our bonus or our raise. We all think we deserve just a bit more; this really creates a high degree of unhappiness and anger in our society. Of course, Jesus always turns everything on its head, ending with the punch line: “Those that you think are the last might well be first” (Matthew 20:16). We’d better be ready to be surprised. The way most of us measure things—especially if we are privileged and comfortable—demonstrates that we might in fact not love God at all, but just ourselves.

There’s only one way to get us out of this meritocracy and entitlement. Once in our lives we have to experience undeserved love at a deep, gut level. Where we didn’t merit it, we weren’t worthy of it; in fact we were unworthy of it, and we got it anyway. That’s called mercy. Only the experience of divine mercy breaks down this entire way of counting. And that’s what we do—we’re all counters. We are! We think to ourselves, “You gave this much, so you deserve this much.”

Every such expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. When we expect, we’re soon going to resent it when we don’t get what we think we deserve. So, what the Gospel says is “Stop expecting!” Entitlement is lethal for the soul. Everything is a gift—one hundred percent pure gift. The reason any of us woke up this morning had very little to do with us and everything to do with God. All twenty-four hours today are total gift. And so, the only real prayer is to say “Thank you!” and to keep saying it. When our prayer is constantly “Thank you,” and we know we deserve nothing, and that everything is a gift, we stop counting. Only when we stop counting and figuring out what we deserve, will we move from the world of merit into the wonderful world of grace. And in the world of grace, everything is free.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Who Deserves Anything?,” homily, September 21, 2014.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the gift economy.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I am finding a lot of lived Truth in the Daily meditations. I am a 91-year-old man, and I’ve learned that it’s important to listen to your body. Listening to your body and to God are quite similar and require quieting the mind. Once you learn it is possible, listening is simple and easy. —Reed H.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Sower’s Generosity

Author and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor considers her usual response to the parable of the Sower scattering seed on different types of ground. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Matthew 18–23).

I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God. I started worrying about how many birds were in my field, how many rocks, how many thorns. I started worrying about how I could clean them all up, how I could turn myself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for the sowing of God’s word. I started worrying about how the odds were three to one against me—those are the odds in the parable, after all—and I began thinking about how I could beat the odds . . . by cleaning up my act.

That is my usual response to this parable. I hear it as a challenge to be different, as a call to improve my life, so that if the same parable were ever told about me it would have a happier ending, with all of the seed falling on rich, fertile soil. But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable, because if that is what it is about, then it should be called the parable of the different kinds of ground.

Taylor asks whether our familiar interpretation may miss the more dramatic message of God’s radical grace:

Instead, it has been known for centuries as the parable of the Sower, which means there is a chance, just a chance, that we have got it all backwards. We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?

If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.

Reference:

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Seeds of Heaven: Sermons on the Gospel of Matthew (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 25–26.

Explore Further. . .

Read Cynthia Bourgeault on Jesus’ radical generosity and abundance.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Heaven Is a Great Party

In this homily, Father Richard considers the parable of the wedding feast and points out how few of us seem even to desire to attend God’s banquet. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Matthew 22:1–10).

God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one seems to want this gift. We’d rather have religion, and laws, and commandments, and obligations, and duties. I’m sure many of us attend church out of duty, but gathering with the Body of Christ is supposed to be a wedding feast. Do you know how many times in the four Gospels eternal life is described as a banquet, a feast, a party, a wedding, the marriage feast of the Lamb? There are fifteen different, direct allusions to eternal life being a great, big party.

Do you know how many parables there are about eternal life being a courtroom or a judgment scene? One. Matthew 25. And that’s good. We need Matthew 25 because it makes it very clear that the ultimate issue is about how we care for the poor and marginalized. But we forget this good news of Jesus, sending a message out to the highways and the byways, inviting everybody who’s willing to come to the banquet. It’s that simple!

Jesus goes out of his way to mention the good and the bad alike. We don’t like that either. We only want the good people to be there at the banquet, assuming, of course, that we’re the good people. Did you ever see the irony of that? Don’t you realize that every religion thinks that they are the ones that God likes? And we end up gathering at the party with that smug certitude; but when we do, it resembles something that very often isn’t much like a party. I don’t want to offend anybody, but sometimes only half of us even sing when we’re at church; half of us don’t even pick up the hymnals. I’m not trying to be cruel, but let’s just be honest and admit that many of us aren’t excited to be at church. For many of us, the Body of Christ is not a party.

Instead, we often believe that heaven is a giant courtroom scene. The good people win, the bad people lose, and almost everybody is bad except our group. That won’t work! It gives no joy and no hope to the world. It tells people they’re on the right side when sometimes they’re very unloving people who don’t care about the poor or the marginalized at all. And the statistics prove that Christians are no better than anybody else, in fact, very often—I’m sorry to say it—we’re worse.

Do we want to be a part of the wedding feast to which all are invited? The only people who don’t get in on the party are those who don’t want to come—so I guess we have to ask ourselves, “Do we want to come?”

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “In the End, a Banquet,” homily, October 14, 2017.

Explore Further. . .

Read Franciscan writer Ilia Delio on the “love energy of God.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I recently retired from working as a parish priest in the Church of England in order to focus fully on mental health counseling. My calling is to heal the sick of body, mind, and spirit. I have been walking through a dark night of the soul since 2011, a deconstruction that continued for far longer than I thought possible. But it was only in this darkest of years that reconstruction has begun. Reading your daily meditations has been part of that reconstruction process. Thank you for introducing me to others who think so broadly and so beautifully. Your work enables mine. —Karen H.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Sheep Lost and Found

In this 1951 sermon, theologian and mystic Howard Thurman (1900–1981) reflects on Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep, starting with the sheep’s perspective. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Luke 15:4–7).

A sheep was enjoying his grass . . . and then when he started feeling chilly, he didn’t recall, but the only thing that he remembers is that suddenly he became aware that he was cold, and there was a throwback in his mind, and he realized that he had been cold for some time. But, the grass was good. Then he looked around, and he discovered that he was alone. That everybody had gone. That is, that all the sheep had gone. And he began crying aloud.

And then the shepherd, who had many sheep, missed him when he got back to the fold, and he left his ninety and nine . . . to try to find this sheep that was lost. And Jesus says, “God is like that.” Nothing heavy and theological about that. Very little that is dogmatic, technically, about it. Just that here is a shepherd who loves his sheep, and one of the sheep in doing the most natural thing in the world—and that is to eat the grass—did it with such enthusiasm and over a time interval of such duration that he didn’t know when the shepherd called, and he was lost.

And why was he lost? He was lost because he was out of touch . . . with the group that sustained him, the group that fed him, that gave him a sense that he counted. That’s all. And as soon as he was out there alone, he said, “I’m just here by myself. Nothing but me in all of this? And I want to feel that I count with the others.” There’s a certain warmth in that. There’s a certain something that is creative and redemptive about the sense of community, about the fellowship.

Thurman speaks of the pain of being separated from our communities:

Insulation is something that is spiritual; . . . there’s something inside of me that pulls up . . . the drawbridge. . . . Sometimes I do it because I’m afraid; sometimes I do it because I’m clumsy and awkward, and I don’t quite know how to establish a relationship or relationships with my fellows that can float my spirit to them and bring their spirit to me. . . .

Now, Jesus says that God is like the shepherd, seeking always to find those who are out of community with their fellows, and when they have found it, when they have found their community with their fellows, then all the world seems to fit back into place, and life takes on a new meaning. . . .

The lost sheep. The searching shepherd. And the cry of anguish of the sheep was the voice of identification that the shepherd heard. That is how God is, if we let him.

Reference:

Howard Thurman, Sermons on the Parables, ed. David B. Gowler and Kipton E. Jensen (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 22–24, 25.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on God’s acceptance of us.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Wisdom Teachings

Episcopal priest and CAC emerita teacher Cynthia Bourgeault describes how Jesus’ parables are a part of a genre that aims to bring about inner change in the hearer:

Parables are a wisdom genre. They belong to mashal, the Jewish branch of the universal tradition of sacred poetry, stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed. . . .

We can see the razor edge of [Jesus’] brilliance as he takes the familiar world of mashal far beyond the safety zone of conventional morality into a world of radical reversal and paradox. He is transforming proverbs into parables—and a parable, incidentally, is not the same thing as an aphorism or a moral lesson. Its closest cousin is really the Buddhist koan, a deliberately subversive paradox aimed at turning our usual mind upside down. . . . Their job is not to confirm but to uproot. You can imagine the effect that had on his audience! Throughout the gospels we hear people saying again and again, “What is this he’s teaching? No one has ever said anything like this before. Where did he get this? Where did he come from?” [1]

Theologian Harvey Cox explores how parables invite the hearer to encounter God in an everyday and ever-changing reality:

Stories were Jesus’ stock-in-trade, the main medium by which he conveyed his message. The parables occupy fully 35 percent of the first three Gospels. But one of their most surprising features is that they are not about God. They are about weddings and banquets, family tensions, muggings, farmers sowing and reaping, and shrewd business dealings. God is mentioned in only one or two. . . . Rabbi Jesus obviously wanted us to look closely at this world, not some other one. It is here and now—all around us in the most ordinary things—that we find the divine presence. . . .

But Jesus’ stories, though similar to Zen koans in some ways, were also different in important respects. While the Zen stories aim at changing one’s perception of the world, Jesus wanted people to see that the world itself was changing, and that therefore, they had better change the way they looked at it. He invited them, in effect, to become part of the change. Time after time he said, “They that have eyes to see, let them see, and they that have ears, let them hear.” He simply wanted people to pay attention to what was going on around them and to discern a reality that was just under their noses. To describe this change he used a term that his listeners would have found familiar, though they might have been startled by the way he used it. He called it the coming of the “reign of God.” What he meant was that something was happening, not just in the consciousness of the listener, but also in the world itself. Something new and unprecedented was happening, and they could be a part of it. [2]

References:

[1] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 2008), 23–24, 27.

[2] Harvey Cox, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 155, 159. Note: minor edits made for inclusive language.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on Carl Jung and the power of a great story.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

I’m a Quaker and I love the description of worship as a “listening prayer.” When I stayed with some friends in Belarus, I noticed they answer the telephone not by giving their number or name, but by saying “I am listening” and then wait to hear the speaker. It’s a wonderful metaphor for prayer. —Diana L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Weeds and the Wheat

This week’s Daily Meditations focus on Jesus’ parables as teachings intended for our spiritual transformation. In this homily, Father Richard Rohr describes how Jesus’ parable of the weeds and wheat offers insight into becoming compassionate, “both-and” people instead of “either-or” people. Click here to read the Gospel passage (Matthew 13:24–30).

This Gospel is not only extremely insightful, it’s also very realistic and compassionate. With injustices and crises in every part of the world, many of us are asking ultimate questions about good and evil. “Where do the weeds come from? Where does evil originate? Why do people do such harmful things?” I ask this about a dozen times every day. This world doesn’t make sense. How can people be so malicious, so unkind, so uncaring? It’s like we don’t know how to care anymore, as though we don’t know how to access our own hearts, our own souls, and our own spirits.

For those of us who grew up as Christians, we may have heard this parable when we were younger. We may have been told to pull out the imperfect weeds and get rid of our faults. But since we really couldn’t get rid of them, we covered them up and pretended we didn’t have them. And that just doesn’t work.

Yet Jesus shows us an absolute realism. He says something that was never said to me when I was a young person: “Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together.” Wow! That’s risky. I can’t pretend to logically understand it, although I know it allows me to be compassionate with myself. After all, I’m also a field of weeds and wheat, just like you are, and just like everything is. Everything is a mixed bag, a combination of good and bad. We are not all weeds, but we are not all wheat, either. We have to learn, even now, to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality in ourselves and in everybody else. If we don’t, we normally become very angry people. Our world is filled with a lot of angry people because they cannot accept their own weeds.

To accept this teaching doesn’t mean we can say, “It’s okay to be selfish, violent, and evil.” It simply means that we have some realism about ourselves and each other. We have to name the weed as a weed. We can’t just pretend it’s all wheat, all good, because it isn’t. We’re not perfect. Our countries are not perfect. The Church is not perfect. The project of learning how to love—which is our only life project—is quite simply learning to accept this. If you really love anybody, and I hope you all do, then you have learned to accept a person despite, and sometimes even because of, their faults.

What love means is to say, “I know your faults, I see your weeds, and I care for you anyway.” Only God’s heart, only the mind of Christ in us, really and fully knows how to do that.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Weeds and the Wheat,” homily, July 20, 2014.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on a contemplative, compassionate stance in the world.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

This week’s images by Carrie Grace Littauer and Claudia Retter appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Parables of Jesus: Weekly Summary

Everything Is a Gift

The Sower’s Generosity

Heaven Is a Great Party

A Sheep Lost and Found

Wisdom Teachings

The Weeds and the Wheat

Category Archive

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Stay connected

explore more

The Parables of Jesus: Weekly Summary

Everything Is a Gift

The Sower’s Generosity

Heaven Is a Great Party

A Sheep Lost and Found

Wisdom Teachings

The Weeds and the Wheat

Category Archive

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