Listening to the Shepherd: Finding God's Wisdom Through Jesus' Parables

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. Matt 13:33-34

Tara and I just watched the film, The Sheep Detectives, which is out now in theaters. The premise of the movie is that the shepherd reads the sheep murder mystery stories at bedtime. The sheep listen, and over the years learn how to solve mysteries. For those of you who know anything about sheep, this is clearly not a documentary. In the film, their crime solving skill comes in handy when they have a mystery of their own to crack.

Jesus liked to tell stories to His sheep as well. They were not murder mysteries, but short tales called parables, which helped to reveal the mysterious ways in which God was working in the world. The parables used camels, wheat, yeast, diamonds, seeds, workers, birds, vines, and many other things to show His audience how to deal with the struggles of life. The parable also helped people to see God’s plan and to give them a lens through which to see the world so that they could find a way to solve the mystery. From the parable at the top of the page, they could see that God’s work was happening behind the scenes, hidden in the dough, and at an imperceptible rate things were changing until finally that work would be complete, all would be transformed.

The messages of the parables were helpful for understanding, but were often incomprehensible to the people. This allowed Jesus to speak of profound truths which could be understood by those with ears to hear, but would be discounted as quaint stories by those who could not. In The Sheep Detectives, the hearing of the mysteries gives the sheep the ability to make sense of seemingly unrelated facts and bring about justice. In our world, hearing and pondering over the words of Jesus give us the ability, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to make sense of, and find our place in, a world which seems so chaotic. Let us gather as a flock to listen to our shepherd.

In Christ,
Father Seth

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