A seed, a coin, a lost son, a wedding with empty seats. Here is what a parable is, how it differs from an allegory or a fable, how many Jesus told, and how to read one without making it say what He never said.
What is a parable? It is a short story from ordinary life that Jesus set alongside the Kingdom of God, so that the people listening would see the Kingdom clearly and, very often, see themselves in it.
A parable does not hand you a moral. It asks you to judge the story, and then the judgment turns around and lands on you. That is why religious leaders sometimes walked away from one knowing it had been aimed at them.
The rest of this page gives you the working tools, and at the bottom is an index of every parable we have written up in full.
You may have learned that a parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. That is half right. The heavenly part sends people looking to a heaven somewhere later, when most of Jesus' parables are about God's reign arriving on the ground, in front of the people hearing Him.
A better working definition: an ordinary story with a Kingdom verdict inside it. Four marks show up again and again.
Seed and soil, yeast, a lost coin, a day's wage, a wedding. Nothing a villager would need explained.
Some run for twenty verses. Some are a single sentence. The yeast in Matthew 13:33 and the hidden treasure in 13:44 are one verse each.
The Samaritan is the hero. The father runs. The last hired get a full day's pay. The meaning usually lives in the surprise.
The listener is drawn into judging the story, and then finds the judgment pointed back at them.
“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.’”
Matthew 13:33One sentence, and the Kingdom is already in the dough and already spreading. For why Jesus taught this way at all, the Hebrew and Greek words behind “parable,” Nathan's story to King David and the rabbis who told parables too, see why did Jesus speak in parables. Read that one alongside this one. We will not repeat it here.
One thing is simply called another. “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5). No story, just a picture.
A comparison with “like.” “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” Many of Jesus' shortest parables are really an extended simile.
A realistic story with characters you could meet in town, laid beside a truth about God and His Kingdom.
A story where each piece stands for something else, and the meaning is decoded piece by piece. Paul reads Hagar and Sarah this way in Galatians 4 and tells you he is doing it.
Animals, plants or objects talk and act like people. Jotham's story in Judges 9:8 to 15, where the trees go looking for a king and only the thornbush says yes, is a fable. So are Aesop's.
The lines blur. Some of Jesus' parables carry allegorical pieces on purpose. The vineyard in Matthew 21 echoes Isaiah 5, where the vineyard is Israel, and every listener would have caught it. When the disciples asked about the sower, Jesus explained it piece by piece.
So the rule is not “never find symbols.” The rule is that the symbols belong to the teller. Where Jesus or the Old Testament background signals that a detail stands for something, follow it. Where nothing signals it, do not invent it.
A fable teaches a moral anyone could reach alone. A parable of Jesus announces something happening in front of the listeners and asks what they will do about it.
Somewhere between about thirty and more than sixty. It depends entirely on what you decide to count.
A good illustration comes from a university review of Klyne Snodgrass's major study of the parables. The reviewer, E Bruce Brooks, puts it plainly: “No one is prepared to say exactly how many parables there are, since definitions differ; a wide definition can easily take in more than 60.” The same review notes that C. H. Dodd's classic 1935 study focuses on 34, and that the list Snodgrass works through comes to 39.
Is the lamp under a bowl a parable? It is a comparison, not a story. Counting sayings like that pushes the total well past fifty.
The sower appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke. The mustard seed does too. Lists that count by Gospel passage come out higher than lists that count by story.
Some scholars set the Good Samaritan and the rich fool apart as example stories, because the characters model the behavior directly.
John has strong pictures, the shepherd, the vine, the grain of wheat, but no story parables like the other three Gospels. Counting them moves the total again.
Some of the best loved parables, the Good Samaritan, the prodigal son and the rich man and Lazarus, are found only in Luke.
Around forty is a fair working number. The exact figure is a question of definition, not of the reliability of Scripture.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
You do not need a seminary degree. You need to ask a few questions in the right order.
Most parables come with a setting. Luke 15 opens with religious leaders complaining that Jesus eats with sinners, and three lost and found stories answer that complaint. Luke 10:29 tells you the Good Samaritan answers a man who “wanted to justify himself.”
A Samaritan hero was not heartwarming to that crowd. It was offensive. Recover the shock and the parable comes back to life.
Find where the story does what nobody expected: the last paid like the first, the invited guests refusing, the door shut on people who assumed they were in.
Ask what each main character teaches. The prodigal son has a younger son, a father and an older brother, and the story ends on the older brother still standing outside.
The coins, the donkey, the oil and the wine make the story real. Unless Jesus assigns them a meaning, they need none.
Ask what this says about God's reign as Jesus announced it, and then ask where you are standing in the story today.
“Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering around to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ Then Jesus told them this parable.”
Luke 15:1 to 3Without those verses the prodigal son is a story about a bad kid who came home. With them it is a question to the people muttering: will you come into the party?
For much of church history, preachers read parables as codes. The famous example is Augustine on the Good Samaritan: the wounded man is Adam, the Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the church, the innkeeper an apostle. Beautiful theology, and not the question Jesus was answering.
At the end of the nineteenth century the German scholar Adolf Jülicher pushed hard the other way. The New Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes that he “rejected 18 centuries of allegorizing and insisted that the parables of Jesus were simple, moralizing stories.” One parable, one point.
He was right about the allegorizing and too thin about the point. C. H. Dodd, in The Parables of the Kingdom (1935), argued that the parables announce the Kingdom as arrived in Jesus' own ministry. Joachim Jeremias set each parable back into Jesus' life setting. Later scholars such as Craig Blomberg argued for one point per main character, so often two or three.
Decode every detail into a doctrine. Or shrink the story into a general moral anyone could have said without Jesus.
First audience, the surprise, the main characters, and the Kingdom that Jesus said had come near. Symbols only where He or the Scriptures behind Him put them.
At Sound of Heaven we read the parables as Kingdom stories, and the Kingdom they describe is present and active now. The mustard seed and the yeast describe a Kingdom already planted and spreading, not one waiting to begin.
Many of the parables were also aimed squarely at that generation. The tenants who kill the son, the king whose guests refuse and whose army burns their city in Matthew 22:7, the fig tree and “this generation,” the bridesmaids and the talents in Matthew 25: these were warnings about the judgment that fell on Jerusalem in AD 70. Reading them as a coded chart of our future is wrong, and so is flattening them into moral tips. Both miss who was in the room.
And we do not build a map of the afterlife out of parable scenery. The rich man and Lazarus is a story about wealth and listening, not a floor plan.
After which parables does Matthew say the chief priests and Pharisees knew Jesus was talking about them?
Matthew 21:45 comes right after the two sons and the tenants: “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus' parables, they knew he was talking about them.” The first audience understood exactly who the story was for.
Each of these has its own full study, read the way this page describes.
The sower. One farmer, four soils, and a harvest far bigger than the losses.
The mustard seed. A Kingdom that starts tiny and will not stop growing.
The vineyard workers. The last shall be first, because standing is a gift and not a wage.
The two sons. The yes that never went, told to the leaders who questioned His authority.
The wedding banquet. Many are called, few are chosen, and a burned city in verse 7.
The fig tree. A lesson about timing that Jesus tied to the people listening.
The ten virgins. Oil, a delayed groom and a shut door, inside His answer about the temple.
The talents. How a false picture of God makes people bury what He gave them.
The prodigal son. Two lost sons and one father who goes out to both of them.
The rich man and Lazarus. God sees the man at the gate.
One more, from outside the Bible, is worth reading as a contrast. The blind men and the elephant is a parable too, often used to argue that nobody can know God. Beside Jesus' parables the difference is plain: in His, the teller came to show us the whole thing.
Read slowly, the parables keep pointing back at the one telling them. The sower is Jesus announcing the Kingdom. The owner who finally sends his own son to the vineyard is not a hard riddle. The father running down the road is the clearest picture of God some people have ever been given, and it came from the Son who knew Him.
The question the parables keep asking is some version of this: the Kingdom is here, the invitation is open, where are you standing? The story never tells us whether the older brother came in. That space is left open on purpose, for you.
For related reading, see what the Kingdom of God is, Matthew 24 explained for the setting of the Matthew 25 parables, and what we believe. If you are on Long Island, come and hear them taught in person.
A parable is an ordinary story that Jesus laid beside the Kingdom of God, around forty of them depending on how you count, best read by finding the first audience and the surprise, and always pointing back to Him.
Tell us which one, and somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray with you and work through it with you.
A parable is a short story drawn from ordinary life, like seed, yeast, coins or a wedding, that Jesus set alongside the Kingdom of God. It draws the listener into judging the story, then turns that judgment back on the listener. Some run a whole chapter and some are a single sentence. Jesus used them to announce that God's Kingdom had arrived and to show His hearers where they stood.
Somewhere between about thirty and more than sixty, depending on what you count. Lists that include one-line sayings, like the lamp under a bowl, run higher. Lists that count only full stories, and count the sower once rather than once per Gospel, run lower. C. H. Dodd's classic study focuses on 34, and Klyne Snodgrass works through 39. Around forty is a fair working number. The difference is about definition, not about the reliability of Scripture.
In an allegory, every piece of the story stands for something else and the meaning is decoded detail by detail. A parable is a realistic story with one or a few main points, carried by its main characters and its surprise. Some of Jesus' parables do contain allegorical pieces, like the vineyard that echoes Isaiah 5. Find symbols only where Jesus or the Old Testament background puts them.
Not in the way Matthew, Mark and Luke do. John has no story parables like the sower or the prodigal son. It does have strong pictures, such as the good shepherd, the vine and the branches, and the grain of wheat that falls into the ground, and John 10:6 calls the shepherd saying a figure of speech. Whether those count as parables depends on how widely you define the word, which is one reason the total number of parables varies.
Start with the first audience, because most parables answer a specific question or complaint. Hear the story the way they heard it, including what would have shocked them. Look for the surprise, since the unexpected turn usually carries the point. Ask what each main character teaches, and leave minor details alone unless Jesus gives them a meaning. Then bring it to Jesus and the Kingdom He announced, and ask where you are standing in the story today.