"He said nothing to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything." — Mark 4:34
WHY PARABLES?
When Jesus begins His public ministry in Galilee, He does something that immediately distinguishes Him from every rabbi, scribe, and teacher of His day: He teaches almost exclusively in stories.
Not in logical argument, as the philosophers. Not in legal commentary, as the scribes. Not in apocalyptic vision, as the prophets. In stories — drawn from the soil, the kitchen, the fishing boat, the marketplace, the wedding hall, the shepherd's field. Stories that any peasant in Galilee could follow with their imagination, but that have occupied the greatest theological minds in the world for two thousand years without being exhausted.
The disciples ask Him directly: "Why do you speak to them in parables?" (Matthew 13:10). His answer is among the most theologically significant in the Gospels:
"To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given... This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." — Matthew 13:11, 13
The parable is not primarily a teaching device designed to make the truth more accessible. It is a revelation device that simultaneously reveals and conceals — that gives the truth to those who approach with openness, humility, and genuine seeking, while leaving those who approach with pride, closed minds, and self-sufficiency exactly where they are. The parable is the form of teaching that mirrors the nature of the Kingdom itself: it cannot be grasped by force of intellect or seized by the powerful. It must be received — like a seed, like a child, like a gift.
St. John Chrysostom observed: "A parable cannot be received passively. It requires the listener to complete the meaning by entering into it." This is the genius of the form. The story draws you in through your imagination, engages your emotions, and then — at the moment of recognition — delivers a truth that has slipped past the defences of pride precisely because it arrived in the form of a story rather than a proposition.
The Greek word parabolΔ — parable — means literally "a throwing alongside": a story placed beside a reality it illuminates. The parable is not a simple illustration (which merely decorates a point already made by other means). It is the primary vehicle of the revelation, the form the truth takes because only this form is capacious enough to carry it.
THE PARABLES: HOW MANY, AND WHERE
Jesus tells approximately forty parables across the four Gospels — though scholars disagree on precise counts depending on how one distinguishes a parable from a proverb, a metaphor, or an extended simile. Matthew contains the most, including five major parabolic discourses. Luke contains the greatest number of parables found nowhere else — including the three supreme parables of Chapter 15. John contains no parables in the Synoptic sense, but uses extended allegorical images (the Good Shepherd, the True Vine) that carry similar theological weight.
The parables cluster around three great subjects:
The Kingdom of Heaven — what it is like, how it comes, who enters it, and who does not. Matthew 13 alone contains seven Kingdom parables in rapid succession.
The mercy of God — how God responds to sin, loss, return, and repentance. Luke 15 contains the three great parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.
Judgement and discipleship — what faithfulness looks like, what the consequences of unfaithfulness are, and how to live in the time between the Kingdom's arrival and its consummation. The parables of the Talents, the Ten Virgins, and the Sheep and the Goats belong here.
THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER: THE KEY TO ALL PARABLES
"A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil... Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty." — Matthew 13:3–8
Jesus gives this parable a unique distinction: He explains it. And in the explanation He tells His disciples something extraordinary: "Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?" (Mark 4:13). The Parable of the Sower is the key — the parable that teaches you how to read every other parable.
The seed is the Word of God. The four soils are four conditions of the human heart in its encounter with that Word.
The path — the heart so hardened by sin, distraction, or wilful resistance that the Word cannot penetrate at all. It lands on the surface and the birds — the powers of evil — immediately snatch it away. The Word is heard but never received. This is the person who attends Mass weekly, hears the Gospel read, listens to a homily, and walks out unchanged because the heart has never been opened to what was said.
The rocky ground — the heart that receives the Word with immediate enthusiasm but has no depth. Joy comes quickly; commitment evaporates at the first sign of difficulty. St. Gregory the Great identifies this as the soul that is moved by spiritual consolation — the feeling of religion — but has never built the interior foundations of prayer, sacrifice, and perseverance that allow faith to survive when consolation is withdrawn.
The thorns — the heart that genuinely receives the Word but allows the Word to be choked by competing loyalties: the anxiety of the world, the deceitfulness of riches, the desire for other things (Mark 4:19). This is perhaps the most common condition of the believing Catholic in a prosperous age: faith that is real but perpetually crowded out by the noise, busyness, and material preoccupations of daily life. The seed does not die; it simply never bears fruit because it is never given enough light, space, or silence to grow.
The good soil — the heart that hears the Word, receives it, holds it fast, and through patient endurance bears fruit (Luke 8:15). Not immediately. Not without struggle. But persistently, abundantly — a hundredfold, sixty, thirty. The good soil is not a different type of person; it is the same human nature, opened by grace, prepared by prayer, turned by the plough of suffering, and given the water of the sacraments.
The Parable of the Sower does not describe four kinds of people in permanent categories. It describes four conditions of the same heart at different moments — and the constant, patient, extravagant generosity of the Sower who keeps throwing seed, on path and rock and thorns alike, as well as on the good soil.
THE PARABLE OF THE PRODIGAL SON: THE FACE OF THE FATHER
"And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him." — Luke 15:20
This is, by the near-universal consensus of the tradition, the single most complete portrait of the nature of God in all of human literature.
The parable is often called the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Pope St. John Paul II, in his 1980 encyclical Dives in Misericordia (Rich in Mercy), argued that it should more properly be called the Parable of the Merciful Father — because it is the father, not the son, who is the theological centre of the story.
The Son's Sin
The younger son's demand — "Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me" (Luke 15:12) — was, in the context of first-century Jewish culture, an act of extraordinary offence. In effect he is saying: I cannot wait for you to die. The father's response is equally extraordinary: he divides the inheritance and gives it. No argument. No refusal. He respects the son's freedom even at the cost of his own pain.
The son leaves for "a far country" — spiritually as much as geographically — and "squanders his property in reckless living" (Luke 15:13). When a famine comes and he finds himself in the most degrading situation conceivable for a Jewish young man — feeding pigs, longing to eat the pigs' food — the text gives us one of the most important phrases in the Gospel: "he came to himself" (Luke 15:17). Not "he repented" yet. First: he came to himself. He recovered his own reality. He remembered who he was and who his father was. This is the beginning of all conversion — not a moral resolution but a recovery of truth, the moment when the lie of the "far country" collapses and the reality of the Father's house becomes visible again.
The Return
"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him."
The father was watching. He had never stopped watching. The word "ran" in Greek — edramen — is vivid and undignified: a wealthy man in the ancient Near East did not run. Running required gathering up one's robes, exposing one's legs, abandoning the dignity of position. The father runs. He abandons dignity. He does not wait for the son to arrive, to prepare his speech, to prostrate himself. He runs to meet him while he is still a long way off.
St. Ambrose of Milan writes: "Let us run to meet him who runs to us. Let us run with the steps of faith, with the feet of love, with the wings of the spirit." The father's running is the image of prevenient grace — the grace that goes before us, that meets us before we have completed our return, that is already on the road toward us when we are still uncertain whether to come home at all.
The son begins his prepared speech: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants." The father does not let him finish. He interrupts — calling for the best robe, the ring, the sandals, the fatted calf. The ring restores sonship. The robe restores dignity. The sandals mark him as a son, not a servant (servants went barefoot). The feast is thrown not as a reward for return but as the pure expression of a love that cannot contain itself.
"For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." (Luke 15:24)
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Luke, notes that the father does not restore the son to servanthood — he restores him to full sonship. This is the theological precision that distinguishes Christian grace from every other religious account of forgiveness: God does not merely tolerate the returning sinner; He restores them to the dignity they had before the fall — and, through the grace of repentance, often to a deeper dignity than they possessed before.
The Elder Brother
The second half of the parable is almost always overlooked — and is, in some ways, the more challenging half. The elder brother, faithful and obedient, working in the field, hears the music and learns the reason. His response is fury: "I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came..." — note: not "my brother" but "this son of yours" — "you killed the fattened calf for him."
The father goes out to the elder son exactly as he ran to the younger. He does not rebuke. He explains: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours." The elder son, in his obedience, had never appropriated the father's goodness as his own. He had lived in the father's house like a hired servant — keeping the rules, doing the work, missing entirely the abundance that was his all along.
Jesus leaves the parable without an ending. We do not know whether the elder son enters the feast. The parable is incomplete because it is a question addressed directly to those listening — the Pharisees and scribes who were grumbling that Jesus received sinners and ate with them (Luke 15:2). It is addressed to every person who has served God faithfully and struggles to rejoice at the mercy shown to those who have not. The open ending is the invitation: will you come in?
Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Dives in Misericordia (§6): "The parable of the prodigal son expresses the essence of divine mercy. This mercy is clearly the love of the father, but it is also the mercy of the son, and of the holy spirit. It is the mystery of the Trinity." The Trinitarian reading — the father as the image of the Father, the love that receives the son as the image of the Spirit, the return enabled by a grace that was always there — is the tradition's deepest interpretation of this inexhaustible text.
THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN: WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?
"Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" — Luke 10:36
A lawyer asks Jesus two questions. The first: "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers with a question: what does the Law say? The lawyer gives the right answer — love God with everything, love your neighbour as yourself. Jesus confirms it: do this and you will live.
Then the lawyer asks the second question — the one that exposes his real intention: "And who is my neighbour?" Luke adds: "desiring to justify himself" (Luke 10:29). He wants a definition that will limit the obligation. If he can establish exactly who counts as his neighbour, he can calculate whether he has fulfilled the commandment. He is doing with love what the scribes did with the Law: seeking its minimum rather than its maximum.
Jesus gives him a story instead of a definition. A man — unnamed, unidentified, belonging to no group — falls among robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, is stripped, beaten, and left for dead. A priest passes. A Levite passes. Both see the wounded man; both cross to the other side.
Then comes the turn that would have shocked every Jewish listener: a Samaritan — a member of the people most despised by first-century Jews, a half-breed heretic in their estimation, a person with whom observant Jews did not associate — stops. Approaches. Pours oil and wine into the wounds. Binds them. Lifts the man onto his own animal. Takes him to an inn. Pays for his care. Promises to return and cover any additional expense.
The priest and the Levite are not condemned as wicked men. They are simply men who allowed the boundaries of obligation — ritual purity, category, group membership — to determine whether love was required. The Samaritan is not praised for performing a moral theory. He is simply presented as a man who saw a human being in need and responded with everything he had.
Jesus then reverses the lawyer's question. The lawyer asked: "Who is my neighbour?" — seeking to establish the boundaries of his obligation. Jesus asks: "Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" — replacing the category of the person in need with the category of the one who responds. The question is not "Who qualifies as my neighbour?" but "Am I being a neighbour to whoever is in front of me?"
The command that follows is simply: "Go and do likewise."
St. Augustine reads the parable allegorically — the traveller as Adam, the robbers as the devil, the priest and Levite as the Law that could not heal, the Samaritan as Christ who stoops to heal the wounded human nature that law alone could not restore, the inn as the Church, the innkeeper as the Apostle Paul, the two denarii as the two commandments or the two Testaments. The allegorical reading does not replace the literal and moral reading; it deepens it. The neighbour we are called to be is modelled on the one Neighbour who came down from heaven to heal what no human law could heal.
THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SHEEP AND THE LOST COIN
"What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it?" — Luke 15:4
These two brief parables open Luke 15 — the great chapter of mercy — and establish the theological ground on which the Prodigal Son parable stands. Together the three form a triptych: a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son. Three images of loss; three images of seeking; three images of joy at recovery.
The shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep is doing something economically irrational. One sheep out of a hundred is a one-percent loss — manageable, within the normal attrition of pastoral life. No sensible herdsman stakes ninety-nine animals on the recovery of one. But Jesus makes him the image of God: a God who does not calculate percentages when a single soul is missing, who leaves the safe majority to seek the single stray, who carries the found sheep home on His shoulders — the posture of the Good Shepherd that became one of the earliest and most common images of Christ in catacomb art.
The woman who searches the whole house for one lost coin from ten — a day's wage from ten days' wages — and then calls her neighbours to celebrate when it is found: the joy she expresses is disproportionate to the economic value of the recovery. One-tenth of her savings, found. And she throws a party. This disproportionality is the point: "There is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:10). The value God places on a single human soul is incommensurate with any human calculation. A single soul matters to God as much as if it were the only soul in existence. This is not a pious sentiment; it is the theological revelation at the heart of every act of Christian charity, every hospital room, every confessional, every missionary journey.
THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTS
"For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability." — Matthew 25:14–15
A talent in the ancient world was not a unit of personal gift or ability — it was a massive weight of silver, representing years of wages for a labourer. The master entrusts extraordinary sums to his servants and departs. Two of the three invest and double what they were given. One buries his talent in the ground, preserving it perfectly intact but utterly unproductive.
The master's fury at the third servant is one of the most uncomfortable moments in all the parables — and the most important for understanding what Jesus means by faithfulness. The servant did not steal. He did not squander. He preserved exactly what he received. But the master calls him "wicked and slothful" (Matthew 25:26) and takes even what he has away.
The parable is about what we do with everything we have received from God — time, intelligence, relationships, material goods, faith, grace. The response God seeks is not perfect preservation of what was given, but creative, generous, risk-taking use of it in His service. The servant who buried the talent had confused safety with faithfulness. He had let fear — "I was afraid" (Matthew 25:25) — determine his choices. Fear is always the enemy of love, and love is always the engine of the Kingdom.
The conclusion — "to everyone who has, more will be given... but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (Matthew 25:29) — is not a statement about economic inequality. It is a statement about the spiritual law of growth: the gifts of God grow when used and wither when hoarded. Grace given and not acted upon contracts. Grace given and acted upon expands. The life of faith is not maintenance but growth — not the preservation of what was given at Baptism but the constant investment of it in service, prayer, sacrifice, and love.
THE PARABLE OF THE TEN VIRGINS
"Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise." — Matthew 25:1–2
The setting is a Jewish wedding — the bridesmaids waiting, lamps lit, for the bridegroom's arrival to begin the celebration. His arrival is delayed. All ten fall asleep. At midnight the cry goes up: "Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him." Five have extra oil; five do not. The five who lack oil ask to borrow from the five who have it. The answer is not harshness but honesty: "There will not be enough for us and for you. Go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves" (Matthew 25:9). While they are gone, the bridegroom arrives. The five who are ready go in with him to the wedding feast. The door is shut.
When the five foolish virgins return and knock — "Lord, lord, open to us" — the answer is devastating: "Truly, I say to you, I do not know you." (Matthew 25:12)
The parable is an eschatological warning — addressed to the Church in every generation — about the danger of what may be called nominal readiness: the appearance of faith without its interior substance. All ten carried lamps. All ten went out to meet the bridegroom. The difference was invisible until the moment of crisis: five had the oil of genuine interior life, formed through years of prayer, sacrament, and faithful living; five had the form of religion without its fuel.
The oil cannot be borrowed. This is the parable's most painful point. The five wise virgins are not selfish when they refuse to share — they are honest. The interior life cannot be transferred, borrowed, or lived vicariously. No one's faith, prayer, or holiness can substitute for another's in the moment of judgement. Each soul must stand before God with its own lamp, its own oil, its own accumulated interior life.
"Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour." (Matthew 25:13)
St. Augustine's commentary is characteristically precise: the oil is caritas — charity, love. The lamp that burns without oil is the faith that exists without love — the faith of which St. Paul writes "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:2). The foolish virgins had faith; they lacked love. And when the bridegroom came, faith without love could not enter the wedding feast.
THE PARABLE OF THE WHEAT AND THE TARES
"The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away." — Matthew 13:24–25
The servants want to immediately pull up the tares — the darnel, a weed that in its early stages is indistinguishable from wheat. The master forbids it: "Let both grow together until the harvest, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them." (Matthew 13:29)
Jesus explains the parable privately to His disciples: the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the Kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one; the harvest is the end of the age; the reapers are the angels.
The theological content is immense and has shaped the Church's understanding of herself through every century. The Church on earth — the Church Militant — is not a community of the pure. It is a mixed community, wheat and tares growing together, genuinely good and genuinely evil living side by side, often indistinguishable to human eyes. The Church does not wait for purity before she acts. She lives in the time of patience — the time God gives for conversion, for the tares to become wheat if they will, for the wheat to bear fruit. The separation is real, and it is coming — but the timing belongs to God, not to the servants, however zealous.
St. Augustine used this parable against the Donatists — the rigorists of the 4th century who wanted to exclude from the Church all who had compromised during the Diocletianic persecutions, all whose holiness was imperfect, all who were not visibly and demonstrably pure. The Church, Augustine insisted, is not a community of the perfect but a field of the growing — and the separation of wheat from tares is an eschatological act, not a historical programme.
THE PARABLE OF THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE
"The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it." — Matthew 13:45–46
This shortest of the Kingdom parables carries perhaps the most concentrated theological weight. The merchant is an expert — he knows pearls, has assessed pearls, has bought and sold pearls his whole career. When he finds the one pearl of supreme value, his response is instantaneous: he sells all that he has to buy it.
Not most. Not much. All.
The Kingdom of God is the pearl. And those who truly recognise what it is — those who have genuinely encountered the God who stands behind it — discover that no earthly possession, no human achievement, no alternative life path is worth more than acquiring it. St. Paul expresses the same reality from personal experience: "I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ." (Philippians 3:8)
The parable does not say the merchant felt no attachment to what he sold. It says he sold it. The decisive act of the will — despite attachment, despite cost, despite the incomprehension of onlookers who watched a successful merchant liquidate everything he owned — is the movement of faith, the act by which a human being recognises the supreme good and responds to it with everything.
THE PARABLE OF THE LAST JUDGEMENT: THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS
"When the Son of Man comes in his glory... he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left." — Matthew 25:31–33
The final parable of the great eschatological discourse of Matthew 24–25 is not, strictly speaking, a parable — it is a vision, a depiction of the Last Judgement itself. But it belongs here because it is the culmination of everything the parables have been building toward: the disclosure of how the Kingdom's values, taught in story after story, will be applied at the end of history.
The criterion of judgement is singular and universal: "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." (Matthew 25:35–36)
The righteous are astonished: "Lord, when did we see you hungry... thirsty... a stranger... naked... sick... in prison?"
The answer is the most theologically explosive sentence in the entire Sermon on the Mount discourse: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:40)
Christ is present — truly, really, actually present — in the person of every suffering, hungry, naked, imprisoned, sick, and abandoned human being. This is not a metaphor. It is a revelation of the Incarnation taken to its fullest social and eschatological consequence. The same Christ who is truly present in the Eucharist under the appearance of bread is truly present in the poor under the appearance of destitution. The works of mercy are not merely charitable activities; they are acts of worship — encounters with Christ in the distressing disguise of which St. Teresa of Calcutta spoke with such urgency.
The goats are condemned not for active wickedness but for omission — for failing to see, failing to respond, failing to act. The parable is a permanent warning against the privatisation of faith: a religion of correct belief and proper observance that never translates into concrete love for the suffering neighbour has missed the point entirely. As St. James writes: "Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead." (James 2:17)
THE PARABLES AND THE TRADITION
The Church's engagement with the parables has been one of the richest chapters in the history of Christian thought. St. John Chrysostom (4th–5th century) preferred the literal and moral reading, insisting that the parables were primarily calls to action rather than puzzles to be decoded. St. Augustine (4th–5th century) combined allegorical and moral approaches in his masterful commentaries on Luke and Matthew — his allegory of the Good Samaritan as a portrait of the Incarnation itself remaining one of the most beautiful readings in the patristic tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) placed the parabolic teaching of Jesus within his doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture, showing how each parable yields its fruit at the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels simultaneously. Pope St. John Paul II (20th–21st century) returned to the parables repeatedly in his apostolic letters and encyclicals, using them as theological sources in their own right — his meditation on the Prodigal Son in Dives in Misericordia among the finest in the modern period.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the parables as primary sources of the Church's teaching on the Kingdom of God (§546–547), on divine mercy (§1439, drawing on the Prodigal Son), on the Last Judgement (§1038–1041, drawing on the Sheep and Goats), and on prayer (§2613, drawing on the Unjust Judge).
The parables are not merely historical texts to be studied. They are living words — "the word of God is living and active" (Hebrews 4:12) — that address the human heart in its perennial condition: lost, seeking, called, failing, returning, loved. Every generation reads them and finds in them the face of a Father who is running down the road, the voice of a Shepherd who will leave ninety-nine for one, the image of a King who sees Himself in the suffering of the least — and is not finished with any of us yet.
THE PARABLES AND PRAYER: HOW TO READ THEM
The tradition of Lectio Divina — the slow, prayerful, meditative reading of Scripture — is the most natural way to receive a parable. The four movements of Lectio Divina apply to the parables with particular force:
Lectio — Read. Read the parable slowly, aloud if possible, from the actual text of Scripture. Not a summary; the text itself. Read it more than once.
Meditatio — Meditate. Ask: where am I in this story? Which character do I most resemble at this moment in my life? Where do I feel the parable pressing on me? What word or image stays with me?
Oratio — Pray. Respond to what you have heard. Tell God what the parable has shown you about yourself, about Him, about the gap between the two. Use your own words. Be honest.
Contemplatio — Rest. After speaking, be silent. Allow the mystery you have touched to rest in you, deeper than words. Let the parable do its slow work in the silence.
The parables do not yield their deepest meaning to rapid, analytical reading. They yield to the patient, receptive, prayerful attention of one who comes to them not as a student looking for information but as a disciple looking for a word from the Lord.
A CLOSING PRAYER
Lord Jesus, You who spoke in parables because the truth You carried was too large for propositions and too alive for definitions —
let me be the good soil. Let the seed You sow in me find depth, find space, find light.
When I am the elder son standing outside the feast, call me in. When I am the younger son still a long way off, run to meet me. When I am the servant who buried the talent in fear, give me the courage to invest what You have trusted me with. When the bridegroom comes, let my lamp be burning.
And in the face of every hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned person I will meet today — give me eyes to see You.
Amen.
"The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." — Matthew 13:31–32
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