When you read a good story, it is not just coming to the end and closing the book. A good story with an ending like "Grapes of Wrath" is carried around long after the book is closed. A good sermon is the same way. A good sermon is not forgotten after the benediction, but has some staying power that requires some after preaching chewing. The Parables Jesus told are like this as well. When people heard them, something was carried forward into the tomorrows still to come which had the power to bring back the moment.
What Jesus did was to take such ordinary things like a man sowing a field, or a woman working with yeast, or the experience of losing and finding something of value. These were the kind of things which everyone could touch in their own life, but when Jesus finished handling them, the ordinary things were no longer the same. They became memorable. They became something filled with the transcendent. No longer ordinary, they became holy. To walk down the road and see seed being cast on the ground by a sower brought back the words of Jesus. In what seemed to be a random and ordinary moment, an echo of a Kingdom truth sounded deep in the heart.
Anyone who reads the gospels encounters these parables of Jesus. And even though we cannot hear the sound of the voice teaching them, the Holy Spirit works a miracle in the heart of those of us who are willing to sit and chew on something so filled with the ordinary that it seems impossible God could have something to say through it. The surprising thing is that He always does. We can read the parables of Jesus by calling the words, or we can read them as a hungry beggar who needs the spiritual food for the life of the soul within us. When we chew on them as one who is hungry and thirsty, there is no end to what God might say to us through one of those ordinary images overflowing with the holy.
What Jesus did was to take such ordinary things like a man sowing a field, or a woman working with yeast, or the experience of losing and finding something of value. These were the kind of things which everyone could touch in their own life, but when Jesus finished handling them, the ordinary things were no longer the same. They became memorable. They became something filled with the transcendent. No longer ordinary, they became holy. To walk down the road and see seed being cast on the ground by a sower brought back the words of Jesus. In what seemed to be a random and ordinary moment, an echo of a Kingdom truth sounded deep in the heart.
Anyone who reads the gospels encounters these parables of Jesus. And even though we cannot hear the sound of the voice teaching them, the Holy Spirit works a miracle in the heart of those of us who are willing to sit and chew on something so filled with the ordinary that it seems impossible God could have something to say through it. The surprising thing is that He always does. We can read the parables of Jesus by calling the words, or we can read them as a hungry beggar who needs the spiritual food for the life of the soul within us. When we chew on them as one who is hungry and thirsty, there is no end to what God might say to us through one of those ordinary images overflowing with the holy.
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