Christianity retold
The Leaflet Distributors is based on Matthew 20: 1-16
God’s nation is like an employer who put out an urgent ad at 6 am one morning, to get people to come and leaflet for him. The first people who responded, he agreed to pay them £100 for the day, cash-in-hand. Then he sent them out with their boxes of leaflets.
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The Flower Seeds and the Pots is based on Luke 8:5-8.
This was the first parable I retold, rather than just updated. I was writing a book which had a modern Jesus preaching in a modern London. It became very obvious, very quickly, that Jesus wouldn’t tell a parable based on First Century Middle Eastern farming practices to a bunch of modern East Enders – not if they had no previous experience of hearing it. The meaning of the parable would stay the same; the props and setting would be reset.
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The Two Daughters is based upon Matthew 21.28-32
This is a very easy parable to retell in modern terms, because it uses a situation that repeats in every generation. The writer Paula Gooder jokingly calls it: ‘the parable of the wet towels’. We could even have it as: ‘the parable of the dirty socks’.
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Ravens and Flowers is based upon Matthew 6.25-33
The first question is: are these even parables? Are they sayings instead? Some commentators (for example, Paula Gooder) place them in the ‘not-parables’ category. Birds and flowers, frankly, live in the real world. They don’t need to be placed in the narrative, ‘story’ world of the parables.
[Read more…] about Commentary: Ravens and FlowersRavens and Flowers is based upon Matthew 6.25-33
So I’m telling you, don’t worry about going hungry or thirsty, how you’ll live or what you’ll wear. Life’s more than food and our bodies are more than the clothes we wear.
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The Three Employees is based on Matthew 25:14-30
There is a variation on this parable in Luke 19: 11-27; the parable in Matthew seems to be a more basic version, missing out Luke’s explanation of the journey and omitting several characters. Matthew places this parable between Jesus’ visit to the Temple and the Last Supper, and states that Jesus told it privately to his disciples rather than to the crowd.
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