Little Famous Parables - Reflections on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, 9th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Friday, May 22, 2026

         Matthew is very clear that Jesus enjoyed teaching in parables. Though Luke may have the famous literary stories—“The Prodigal Son,” “The Good Samaritan,” for the two best examples—Matthew shows us a wealth of tiny fragment stories, parables that have become so well-known as to have entered into common secular language. Indeed, the mustard seed and the leaven in the dough, for example, have become ubiquitous tropes in our own time. Still, we would do well to examine for a moment just what a parable is.

         I like the famous definition of C.H. Dodd, offered some 65 years ago. A parable, he says, is “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt of its precise application to tease into active thought.” This is a rich and delightful definition that offers to us the multiple possibilities of a particular mode of speech, one apparently employed by Jesus with considerable frequency and with considerable skill. I well remember reading, though I cannot remember exactly where, a quite different definition of a parable: it is, this author said, “an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.” Well, that is dreadfully vague, if perhaps slightly true, and lacks any real value to assess these gems of language. Surely, Dodd is far closer to the mark with his evaluation. I wish to focus on several elements of Dodd’s work.

         Parables may be either “metaphors or similes.” A metaphor is a figure of speech that claims that one generally unrelated thing is precisely another thing. “You are a peach,” we may say, hardly implying that a person is in fact a juicy fruit, but suggesting that the person is in some way peach-like. A simile, in contrast, uses either “like” or “as” to make a more direct comparison. “Quiet as a mouse,” we say to suggest that someone is mouse-like in their lack of noise production. Parables may use both of these figures of speech.

         Perhaps the more significant element in Dodd’s definition is found in his idea of “vividness or strangeness” that can cause the mind to doubt its precise application, “so as to tease it into active thought.” Precisely here is where a parable may perform its intended task to move its hearers to think differently about something they thought they knew clearly already or to make slightly clearer a notion difficult to grasp.

         Matthew’s several examples in Mt.13 illustrate very well what Dodd had in mind. The “kingdom of heaven,” Matthew’s particular way of speaking of the rule or reign of God, the central idea of the gospel proclaimed by Jesus, is a slippery concept both in the first century as well as now. To delineate just what the kingdom of God may be Matthew has Jesus regularly resort to parables, often both vivid and strange, to make our minds begin to grasp, however incompletely, however limitedly, just what this kingdom thing may be. “The kingdom of heaven is like (simile) a mustard seed that a man takes and sows in his field. It is smaller than all seeds, but when it grows, it is greater than all garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the heavens come and nest in its branches” (Mt.13:31-32). It is completely hyperbolic (another characteristic of certain parables) to say that this seed is the smallest of all seeds—it plainly is not. The point of the tiny story is to contrast the small size of the seed with the much larger size of the mature plant. Matthew in 17:20 employs that same seed to describe the power of faith needed to move a mountain, again to contrast tiny size with vast size.

         In addition, Matthew uses the image of the “nest,” now found in the great tree spawned by the mustard seed, in echo of several texts from the Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel 17:22-24 speaks of the final exaltation of Israel by means of the nesting birds found in the branches of God’s mighty cedar tree. Also in Daniel 4:12, we read that a great tree “grew at the center of the earth” and that “birds of the air nested in its branches.” Just as in Ezekiel’s time in the 6th century BCE and Daniel’s time in the 2nd century BCE, the weak and defeated Israel still became a mighty and significant community with the aid of the power of God. So it is with the kingdom of heaven; like a tiny seed, whose beginnings are unremarked and obscure, the kingdom will grow and prosper beyond all expectations. Remember the tiny seed, says Jesus, and hope in the coming kingdom of heaven.

         Likewise, that kingdom is like leaven in the dough. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman takes and hides in three measures of flour until the whole has been leavened” (Mt.13:33). Again a simple simile is used to speak of the coming kingdom of heaven. Here it is hidden, unseen, unremarked, but soon the flour is all leavened, the dough expands, and the bread appears, nurtured and made possible by the hidden leaven. So it is with the kingdom of heaven, now hidden but soon to appear. 

         Jesus speaks in parables in order to fulfill the ancient scripture, a common feature of Matthew’s Gospel. Psalms 78:2 (Psalm.77 in the Greek Septuagint) says, “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter sayings from of old.” The ancient Hebrew wisdom teachers employed parables (meshalim) often as a teaching device, and Matthew says that Jesus of Nazareth stands in their train. Here in Mt.13 Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven, which is surely coming without fail, is like both mustard seed and leaven, both tiny and hidden. But it will come, just as great trees and delicious bread unfailingly appear. Neither of these similes begin to exhaust the full meaning of the kingdom of heaven, but they do “tease our minds into active thought” as we wrestle with the richness of the boundless idea of God’s coming rule.