Please share your Christian parables

August 21, 2006 10:51 AM

I'm looking for parables that illustrate Christian precepts like faith, hope, charity and forgiveness. But hold on, there's

I know of the parables Jesus Christ taught, and although they are the finest examples to be found, I'm looking for clever new ones I've never heard before. I'm looking for one parable in particular that I heard as a child but I'd like to re-read. It's a story of a man who carried a bag of rocks on his back - every rock representing an unkind act ever done to him. Can anyone locate that parable? Any others the hive would like to share?

posted by raydexter to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

The Rag Man.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:55 AM on August 21, 2006 [1 favorite]

A Cross Too Heavy To Bear - Enjoyed that one as a youth.
posted by unixrat at 11:03 AM on August 21, 2006

In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, the ghost Marley is weighted own with chains. Each link representing a bad deed or some such.

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

Scrooge trembled more and more.

“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.

posted by willnot at 11:52 AM on August 21, 2006

What about The Man Who Planted Trees? He struck me as Christ-like.
posted by salvia at 9:31 PM on August 22, 2006

Response by poster: Thank you all
posted by raydexter at 4:34 PM on August 23, 2006