Every parable Jesus told, where to read it, and what it means in one sentence — plus four simple rules that make parables easier to understand, and five to start with if you are reading to children.
Jesus was a storyteller. When people asked him a hard question, he usually did not answer with a rule. He answered with a story about ordinary life: a farmer scattering seed, a woman turning her house upside down to find one coin, a father watching the road for his son.
Matthew says it simply: “Jesus spoke all these things to the crowds in parables. He did not tell them anything without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34, BSB).
On this page you will find every parable in the Gospels, where to read it, and what each one means in a sentence. Before the list, there are a few things worth knowing. Parables are easy to read and surprisingly easy to misread, so it helps to know how they work.
You will see different numbers in different books, and none of them is wrong. It depends on what you count.
Some parables are full stories with characters and an ending. Others are just a picture in a single line, like new wine in old wineskins. If you only count the full stories, you get about 33. If you count the short pictures as well, the number climbs past 60. The list most reference books settle on sits in the middle, at 38. That is the list below.
Two things are not in doubt.
The first is that all the parables are in Matthew, Mark and Luke. There are none in John. John does have pictures that sound similar, such as the vine and the good shepherd, but those work differently. In a parable, Jesus tells a story about someone else. In John, he is describing himself.
The second is that Luke has the most. He records around twenty-four, and about eighteen of those appear nowhere else in the Bible. If you have a favourite parable, there is a good chance Luke is the only reason you know it.
A parable takes something you already understand and uses it to show you something you do not. The setting is always ordinary: farming, baking, borrowing money, a family falling out. Nothing in it needs explaining.
That is what makes it work. You listen without your guard up. You agree with the story. And then you realise the story is about you.
This is an old technique, and the Bible uses it before Jesus does. In 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan tells King David a story about a rich man who steals a poor man's only lamb. David is furious and says the man deserves to die. Nathan replies, “You are that man.” David had already judged himself before he knew he was doing it.
We have heard these stories so many times that they feel gentle. They were not gentle when they were first told.
Take the Good Samaritan. Today the word “Samaritan” just means someone kind. To the people listening, Samaritans were outsiders. They had grown up being taught to keep away from them. Jesus told this story to a Jewish teacher of the law, and he made the Samaritan the hero. That was meant to sting.
Or take the father in the Prodigal Son. He sees his son coming and runs down the road to meet him. In that time and place, a respected older man did not run in public. He would have to gather up his long robes to do it, and everyone would stare. Jesus is showing us a father who does not care how it looks.
So when a parable feels flat, ask what would have made the first crowd sit up. The meaning is usually hiding there.
People have spent centuries trying to work out what every small thing in a parable stands for. What does the inn represent? The two coins? The oil?
Most of the time, the answer is: nothing in particular. A parable usually makes one main point, and the rest of the story is there to carry that point along, the way scenery carries a play.
There are two clear exceptions, and they are useful ones. Jesus explains the Sower and the Weeds Among the Wheat himself, piece by piece. Where he does that, follow him. Where he does not, be slower about deciding what each detail means.
Luke tells us exactly who was standing there when Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son. Religious leaders were complaining that he spent his time with the wrong sort of people (Luke 15:1–3).
That one detail changes everything. It means the older brother, the one who stays home and gets angry about the party, is not a minor character. He is a portrait of the people listening. Jesus is telling them a story about themselves, and they are standing right in front of him while he does it.
Some parables simply stop. We never find out whether the older brother goes into the party. We never hear what the workers in the vineyard said after they were paid.
That is not careless storytelling. Jesus leaves the ending open on purpose, so that the listener has to finish it. When a parable feels unfinished, that unfinished part is usually the question being handed to you.
Here are all 38, roughly in the order they appear across the Gospels, with where to find each one and what it is saying.
| Parable | Where to find it | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| The Wise and Foolish Builders | Matthew 7:24–27; Luke 6:46–49 | Hearing what Jesus says is not enough. Doing it is what holds when the storm arrives. |
| New Wine in Old Wineskins | Matthew 9:16–17; Mark 2:21–22; Luke 5:37–39 | What Jesus brings is new. You cannot patch it onto the old way of doing things. |
| The Strong Man | Matthew 12:29; Mark 3:27; Luke 11:21–22 | Jesus does not bargain with evil. He overpowers it. |
| The Two Debtors | Luke 7:41–43 | The person who has been forgiven more loves more. Jesus says this to a host who thought he needed very little forgiving. |
| The Sower | Matthew 13:3–9; Mark 4:3–9; Luke 8:5–8 | The same seed lands on four kinds of ground. What changes is the soil, not the seed. |
| The Lamp Under a Bowl | Matthew 5:14–15; Mark 4:21–25; Luke 8:16–18 | Light is given to be seen by others, not hidden away. |
| The Growing Seed | Mark 4:26–29 | The kingdom grows while the farmer sleeps. He does not make it happen and cannot explain it. |
| The Weeds Among the Wheat | Matthew 13:24–30 | Good and bad grow side by side until harvest. Pulling the weeds early would tear up the wheat too. |
| The Good Samaritan | Luke 10:25–37 | Asked “who is my neighbour?”, Jesus answers with a dangerous road, an unexpected rescuer, and the words “go and do the same”. |
| The Friend at Midnight | Luke 11:5–8 | Keep asking. Persistence is not rudeness. |
| The Rich Fool | Luke 12:16–21 | A man measures his life by how much he has stored. He is not ready for the night it ends. |
| The Barren Fig Tree | Luke 13:6–9 | There is real patience here, and there is also a limit to it. |
| The Mustard Seed | Matthew 13:31–32; Mark 4:30–32; Luke 13:18–19 | Something too small to notice grows into shelter for others. |
| The Leaven | Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20–21 | The kingdom works quietly and out of sight, but it changes the whole batch. |
| The Hidden Treasure | Matthew 13:44 | A man finds treasure and sells everything to get it. He is not sad about it. He is delighted. |
| The Pearl of Great Price | Matthew 13:45–46 | The same idea, seen from the other side: an expert who has spent his life looking finally finds the one thing worth everything else. |
| Drawing in the Net | Matthew 13:47–50 | The net catches everything. The sorting comes later, and it is not our job. |
| The Householder's Treasure | Matthew 13:51–52 | A good teacher brings out new things and old things, and knows when each is needed. |
| The Places at the Table | Luke 14:7–14 | Take the lower seat. Invite the people who cannot invite you back. |
| Counting the Cost | Luke 14:28–33 | Do not start building something before you know what it will cost you. |
| The Lost Sheep | Matthew 18:10–14; Luke 15:4–6 | Ninety-nine safe sheep do not make up for one that is missing. |
| The Unforgiving Servant | Matthew 18:23–35 | A man is let off a huge debt, then refuses to let off a small one. The forgiveness he would not pass on is taken back. |
| The Lost Coin | Luke 15:8–9 | A woman turns the whole house upside down for one coin, then throws a party when she finds it. |
| The Prodigal Son | Luke 15:11–32 | A son comes home expecting nothing. His father runs to meet him. And the older brother is left standing outside. |
| The Shrewd Manager | Luke 16:1–13 | A dishonest man acts fast to protect his future. Jesus is pointing at the urgency, not the dishonesty. |
| The Rich Man and Lazarus | Luke 16:19–31 | A gap that was ignored in life becomes a gap that cannot be crossed. |
| The Master and Servant | Luke 17:7–10 | Doing your duty is doing your duty. It does not put God in your debt. |
| The Persistent Widow | Luke 18:1–8 | If even an unfair judge gives in to someone who keeps asking, keep asking. |
| The Pharisee and the Tax Collector | Luke 18:9–14 | Two men pray. The one who goes home right with God is the one who asked for mercy. |
| The Workers in the Vineyard | Matthew 20:1–16 | Everyone is paid the same. Nobody is cheated, but it feels unfair, and that feeling is the point. |
| The Two Sons | Matthew 21:28–32 | One son says no and goes. The other says yes and stays home. Saying yes is not the same as going. |
| The Wicked Tenants | Matthew 21:33–41; Mark 12:1–9; Luke 20:9–16 | The vineyard was lent, not given. The owner is coming back. |
| The Great Banquet | Matthew 22:1–14; Luke 14:15–24 | The invited guests make excuses, so the invitation goes out to people nobody expected. |
| The Budding Fig Tree | Matthew 24:32–35; Mark 13:28–31; Luke 21:29–33 | You can read the weather. Learn to read the times you are living in. |
| The Faithful and Wise Servant | Matthew 24:42–51; Mark 13:34–37; Luke 12:35–48 | Live today as though the master comes home today. |
| The Ten Virgins | Matthew 25:1–13 | Some things cannot be borrowed at the last minute. You either brought the oil or you did not. |
| The Talents (The Minas) | Matthew 25:14–30; Luke 19:12–27 | What you have been given is meant to be used, even at some risk. Burying it is the one thing that fails. |
| The Sheep and the Goats | Matthew 25:31–46 | The judgement comes down to something very plain: what you did for the hungry, the stranger and the prisoner. |
The list above is a map. These three are the ground. Most people can summarise all of them in a sentence, and very few have actually sat with them.
Read on its own, this looks like a story about a son who goes wrong and is forgiven.
Read with the opening verses of the chapter in view, it becomes something sharper. Jesus is telling it to people who are annoyed that he welcomes sinners. So the story has two halves. In the first, a father runs out to a son who has wasted everything. In the second, the same father goes out again, this time to an older son standing in the dark outside a party, refusing to come in.
Then the story stops, without telling us what the older son decided. We take the whole parable apart line by line in The Prodigal Son explained, including what “prodigal” actually means and the speech the son never finishes. The Prodigal Son is our illustrated edition of Luke 15.
A lawyer asks Jesus a question designed to keep his obligations small: who exactly counts as my neighbour? Jesus answers with a story that removes the limit altogether.
The road he describes was real, and it was genuinely dangerous. It drops about seventeen miles from Jerusalem down to Jericho through steep, rocky country, with plenty of places for robbers to wait. That is why the priest and the Levite walking past is believable rather than cartoonish. The parable never says why they crossed over — fear and the purity laws are both offered, and neither of them changes the outcome.
The sting is who does stop. We walk through the whole passage in The Good Samaritan explained, including what two denarii was worth and the question Jesus asks back. The Good Samaritan is our illustrated edition of Luke 10.
This is the one parable Jesus takes apart and explains, which makes it the key to all the rest. Learn how this one works and the others open up.
It is often read as four kinds of person. It is really four kinds of ground, which is not quite the same thing. Ground can change. So the harder question is not “which one am I?” but “which one am I this year?” The Sower is our illustrated edition of Matthew 13.
Not every parable suits a young reader. The usual mistake is to pick the ones with the clearest moral, when what a child actually needs is the clearest story.
These five have a shape children can follow, and each ends somewhere worth talking about:
Leave the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Weeds, and the Ten Virgins for older readers. They are worth waiting for.
Parables are unusually good for reading together, because they end in a question instead of a conclusion. There is always something left to say.
One parable is a complete sitting. You do not need to get through a chapter, and you do not need to have an answer ready. Read it out loud, look at it, and ask one thing: who in this story do you understand? That is usually enough for ten minutes, and sometimes it stays with people for a week.
If you would like a fixed shape for that, our guide to starting family devotions sets out a ten-minute pattern, and our seven-day reading paths on mercy and on waiting on God each give you a week of short readings built around these stories. Our guide to the illustrated parables explains how the books are built, and what an illustrated Bible storybook is covers what sits alongside the artwork. You can see the series in Illustrated Parables and the wider set in The Living Vine.
There is no single agreed number, because it depends what you count. If you only count full stories, the answer is about 33. Most reference books list 38. If you also count short one-line pictures, you can get past 60. The disagreement is about definitions, not about which texts are in the Bible.
No. John has no parables of the kind found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It has pictures that sound similar, such as the vine and the good shepherd, but those work differently: Jesus is describing himself, not telling a story about someone else.
Partly because it works. A story lets you agree with something before you realise it applies to you, and that gets past defences a direct statement would raise. But Jesus also says, quoting Isaiah, that parables leave some people looking without really seeing (Mark 4:11–12). People have argued about that verse for a very long time. What is clear either way is that a parable asks something of the listener. It does not hand over its meaning to someone who would rather not have it.
In an allegory, every part of the story stands for something else. In most parables, the story makes one main point and the details are simply there to make the story work. The exceptions are the two Jesus explains himself, the Sower and the Weeds, where he does give each part a meaning.
Start with the Sower, because Jesus explains it, and that explanation teaches you how to read the others. Then read the Prodigal Son — but read Luke 15:1–3 first, so you know who was standing there listening.
A lawyer asks Jesus where his obligation ends. Jesus answers with a real road, two men who walk past, and a hero his listeners would rather not adm...
"Prodigal" does not mean lost or returning — it means wastefully extravagant. A close reading of Luke 15:11–32: what happens, what the first listen...
A short guide to the parables of Jesus—what a parable is, why Jesus taught this way, and where to start with illustrated parables for kids and adults.
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