October 5, 2025
The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost
Elizabeth Gelfeld presented the Parable of the Mustard Seed (Luke 13:18-19) from The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Vol. 3, by Jerome W. Berryman. The quotes below are taken from this volume.
“Godly Play is what Jerome Berryman calls his interpretation of Montessori religious education. It is an imaginative approach for working with children, an approach that supports, challenges, nourishes, and guides their spiritual quest. It is more akin to spiritual guidance than to what we generally think of as religious education.” (p. 5)
“A parable is a metaphor that uses short narrative fiction to reference a transcendent symbol, which in the Gospels is generally the Kingdom of Heaven. The Godly Play approach to parables includes six guiding parables in gold boxes… . The materials are generally flat as opposed to the three-dimensional materials used for the Sacred Stories.
“[The Parable of the Mustard Seed] is found in all three synoptic gospels and in the Gospel of Thomas. The ‘mustard’ in the parable is not the domestic mustard we use for flavoring. The mustard of the eastern world grew and spread quickly. Farmers did not like it because it could take over a field and ruin its useful production of grain. It is a shrub and not a tree. These historical matters are not interesting to children, but they are mentioned to invite the reader to discover more about this parable as an adult. …
“Why tell parables? In parables, we enter with wonder to live the question. Parables question our everyday view of life. They wake us up to see in life what we have not seen before. Parables question the status quo, the order imposed by tradition, power, or class. That is why Jesus’ parables often got him into trouble, and why Christians ever since have tried to make parables more benign so they will not disrupt our comfortable worldviews.” (pp. 149-150)
Godly Play Resources: https://store.godlyplayfoundation.org/