Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute.

And joining me is Dr. Michael Barber, who is a professor of scripture here at the August Institute.

And we're going to continue our ongoing Bible study on the Gospel of Matthew.

You can always go back and find past episodes.

We are right in the midst of the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 13, verse 24.

We left off last time we covered the parable of the sower and now we're going

to dive into the weeds literally with the parable of the weeds so Michael you want to set this

someone up for us sure so we're in a section of Matthew's gospel where after chapters 11 and 12, Jesus has faced resistance.

Now he begins to speak in parables. And I think it's really important to just highlight that Jesus speaks in parables, as we pointed out last time, to hide his meaning.

A lot of people think, well, instead of talking about the readings today,

I'm going to give an illustration. I'm going to tell an anecdote. I'm going to tell a story.

You see this a lot. People often highlight or even exaggerate in my view.

Well, even the teaching power of homily. It'sily, like Jesus spoken parables they could easily understand him.

And it's like, no, that's actually the opposite.

Exactly.

Right.

Or I think people think today that a great way to help explain the gospel is to help people through stories.

So, well, stories are really the way we're going to communicate the Christian message.

Actually, not usually, you know, you look at J.R.R.R. Token, he's a very Catholic author.

And his books have been widely read in our culture, and so everybody's converted and become Catholic, right? No!

Right? So I think we can overstate the power of stories as well.

And so what Jesus is going to do is he's speaking in sort of coded language.

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