Chinatown Stories Volume 3
Chinatown Parables
Found on the supermarket racks when you are checking out your items, there will be these “tell all” life stories that claim to be true. We know that there may be an ounce of truth but sensationalized for us to buy the magazines. The featured story is claiming to reveal a truth of that person that was previously private.
A parable is a story to reveal what was hidden to be visible. Jesus told many parables as a part of his teaching ministry. When he taught in the Sermon on the Mount, he was direct and explicit. But then he started teaching in parables with indirect images and tales about farmers, seeds, and soils, by images of women at work baking bread and fishermen casting their nets. There was a cast of imaginative characters—masters and merchants, reapers and plowmen. And after Jesus told his parables, the hearers were challenged to understand the meaning of the parable by completing the endings. Parables are unfinished stories for us to discover their meanings on our lives.
In this third volume of Chinatown Stories, we have 62 parables. Each storyteller spun a parable of how they understood the purpose and meaning of their lives. These stories are what they want us to see but it will be up to all who read these stories to understand their meaning on their own lives. In most of these stories, they represent people who just surpassed their centenarian halfway point. These are not yet finished parables that undoubtedly will continue to have an impact on the people they relate with and particularly to the children they have been blessed to have.
One of the reasons that Jesus told parables was that many of the people around Jesus have closed their ears and stopped listening. Some people would rather be blind and deaf than see and hear that the kingdom of God has drawn near in Jesus. So, Jesus began to tell parables to those who will hear and who do see, namely his own disciples.
Like every parable that Jesus told had a lesson, every Chinatown parable told in this book can teach us something meaningful for living. You will discover how people balance getting an education and getting a job, choosing to wed and having a solitary life, abiding in the fellowship of the church and participating in shaping the larger world. In these Chinatown parables, you’ll experience what life is like and with the hope that you too will understand your life’s meaning and purpose.
In the parable of the yeast (Matthew 13:33), Jesus likened the kingdom of heaven to yeast that a woman hid in flour. Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed (hid) in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” There’s an unexpected twist here. To our ears, it sounds like a gentle cooking instruction, but this is not so. In Jesus’ day, yeast was a popular symbol of corruption. It was more like, “one bad apple spoils the barrel.” Not only that, but the woman does with this yeast implies a bit of stealth. The woman doesn’t innocently mix or blend the yeast into the flour, she hides it. And she is baking for an army because she hides the yeast in “three measures of flour”—that’s about fifty pounds of flour, enough to make bread for a hundred people!
The stories in Volume 3 may not be as sensational as those that appear on the supermarket checkout racks but they are nonetheless filled with parables of revealing to us in the lives of these persons what once was personal but is now made public and visible for you to see and read. They are mostly yet to be finished stories and it will be amazing to see and hear how these many lives will end up.
Jesus said, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it” (Matthew 13:17). Imagine what powerful meaning that you might be blessed with contained in the 62 Chinatown parables that you are about to read!
Rev. Don Ng
Senior Pastor, First Chinese Baptist Church, San Francisco