Telling Stories New and Old

Preaching the Bible on Turtle Island [2 of 6]

Scripture: Matthew 13

The collection of parables and teachings on parables in Matthew 13 makes up the third of five extended teaching blocks in Matthew’s gospel.¹ The chapter includes seven parables, commentary on the meaning of two parables, two explanations of the purpose and use of parables, and one commission to be scribes, or parable-tellers, for the kingdom of heaven.

Parables have always struck me as akin to Indigenous storytelling. There is something similar in the way Jesus’s parables and Indigenous stories cultivate meaning.

First, like Indigenous stories, many of the parables are grounded in creation and the routine activities of daily life. They weave meaning into the fabric of the seemingly unremarkable. Consider the parables in this chapter alone: Seeds, soil, birds, trees, wheat, and weeds, along with daily labors and household practices, such as growing and cooking food and the buying, selling, and production of common goods—each of these becomes a site of sacred knowledge. Such teaching resonates with Indigenous ways of knowing, which understand knowledge as emerging through relationships with land, animals, people, ancestors, and even the everyday dance of communal being. Jesus, like Indigenous storytellers, does not remove his teaching from the world—from creation—to make it sacred; rather, he attends to creation itself as a source of wisdom and divine encounter.

Second, parables, like Indigenous stories, are animate tales. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) writes of Indigenous storytelling: “We are told that stories are living beings, they grow, they develop, they remember, they change not in their essence, but sometimes in their dress. They are shared and shaped by the land and the culture and the teller, so that one story may be told widely and differently.”² The parables shared by the Synoptics illustrate the variability of Jesus’s parables, each author supplying their own understanding and adapting the parables’ wisdom to their particular context. Countless contemporary commentaries also exemplify their elasticity, as single parables take on endless interpretations.

Parables are dynamic, relational storytelling. They aren’t objects to be mastered, dissected, or resolved, but guides, teachers, and mentors. They are part of a larger, older collection of our ancestral stories. Parables are inherently Indigenous.

Following verse 2, the First Nations Version of the Bible adds the following introduction to Matthew 13: “The Great Storyteller began to tell his stories, teaching people about Creator’s good road.”

This translation matters. Jesus is the Great Storyteller, and his parables are the stories that teach people about Creator’s good road. But the connection to Indigenous ways of being doesn’t stop with Jesus’s stories. Jesus commissions his disciples to become storytellers themselves. Listen carefully to his words to the disciples:

He smiled and said to them, “Every scroll keeper who has learned to walk in the ways of Creator’s good road is like the head of a family, an elder who opens the medicine pouch of his heart, sharing wisdom that is both new and old, bringing new understanding to the old ways.” (Matthew 13:52, First Nations Version)

I want to offer an important clarification on the interpretive addition the First Nations Version adds to the end of verse 52, “bringing new understanding to the old ways.” How we understand the function of the preposition “to” makes a difference. We have to take care not to read this through a Western lens.

Settler epistemologies often operate through a logic of replacement, in which new settlements displace existing communities, new knowledge supersedes older wisdom, and new technologies improve upon outdated systems. Within this framework, progress means something like moving away from the past toward the future. History becomes something to preserve in an archive rather than something that remains present and generative. Some have interpreted these words of Jesus through this lens—he brings new ideas to replace old ones—but Indigenous storytelling offers new ways of understanding Jesus’s teaching. Wisdom is reciprocal; the old and new inform each other.

Steven Charleston (Choctaw) writes, “As a four-year-old, I would sit with my great-grandfather beneath the star-filled sky as he told me stories from my ancestors and stories from the Bible. When I asked why he was telling me these stories, he said, ‘Because one day you are going to be pehlichi shilonbish [a spirit guide], and you need to know how things really work so you can help others find their way.’”³

Charleston goes on to tell the story of how he became a sharer of wisdom through social media. It wasn’t a path he ever imagined for himself, yet Charleston’s newly discovered path illustrates what it looks like to bring out of the storehouse both the old and the new, connecting ancient traditions to modern technologies.

Something new need not displace what came before it to be new. Novelty doesn’t require replacement. Charleston shares the wisdom of his ancestors in new clothes; he gives life to old stories in new circumstances.

Similarly, Matthew’s Jesus doesn’t imagine the good road as a new path replacing the old. The disciple brings out of his treasure both the old and the new. The old is not discarded. It remains in the householder’s storehouse, available to be brought forth alongside the new. New stories are merely old wisdom newly perceptible.

This summer I found myself reading an anthology of Indigenous short stories and poems that illustrate what it looks like to join Jesus in the good work of sharing wisdom that is both new and old. The book, Legendary Frybread Drive-In: Intertribal Stories (ed. Cynthia Leitich Smith, Heartdrum, 2025), draws on the rich cultural traditions of Indigenous communities by telling stories of everyday experiences for young adults living across Turtle Island. These intertribal stories are set within the context of an Indigenous drive-in restaurant—named Sandy June’s—that appears within the various Native communities represented across the anthology. For me, this drive-in restaurant is an example of the good road. It exists beyond the bounds of space, geography, and time, meeting people where they are in their lives and encouraging young readers to connect with their cultural traditions, community, and creation as they seek balance and harmony in a world that is constantly changing. Like Jesus’s parables, these stories do not simply offer something new in place of what has come before. Instead, they create space for old wisdom and new experiences to meet, inviting readers to see themselves, their communities, and their relationship with creation in new ways.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for decolonization, helping to disrupt systems of power and reclaim our erased histories. Yet, reading Jesus’s parables as Indigenous stories reminds us that stories aren’t just a tool we pick up to dismantle a broken system. They are a form of discipleship that informs the ways we move in the world, connecting us to the land, reminding us of our interrelatedness, and encouraging us to remember that we are part of a story much larger than ourselves. Stories teach us how to live in relationship with one another, with our communities, with the land, and with the generations who came before us and those yet to come. In this way, storytelling is not simply about recovering what has been lost. It is about cultivating the wisdom and relationships necessary to walk the good road.

Notes

1. This article is part of the six-part series, Preaching the Bible on Turtle Island.
2. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 386.
3. Steven Charleston (Choctaw), Ladder to the Light: An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage (Broadleaf Books, 2021), 5.