Jesus Limericks
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.
Mark 4:11-12
The Book of John the Baptizer 8:23-27
The bona fide impotent breeder
Disburses paternity seaward.
Exilic adoptions’
Veridic decoction
Of mercy becomes the bequeather.
The Sufi Sayings of Jesus 6
A vacuous scribal redactor
Is sealed with immaculate plaster.
Latrine without gaskets,
He’s sound as a casket
To cherish the feculent splatter.
The Sufi Sayings of Jesus 31
A mongrel left dead in the street
Develops an ominous reek,
But lately, the skin’s
Rearranged in a grin:
The sunlight has whitened its teeth.
The Gospel of Mark 2:21-22
Raw fabric recoils from tatters
Immersed in inaugural lather,
And fresh fermentations
Take petillant patience
To burst through their moribund bladders.
The Gospel of Mark 4:3-9
Seeds sown by the roadside are eaten,
On bouldery shallows sunbeaten,
And sprouts among brambles
Are bound in the scramble.
Good soil gives fruit to its season.
The Gospel of Mark 4:26-29
The farmer’s incurably artless;
Persistent through idling darkness,
Fastidious polling
And feckless cajoling,
The kernel pronounces the harvest.
The Gospel of Mark 4:30-33
A minuscule granule of mustard
Profusely proliferates upwards,
Where undulant boughs
Indulgently house
The shadowy perches of buzzards.
The Gospel of Mark 9:43-49
Your eyes are incitements to scandal;
Apprehension’s pernicious to handle.
Consider excision:
Holistic perdition
Eschews the demurely dismantled.
The Gospel of Mark 10:25-27
The affluent shamelessly wheedle,
Supposing beneficence venal.
It’s comparably facile
Compressing a camel
To enter the eye of a needle.
The Gospel of Mark 11:12-14
The nexus of reaper and eaten
Encroaches on desolate seasons.
Deficient in figs,
Deciduous twigs
Are duly convicted of treason.
The Gospel of Mark 12:1-9
The lessor’s belligerent tenants
Despise his parleying lieutenants’
Solicitous offerings
And slaughter his offspring,
Incurring superlative penance.
The Gospel of Mark 12:41-44
Parishioners forfeit their coppers,
But only the dowager pauper
Resigns without qualms
Her dwindling bronze;
Privation enriches the offer.
The Gospel of Mark 13:34-37
The slave emphasizes routine,
Suspecting that Master’s regime
Recurs on the morrow,
At midnight or cockcrow,
Suspending an indolent dream.
The Gospel of Mark 14:50-52
A rude revelation befell
The neophyte-turned-infidel
Who halted kidnapping
By sloughing his wrappings,
Absconding swathed au naturel.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:24-30
Whose wheat intermingles with tares
Too intimately to prepare
Its coming ordeal
As kindling or meal
Permits interim laissez-faire.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:33
The daintiest morsel of leaven
Essays its prospective dimensions,
Conspiring to grow
While copious dough
Affords comprehensive infection.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:44
Concerning the prospector’s treasure’s
Procurement from coveted hectares,
Divesting for now his
Entire endowment’s
Quite fetching, in the altogether.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:45-46
Peculiar, immaculate pearl,
My mercantile hagglings are puerile.
Would that I could marshal
Inadequate marbles,
Exchange quintessential for plural.
The Gospel of Matthew 13:47-48
Disporting with fishermen’s augury,
The ocean disgorges a quandary
In flesh to appraise—
Debris, or filets?—
Its ichthyological congeries.
The Gospel of Matthew 18:23-34
The slave abrogating the judgments
He warrants (imploring indulgence)
While clapping his debtors
In caviling fetters
Receives reparation endungeoned.
The Gospel of Matthew 20:1-19
The minister’s vineyard-plantation
Remunerates mean cultivation
Discounting the measure
Or merit of effort
(Disburses rehearsed compensation).
The Gospel of Matthew 21:28-31
The siblings symmetrically differed
On tilling the lineal vineyard:
To promise and shirk,
Or protest but work.
The filial loyalist dithered.
The Gospel of Matthew 22:2-14
If livestock are slain for the banquet
And invitee turnout is languid,
Take strangers for guests,
But give underdressed
Auditions proscription and anguish.
The Gospel of Matthew 24:43
Uncertainty only prepares
Politely ambiguous snares.
The pilferer crawls
Through moldering walls,
Discovering you unawares.
The Gospel of Matthew 25:1-13
The bridegroom repudiates virgins
Penurious through inadvertence.
Unhappily, campers
With oilless lanterns
Must weather the wedding with merchants.
The Gospel of Matthew 25:14-30
For slaves on appointive allowance,
Ascendancy hangs in the balance;
Trustees too equivocal
To hazard the principal
Are underperforming their talents.
First Corinthians 3:11-15
An axiomatic foundation
Facilitates edification;
Gold, timber and argent
Reach differently ardent
Conclusions around conflagration.
First Corinthians 12:21-26
An eye can’t disparage a fist.
Your disparate parts coexist
Through frailties made crucial,
Disgraces enscrupled,
Voluptuousnesses eclipsed.
The Gospel of Luke 6:48-49
A groundbreaking takes dedication
Derivative of its substratum,
Or else the absorbent
Assemblage treats torrents
As signals for disembarkation.
The Gospel of Luke 7:41-43
Remissions are morally rarefied
By weighing forsaken denarii;
It’s tenfold more ethical
Leftward for decimals
(Any defaulter can verify).
The Gospel of Luke 10:30-37
A Levite despoiled by murderers
Is spurned by his erstwhile co-worshippers.
A hated Samaritan
Deigns to take care of him:
Neighborhood’s curious curvature.
The Gospel of Luke 11:5-8
If neighbors esteem your exhorting
For dinner at one in the morning
Insufficient inducement,
Continue your nuisance;
Aversion defers to extorting.
The Gospel of Luke 11:11-13
Will a father besought for a sturgeon
Provision his son with a serpent?
Nor could he apportion
A pitiless scorpion
In answer to innocent urgence.
The Gospel of Luke 11:21-22
A warrior’s martial equivalents
Dismantle his panoplied vigilance.
Bereft of his weapons,
He renders possession
To weaklings abusing his impotence.
The Gospel of Luke 12:16-20
Proprietors tout the allowance
Attending increasing endowments,
Inanely complacent
As eager assailants
Contrive their eternal impoundment.
The Gospel of Luke 14:8-11
At banquet, celebrity softens
Respect for convivial commons.
Correctively placed
Is roundly disgraced,
Unless you begin at the bottom.
The Gospel of Luke 14:12-14
Exclusively spreading your larder
For peers is circuitous barter.
Munificent deeds
Remediate need,
Disclaiming the services garnered.
The Gospel of Luke 14:28-30
Consider your sponsorship powers
Discreetly; constructing a tower
Encourages gossips,
Who scoff a colossus
Conspicuously unembowered.
The Gospel of Luke 14:31-32
A savvy commander researches
If everyone’s soldiers concerted
Meet tactical cogency,
Whether diplomacy
Carries the balance of courage.
The Gospel of Luke 14:34-35
If seasoning’s flavor’s erased,
What spices rekindle its taste?
But salt without savor’s
Fit neither for nature
Nor churning the secular waste.
The Gospel of Luke 15:4-6
A fitly assiduous shepherd
Will rescue a single defector,
Whose ninety-nine fellows,
Behind in the meadow,
Are only beseiged by conjectures.
The Gospel of Luke 15:8-9
Although silver pieces are formally
Denominated for conformity
As desiderata,
A vanishing drachma
Acquires de facto priority.
The Gospel of Luke 15:11-32
Between qualifying descendants,
Protracting domestic attendance
Is uneconomical:
Only the prodigal
Reaps dividends from repentance.
The Gospel of Luke 16:1-9
The shrewdly audacious embezzler
Auditions his master’s successor
By cooking accounts;
Remitted amounts
Reflect the felonious ledger.
The Gospel of Luke 18:2-5
The widow petitions the arbiter
To wield his position to pardon her.
Afraid of sustaining
Her fiercest inveighing,
He makes the haranguer a harbinger.
Second Timothy 2:20-21
Your villa is riddled with vessels
Extravagant and excremental.
Through earnest ablutions
Performed in pollution,
Distinctions are inconsequential.
The Gospel of John 2:10
Cascades of immaculate tipple
Subside with the slackening trickle
Of guests still undoused,
But only the soused
Make profligacy sacrificial.
The Gospel of John 12:24-25
Survival’s forsaking your peers’
Subsistence affixed to the ears;
Terrestrial furrows’
Funereal burrows
Are uncultivated frontiers.
The Epistle of James 1:23-24
Discernment’s progressively clearer
For spectators traveling nearer,
But only a creature
Discovers its features
Anew on approaching a mirror.
The Epistle to the Hebrews 9:16-17
Determining whether a testament’s
Acquitted is strictly an estimate
If its architect
Can ever defect:
His extermination’s prerequisite.
The Gospel of Thomas 3
Who seeks uninhabited skies,
Which birds have forever belied,
Moreover imagines
The nethermost fathoms
Bereft of their wriggling fry.
The Gospel of Thomas 7
If humans’ predation enlightens
Grotesquely carnivorous lions,
Then Lion bedamns
Comestible Man,
Whose stomach’s the moral horizon.
The Gospel of Thomas 21
Adults are naively remorseless
Annexing a juvenile fortress.
Debunkers dislodge
Embroidered facades,
But blithely relinquish the corpus.
The Gospel of Thomas 32
Estates overtopping their pinnacles
Make fortification formidable
Where altitudes rise
Unparalleleized,
Ascending inversely-invisible.
The Gospel of Thomas 60
The annual supplicant gorges
On nature’s insipid resources,
Whose paramount cookery’s
Grounded in butchery—
Tailoring derelict corpses.
The Gospel of Thomas 97
An urn with immoderate plenty
For burden weighs comparably gently,
Concealing the fickle
Interior’s trickle
Until it’s entirely empty.
The Gospel of Thomas 98
A freshly-aspiring assassin,
Awaiting his first liquefaction,
Stilettos the wall
To better recall
His accuracy and dispassion.
The Gospel of Thomas 102
The ox is an excellent eater,
Unless opportunity’s meager:
A dog in the trough
Is blocking enough
For both, but allotting to neither.
The Shepherd of Hermas Man. 5.1.5
Pure wormwood adulterates nectar.
Evoked from the slenderest vector,
Concocting a stagnant,
Dispirited absinthe,
The worst realizes the lesser.
The Shepherd of Hermas Man. 11.1.15
The singular empty carafe
Won’t fill on another’s behalf;
Though craftily left
Beside, it’s bereft
Of any gratuitous draughts.
The Shepherd of Hermas Man. 11.1.20
A bit of itinerant hail
Attains an impulse to impale.
Perennial drops
Disintegrate rocks;
Celestial jetsam prevails.
The Shepherd of Hermas Sim. 2.1.3
Abundance erupts from the vine
Wherever its tendrils entwine
The vertical elm,
Whose limbs underwhelm
Before that precipitous climb.
The Shepherd of Hermas Sim. 3.1.3
Until the survivors awaken,
The woods are autumnally chastened.
Deserted expanses
Delineate branches
Above camouflaged hibernations.
The Shepherd of Hermas Sim. 5.2.1-11
A slave both obligingly plotting
The requisite margins and opting
To pledgelessly weed,
Once rightfully freed,
Is eligible for adopting.