We present a search for events consistent with the production and decay of the squarks and gluinos of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) in the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron $p\overline{p}$ collider. We examined data for events containing large missing transverse energy and three or more jets. We observed no excess of events above the expected yield from standard model processes. For a choice of MSSM parameter values, we set a lower limit at the 95% confidence level on the mass of the gluino of 144 GeV ${/c}^{2}$ for all squark masses and a lower limit of 212 GeV ${/c}^{2}$ for equal squark and gluino masses.