Today’s parable calls to mind my last visit to the Holy Land where I stood on the shore of the
The ground slopes up steeply from the seashore in several places and curves sharply around several narrow inlets just to the west of
If he were to get out a little way on the water in a small boat, he said, we would be able to hear his every word. He was referring to today’s parable and Jesus’ ability to speak to large crowds by doing that very thing. When Jesus told them to “listen”, they became silent and could hear his every word.
Hearing is one thing, understanding is another. He spoke to them in parables. Parables are stories in word pictures, revealing spiritual truths. The Hebrew and Aramaic word for parable means “allegory,” “riddle,” or “proverb.”
The scriptures, especially the gospels, are filled with parables - images drawn from daily life in the world to represent and communicate the deep things of God. Parables give us a glimpse of Him “whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways.” (Is. 55. 8-9)
As the mission of Isaiah in the Old Testament was to open the eyes of Israel to see the acts of God, so the parables of Jesus are intended to open the eyes of his hearers to the truth and lead them to produce the fruits of righteousness.
Parables challenge the hearer and call forth faith to perceive the mysteries of the
Remember the Pharisee Nicodemus’ dialogue with Jesus? His intellect took him only so far in his understanding of the idea of new birth. Even the disciples find the message hard to understand. While Jesus taught the same message to all, it is the simple and innocent who seem to be open to it.
As he said in last week’s gospel, God has hidden the mysteries from the wise of the world because they choose to trust in their own fallen wisdom and judgment rather than God’s. Spiritual enlightenment is essentially a connection of faith in the Person, words, and deeds of Jesus the Christ.
In today’s parable, Jesus teaches how the kingdom comes and why, in some cases, it is not received. It is a story of failure and success. Just like seed in the field, some was going to waste, but at last, some would bear fruit.
His was a cryptic message. Jesus wanted his hearers to struggle with what he was saying, to talk about it among themselves, to think it through. When he said, “If you have ears, then hear!” What he meant was, “I know it is not obvious; you are going to have to work it out for yourselves.”
Jesus speaks God’s word, the word which announces the kingdom. As Isaiah saw, the word that goes out and does its own work in people’s hearts and lives. That is what some kind of words do; they change the way people are inside.
But not everyone who heard Jesus’ words uses them like this. Still, today, not everyone who hears them has the right reactions. Christ’ interpretation of the parable is, therefore, both very specific to Jesus’ own context and very relevant to Christian practice in our own day. What he said was this.
Some allow the evil one to snatch the words away at once. Most of us have experienced cynical and sneering reactions. Some seem to be enthusiastic, but when the gospel starts to make demands on them they quickly show that the word never really went down and became rooted in their hearts.
Some really do have a deep rooted hearing of the word, but then allow other things to take root in their hearts as well; like thorns the other things choke the delicate plant of the word. These are all ways of getting stuck, if you will, in one’s faith journey. Others might call it reaching a plateau.
As we hear today’s parable, we should ask ourselves: are we, too, stuck somewhere in our journey to God? Are we in danger of these reactions? How deep are our spiritual roots? Are they sturdy enough to withstand the present crisis?
However, today’s parable is one that ends on a happy note in spite of much apparent loss; there will be a glorious sure crop. Jesus is warning the disciples and the future church of these pitfalls, and at the same time encouraging the disciples and the church. Their work and hope as well as Jesus’ work and ours will not be in vain. The emphasis is on “understanding” the Word.
Like the crowds on the lakeshore that day who listened to Jesus, our task again and again as we read and hear scripture and think about God’s work in our own day, is to think it through, to figure it out, and to ask ourselves what does it mean to me? What does it tell me about God? What does it tell me my relationship to God should be?
The way to bear fruit is to hear and understand. This takes time, and sometimes hard work. A quick glance at scripture, an occasional sitting in church, or a study group and being entertained by some new idea, is probably not enough.
We have to hear and understand until God’s word takes proper root. Christianity is not about nice little stories to make us feel better. It is about what God is doing in the world, what he has already done in Jesus and what He wants to do through us today.
In opening to us the door to the kingdom of heaven, the parables of Jesus help us to love God and to know Him, to understand and believe His grace, mercy, and forgiveness, and to order our lives according to His Word.
When hearing brings understanding we have become kingdom - people, bearing fruit in our own right. Yielding “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” AMEN+
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