“But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the
one who hears the word and understands it.”
Matthew 13:23a
(From the Parable of the Sower)
(From the Parable of the Sower)
When
we hear a story like the Parable of the Sower, what does each one of us hear? Can
we personally relate to it, or is it a story that goes in one ear and out the
other?
Jesus
says in this and other parables, “Let him who has ears hear.” Jesus gave his audiences parables to make
them think before believing.
Belief without thought is an exercise in
mindlessness and can lead to spiritual blindness.
Parables
are minimal stories that have multiple layers.
Jesus’ purpose in telling
parables was to help his audience, to help us understand the Kingdom, the realm of God,
which from today’s perspective encompasses the whole of creation, the immensity
of the universe itself. Jesus generally
provided an explanation of his parables, but if one studies these explanations,
one frequently ends up with wanting more clarification, and that’s where
listening with one’s heart, one’s mind, and one’s soul comes in.
One
can apply and interpret a parable any number of ways, but there are three
general questions that can help us understand them:
1)
What
is this story saying to me and about me?
2)
What
is this story saying about the world I live in?
3)
What
is this story saying about God’s relationship to me and how I ought to relate
to the world I know?
The
context, the language, and the metaphors may reflect a different time, but
parables always retain a current application and meaning. In today’s gospel the
seed is presented as the word about the Kingdom. As such, the word of the Kingdom is everywhere,
because the realm of God is all of God’s creation, and it is found in the
everydayness of our lives – God’s voice can be heard in the daily events by those
who are seeking its guidance, hearing it with an open heart and receiving it with an open mind.
In
a portion of Matthew 13 that was skipped over in the lectionary’s presentation
of this parable, Jesus says of his audience at the time “Though seeing, they do
not see; though hearing they do not hear.”
(Matthew 13:13b New Revised
Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education
of the National Council of the Church of Christ in the USA ). [1] “Seeing
but not seeing and hearing but not hearing” is a condition that many religious
people have because they have been indoctrinated to believe without thinking,
to believe without understanding, which results in becoming closeminded and
hardhearted .
This is not Jesus’s way. Jesus wants us to consider the lilies of the
field and God’s concern for birds in order to understand the Kingdom so that
faith rooted in God’s love carries us through each moment of our lives.[2]
So
for a moment let’s think through Jesus’ explanation of this parable:
What
about the path or the wayside, as is interpreted in some translations? Am I walking on the wayside of life – just
going through the motions – not really paying attention to what is really going
on, not hearing anything, not trying to understand what’s taking place in life?
The seed is there, but so are those who
would distort it, deprive it of its meaning, to tell me the Kingdom isn’t so or
isn’t for me. On the other hand, am I
the devil’s advocate for those passing by or who are living on the fringe of
life? Am I one who deprives the kingdom
of its meaning?
What
about the dry and rocky situations? The
seed is there also, but am I too dried out – to concrete in what I believe and
how I think to allow the word to take root?
Do I dry others out with my hot wind and rock solid ways?
What
about the thorny situations life throws our way? The seed is there also, but do these thorny
situations get in the way, stifle the word’s growth in me? Am I choking on the issues
and concerns I’m constantly trying to tend to?
Am I a thorn? Do I choke out the
spiritual growth that has rooted in other people’s lives?
It
is easy to overlook the seed of God’s realm. The word is so prevalent that we
are prone to tune it out because we’re good at habitually tuning things out,
especially things we don’t want to hear and sometimes God is telling us things
in the everydayness of our lives that we don’t want to acknowledge. And yet,
God’s presence is constant, God’s word will not nor can it be silenced.
Jesus’
approach to tending the garden of the Kingdom is for us to tend to the garden
of one’s heart and soul, the core of one’s being, the soil in which God’s
kingdom is planted. Tending takes time. One has to work the soil of one’s soul - put
faith in action – recognize and utilize one’s daily mistakes and failures as
fertilizer to learn, to understand and nourish the kingdom’s growth, to water
it deeply through mindful meditation and contemplation - to trim away excess
and to prevent our own weediness and thorny issues from distracting us in tending
the turf given us in in this life.
Every
human has this seed. We are its casings. It’s called in the
image of God. When we were breathed to
life by God’s Spirit, he made us sowers of the seed we contain – Seed sowing seed.[3]
Not
everyone is aware that they carry this seed in them; that they can hear the
word of God in their own life experiences; in the everydayness of their lives;
that they can awaken and bloom in God’s garden, the realm of God here and now. It should be one of the reasons we come, to
this place of worship – to be reminded of our task as sowers, to think deeply about and ponder
God’s realm that surrounds us, to be tilled by prayer, watered and nourished by
sacrament and scripture so that when we leave this place we’re ready to sow the
seeds given us.
It’s
not so much about being careful where we sow word of the Kingdom, but that we
sow and nourish it indiscriminately because God’s seed, God’s word, is
everywhere, in every situation – waiting to be heard, waiting to be understood
– waiting to grow.
* * * * * * * * * *
Until next time, stay faithful.