Matthew 13:1 - 23
We’ve just heard one of the two
parables where Jesus tells his disciples what the parable means.
Most of the time we don’t have a record of whether he explained a
parable or not. And I wonder if there’s a reason for that. Now
I’ve been fortunate in knowing some very holy people, and I think a
sign of holiness is a real sense of humor. Jesus’ life story, as
much as we know of it, was recorded by four people who probably were
connected to the apostles in some way, but they themselves were
probably not the apostles. After all, Matthew, Mark and John do not
have an author’s name attached to them, and we think Luke, not an
apostle, by the way, wrote Luke and Acts because there is a place in
the Acts of the Apostles where Luke joins Paul on his missionary
endeavors and begins to write in the first person instead of the
third. And since the writers of the gospels were writing theology
and believed Jesus was divine as well as human, they did not
emphasize his humor. But you can see hints of it. He nicknames
Peter “the Rock” and that’s kind of irony because Peter will
deny Jesus after insisting that he won’t. He calls James and John
“sons of thunder” when they ask whether they should call down
fire on a Samaritan village. A great moment is when Jesus brings the
little girl back from the dead and when the parents are standing
there with their mouths hanging open, he turns to them and says,
“give her something to eat!”. And you can find many more hints
if you are listening carefully, because holy people have light hearts
and a sense of humor -- just read an honest biography of a modern
saint.
So with the parable we just heard, and
with Jesus’ explanation of what it means, I am not going to try to
explain the parable, or the explanation. But I think we can look at
this parable as another example of Jesus’ sense of humor. And it
may open things up a bit for us.
If you were a first century
Palestinian farmer you would be very careful of your seed. You would
keep it dry and bug - free until it was time to sew your crop.
Before you threw any seed down you would till the soil, and if you
could, you would wait until a little rain had fallen. If you lived
near a stream, you might haul some buckets of water up and pour them
over your small plot. And then having made the ground as welcoming
as you could, you would carefully put the seed in the best ground.
After that you would be guarding it from animals that ate seeds and
the shoots of the plants that you were counting on to provide you
with your livelihood -- and seed for the next year. It was a big
deal to put down seed, and a real farmer would never dance around
tossing handfuls of seed onto rocky ground, into thorn bushes, onto a
road. So the picture Jesus paints must have seemed very strange to
the apostles. And Jesus goes on to point out the obvious; the seed
that fell on the road, the thorn bushes, and the rocky ground didn’t
do so well; only that which fell on good soil.
Maybe the apostles have missed the
main point. aFter all if the sewer is God, it’s like Jesus says in
many other places, God is extravagant; he is always pouring out his
blessings on the deserving and undeserving; He makes not distinction
about whether you are a sinner or a saint, he’s raining grace upon
you, even if he knows you are going to reject it, even if he knows
that you would rather spend eternity alone rather than at his
extravagant banquet.
So the apostles ask, “Explain this
parable!” And Jesus goes on to explain it -- with an explanation
that a four year old could understand, and I know because I can
remember when I was four years old. And the explanation does nothing
except show you and I how we can distance ourselves from the main
message. Jesus never forces us, always gives us a way to
depersonalize his message to us. Because I can nod with the apostles
and agree that there are people who just don’t get what Jesus is
talking about, and then there is me, who will bear good fruit
someday. Maybe. When I get time. After I get through this next
crisis in my life.
Maybe the parable means that if God is
extravagant and limitless, and I am created in his image and
likeness, and if Jesus tells me that I can only save my life if I
lose it, and if he says that the measure with which I measure out
will be the measure used to reward me, I better imitate God; imitate
Jesus, who gave everything; imitate the saints, who gave all that
they could; imitate holy married couples who bring new souls into the
world and live to pass on their faith to their children; imitate holy
priests who get up in the middle of the night to bring the sacrament
to someone who is dying. Because that’s the point.
So listen once again to Jesus, who
over and over again tells us that we will only find true happiness if
we give ourselves away, if we empty ourselves out, if we sell
everything so that we can have the pearl of great price. And the
wonderful thing is, Jesus promises to make up for our lack of
generosity -- he will give himself away. But you and I have to at
least have some skin in the game.
