Text: Matthew 13:1-9,18-23
The college I went to considered the Bible a “great book,” and thus it was a text that we all had to read, at least large parts of it, for about a month and a half of our sophomore year. For the first New Testament seminar the assigned reading was two of the gospels, Matthew and Mark, in their entirety from beginning to end. I had a friend who had been raised Catholic, went to mass and Catholic schools all her upbringing, still went to mass at the time of college, who said with amazement just before that seminar: all those stories I’ve heard all my life, they’re in a book; they’re all there fit together—put in order—arranged—in a book! She was a Christian of the sort that never read the Bible on her own, she just heard it in church, a bit here, a bit there. And she was astonished to discover the gospel text as a whole.
One of the things we hear much about when we hear the pieces of the Bible read in church is parables. We learn that Jesus was always speaking in parables; that parables were Jesus’ preferred vehicle for teaching. And so we hear some parable read in church and we think, Jesus told a lot of parables.
What I noticed for the first time, just a week or so ago as I started to prepare this sermon, is that there are no parables in Matthew’s gospel prior to chapter 13. Matthew goes a long way before he has Jesus speak a single parable, and then he puts a whole bunch of them, seven, into this one chapter. Today’s reading is the first parable Jesus told.
And that gives it special significance. It is a parable about parables. Indeed, Matthew says in verse 18, it is “the parable of the sower.” He doesn’t call it a parable about seeds. It is a parable about Jesus. It is a parable about the one who taught in parables.
Note how the chapter begins: The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea side. By making a point to tell us something that St. Mark, in his version of this parable, does not tell us, namely, that Jesus went out of the house, Matthew draws a parallel right at the start between Jesus and the sower. In verse 3, the parable itself begins: Behold, a sower went forth to sow. Jesus went forth from the house in order to teach, and he began his teaching by saying that a sower went forth to sow. Jesus is the sower, who has come forth to teach us.
The seed falls in different places; some of it fails to grow into a mature plant, but some of it succeeds and produces fruit. In the interpretation, Matthew causes the emphasis to be on the contrast between understanding and the failure to understand. The seed is the word of the kingdom. If it is not understood, then the devil (the evil one) snatches it away. But if it is understood, much fruit is borne.
Thus is this parable a remarkable summation of the whole gospel. Jesus has come forth from his Father, to give us the word of the kingdom. Some people fail to understand that word, while others do understand. The particular seeds are particular teachings about the kingdom. Up next in chapter 13, we will have the parables of the wheat and tares, the mustard seed, the lump of dough, a treasure, a pearl, and good and bad fish. They all speak of characteristics of the kingdom, things Jesus wants to teach us. The kingdom is valuable, it involves separation, it is desirable, it is final or ultimate. But before these many parables, there is the first parable of all, the parable of the sower, and it turns out to be a little story that contains the big story.
Yet having seen all that, we are left with a question which is raised by, and not answered by, this parable. What does it mean to receive the word with understanding? What is it that we are to understand?
If the people who hear Jesus teach (presumably including you and I) are the soil, then (the parable says) there is a kind of understanding which we already have which will determine whether or not we are able to obtain the further understanding which Jesus is giving in the seed or “word” that he is planting. That is to say, the soil already needs to be a certain kind of soil (an understanding soil) before it can understand what Jesus is saying. Conversely, on the negative side, the soil that cannot receive Jesus’ word with understanding is a soil that had already failed to understand.
Jesus’ parables, then, seem to amplify an antecedent condition. If you have understanding, then you will understand more. But if you lack understanding, you will understand even less when he’s done. This is odd.
What is Jesus pointing to? It is helpful to recall that [as Michael Polanyi says] we know more than we can say. There are, it seems to me, unspeakable truths. Not unspeakable because we are inarticulate or clumsy or limited, but truths inherently unspeakable: even God couldn’t speak them. You know this is the case in many ordinary things of life. Imagine reading a book about riding a bicycle. It could tell you the physics of it. It could give you helpful hints. But the book (that is to say, any account that’s in words) cannot speak the truth of what riding a bicycle is. There are truths that cannot be put into words.
. . . The Lord looked down from heaven and saw that the people had gone far astray. They were harming each other exceedingly. They weren’t able to work together. They continually failed to be friends with one another. And the Lord thought long and hard about what he would do until, at last, he sat down at his desk, dusted off his Olympia typewriter, and with furious strokes sent down to earth a nasty memo.
Of course, that’s not what he did. But if the truth could be put into words by anyone, surely it could be put into words by God. The truth about me and thee, the truth about bicycles and mortgages and relationships, the truth about understanding—it cannot be captured entirely in words. Where then was truth put, if not into words? It is not a cheap homiletical trick to say the truth was put into human flesh, for that is the profoundest statement of our faith. The Word was made flesh. God came not into the world as a manifesto, but as a man.
It was not all clarity and light to be near Jesus. Walking with him, hearing his parables, observing his miracles—this didn’t give plain understanding. Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling: “One is stirred, one harks back to those beautiful times, sweet tender longings lead one to the goal of one’s desire, to see Christ walking about in the promised land. One forgets the fear, the distress, the paradox.” So the Gospels record: Jesus was surrounded by people who didn’t get it. “Why don’t you show us plainly?” they’d say. “Why don’t you tell us?” But he can’t show them plainly, can’t tell them: the problem is in the soil before the word comes; the word alone cannot convey the truth. How frustrating this must be! God, can’t you just tell me what’s wrong, and I’ll fix it. I’ll try. Just tell me. Why won’t you speak to me?
No one can tell us what’s wrong with us; no words can lay out the cure. But words can be used in a suggestive way, to try to orient us towards a truth that is unspeakable. One suggestion, often made, is that it has something to do with our heart, that our hearts are not as pliant and supple as they ought to be. A sower went out to sow, but before the day was out he was strung up to die, and the soil that was on the wayside looked up at him, and softened, and understood.
