“1 Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge. 2 He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: 3 “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. 8 Still other seed fell on good
soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.” 9 Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
10 When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11 He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that, “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
13 Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? 14 The farmer sows the word. 15 Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. 16 Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. 17 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. 18 Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; 19 but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. 20 Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.””
Let’s imagine a young lady with her family—a husband and three children. Her best friend and college roommate buys a house on the same cul-de-sac as her and the women are understandably ecstatic. Their children are happy about it as well—her three and her friend’s two. The husbands get on well and the families spend increasing time together.
The oldest child of the family who lived there first has always been a bit reserved. He is cordial enough to the new family. In time, he starts to tease them—not malicious, friendly teasing, but with an odd edge to it. A few months after moving, this new family finds their packed with flour, baking flour packed as tight as a brick—none of it on the grass, though—strange. About two week later the recently-moved father backs out of the garage and hears gunshots. He jumps out of the car only to find whippersnappers, or some call them noisemakers, flattened out under his tires. He sees that oldest child run back home. The pranks keep coming.
What does this recently-moved father do? Does he charge over to his wife’s friend’s husband and tell him he needs to keep that boy in line? Does print off legal statues to make clear to that boy that could face legal penalty for tampering with a mailbox? Will he consider whether the boy might feel threatened or jealous? Will he wonder how lonely a boy must be to have the time to do this nonsense? The recently moved father will and must respond somehow; his response depends on his interpretation which depends on where his heart is at. That’s how it always is and that’s also how it is with us and Jesus. Your response to Jesus and his words depends on your interpretation which depends on your heart; that’s the claim of this sermon.
We will study this in three points. First: concealing. Second: revealing. Third: the parable of parables. First, with verses 10-12, we will study concealing. Second, with verse 9, we will consider revealing. Third, with verse 13 we will consider the place of this parable of parables.
We begin to see this matter of heart in our first point: concealing. Jesus has many reasons for communicating and so he has many methods of communication. We all do. We speak differently with a friend of thirty years than an acquaintance of five minutes than with a police officer who just pulled us over. We get ourselves into trouble and cause great trouble when we act as if it is simple. We are all quite prone to substitute assumptions for understanding. Consider that recently moved father considering the path forward with that boy. Will he seek to understand? Would I seek to understand?
The disciples recognized the danger of assumptions in communication and so in verse 10 we read, “When [Jesus] was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.” This is the first parable we are studying, but it is not the only; verse 2 tells us, “He taught them many things by parables.” The disciples had questions about this teaching technique and so they asked. That’s most wise to do when you have questions about something—ask, don’t assume. Assuming sets up conflict because communication is quite complicated and everyone else is much more of a foreign nation to us, and we to them, than we would like to admit.
The disciples had enough respect for Jesus to want to understand why he spoke the way he did and so they asked him, “Jesus, why parables?” His response was not what any of them of any or any of us would expect; verse 11, ‘He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”’
Jesus is saying that he uses parables to both reveal and conceal. The idea is that parables are good news but only for those who are willing to be convinced by them. Those who truly seek will surely find. That’s, “the secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.” That’s the reveal. These same parables, though, conceal truth to those who are wrong in their rightness.
Whether they conceal or reveal depends on our heart. The prophet Nathan told David a parable about a man who stole and slaughtered his neighbor’s sheep for his own pleasure. King David’s wrath rose against that one of his subjects would do such a thing without yet knowing that he was the man in question. If David’s heart was unbreakable, he would have burned with rage against Nathan for tricking him. Since David’s heart was soft, he came see. As Snodgrass explained, “Parables hide in order to reveal—or as Kierkegaard observed, they deceive a person into the truth.”
Those who won’t be convinced don’t take the parables to heart and so their message is lost on them. They see but don’t perceive. They hear but don’t understand; “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
Speaking with these hearts is like training someone on driving a forklift who seems to have no comprehension that he soon will be driving a forklift or speaking to someone in customer service who seems unaware that their role is to help the customer. They see but they don’t perceive, hear but don’t understand. “They were left with parables which did not achieve their goal of enlightening. The lack of receptivity prevented further progress,” as Snodgrass describes.
This is the native way the human heart responds not just to parables but to the word of God itself. Jesus’ words on his use of parables in verse 12 come not from a description of parables but from Isaiah’s commission in Isaiah 6. It’s the description the Lord gives to the way Israel will respond to Isaiah’s message. Israel would understand the words coming out Isaiah’s mouth but it would make no difference because they didn’t want to be put right. They were dead right in their wrongness and so the word of God was concealed to them.
Jesus is saying that his parables are the same sort of litmus test. You can be rehabilitated by them or you can hear them the same way you might watch a dog bury a bone—“interesting but what does it have to do with me?” The parable’s relevance to us depends on our heart and so the parables become means of further hardening some and softening others. It’s not so much about revealing their meaning as them revealing us.
Jesus’ parables produce purposeful crises which conceal or reveal depending on our interpretation which depends on the condition of our heart—path soil, rocky soil, thorn-filled soil, receptive soil. It’s the creativity of the parables which allow them to get under our skin and so into our hearts. This makes them excellent tests of genuine responses to how we would actually respond to say a difficult neighbor child or say to Jesus himself rather than how we would like to think we would respond. “Parables are… a preeminently appropriate means for conveying the message of the kingdom of God, which… overturns some of the most basic human attitudes and values, and challenges its hearers to a radically new program of life and action,” as France explains. “It is a message which some will find too uncomfortable and will therefore oppose, while others will simply fail to see the point at all.”
There were doubtlessly any number of people who heard Jesus’ parables and said, “I don’t get a lot out of what he says—all those stories—just say what you mean.” There were others who were bothered by what he said. This, however, was no assessment on the validity of what Jesus said or on the methods he used to communicate. It rather is—as with us in our lostness—a sad rejection of what is meant to save us. “Would you condemn me to justify yourself?” as the Lord asked Job. If we are to receive from God, we must come to the point of saying, “yes, yes, I would. Please change me,” and He will. If we won’t, the truth will forever remain concealed. That’s our first point. Now let’s consider revealing; that’s our second point.
Nothing we’ve said about the parables concealing implies that they were or are purposefully inscrutable so as to leave people in the dark. The parables are invitations to pause and process. It’s you who decides whether you will. If you want to understand the parables and so be changed, you will. If you don’t want to be changed, you won’t you won’t understand. They require openness or as Jesus put it in verse 9, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Parables, illustrations, metaphors, analogies are designed to pull you into a wider appreciation. Jesus knew that we religious people, and whenever he talks with the Jews he is dealing with the quote-unquote “church” of his day, tend to reduce revelation to their own comfort zone. This is why the religious of his day were fine with hearing Leviticus 19:18 read aloud, “love your neighbor as yourself,” but were angered by the parable of the Good Samaritan although it said nothing more or less than what was intended by that verse. This is why Jesus’ hometown delighted to hear him read Isaiah but was enraged what they had never noticed in it because it showed their lostness. Creative teaching gets at God’s intention rather than the established party line but which we know whether we are good or bad, which is why it frustrates some and frees others.
Jesus thought frustrating some was worth it for freeing others. The question of gospel ministry is, “do we?” Revealing through the unexpected is God’s way. You see this in the incarnation itself—when God wanted to reveal Himself most fully He did the unthinkable and became one of us. This pushes back against our understandable but mistaken tendency to so enshrine revelation as to petrify it. You see this tendency in the Latin only movement in the Catholic Church, the King James only movement in English speaking circles and more narrowly 1611 King James only. We’ve got our own enshrinements. The spring from an understandable desire of loyalty but by their very nature wind up manufacturing idols out of forms. That was happening in Jesus’ day as well. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and zealots would all say that they were Bible people. You only see that they, in practice, weren’t open to revelation by their response to Jesus. It’s his saying truths in ways which were unfamiliar to them that creates the crisis but it’s only in this crisis that God finds people. The question is, “are we findable?”
So we will be hearing many parables—many different creative teaching methods. The metric by which to evaluate them, and other revealings of God’s word, is, not by assessing the worthiness of the method—parables, parallel poetry, law, gospel, wisdom literature—but by pondering the content. We humans get caught up on the method or the style rather than the truth or falsity of the content. That’s, in part, because it’s easier to judge method or style than it is to assess truth, and we all tend to take the easiest route in ultimate matters.
That’s dangerous in, though, as Jesus made clear in an analogy between music and his preaching and John’s saying to the Jews, ‘“we played the pipe for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “he has a demon.” The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”’ Jesus and John preached the same truth by different method in different style, but rather than receive the message, the people judged the style and method of both. That’s what we fallen humans do—we judge so as not to be judged—even to the point of judging God. We judge Him when He comes to us in unexpected ways. Jesus’ incarnation and parables seek to train us out of this death spiral.
The parables are a call to be open to God. The parables will reveal Him if you will only accept, if you will only be changed, which is what God is after—change in you and me. “Any hearing that does not result in productive living in relation to the Father is not valid hearing,” as Klyne Snodgrass explained. Do I give the parables a valid hearing? Do you? Do we give Scripture what Jesus would consider a valid hearing? That’s the lesson of this first parable—are we willing to accept what is revealed? We see the import of it in our last point: the parable of parables.
Jesus gave the reflections on purpose which we’ve been studying alongside this parable of the sower because he considers it to be the master key; it opens any door; as verse 13 puts it, ‘Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?”’ It’s all about receptivity—if you aren’t good soil who wants to hear and change, how could you accept that you are the lost sheep, the unexpectedly invited guest, or the neighbor of the wounded traveler, or the neighbor of that annoying neighbor boy? If you aren’t open, if you aren’t willing to be surprised into the truth, you’ve shut your mind and you’ve shut the kingdom doors to yourself.
Receptivity is that important, but Jesus’ words on the importance of this parable have been misunderstood. Due to currents in Greek thought, people came to assume that this parable was the master key because it unlocked the other parables by saying they, like this one, have allegorical elements; so just as the seed, as Jesus explains here, is the word of God, so in the other parables everything important must have a correspondence too. This is how we get readings of the Good Samaritan which teach the robber who beats the traveler is the devil, the priest and Levite who walk by stand for the Law and the Prophets while the Good Samaritan who helps is Jesus, the inn is the church, the two coins given to the innkeeper are the two sacraments, and so forth. This line of interpretation dominated for centuries and spread so widely that the standard way to interpret all of Scripture came to include finding not only its literal meaning but also its allegorical meaning. The Reformation broke with this, but it was so engrained that in the sermons I’m reading on Exodus to prepare for the morning sermons, Luther adds a few pages of allegorical interpretation to the end of every sermon.
It’s taken years more of church history to begin to read specifically parables without such allegorical trimmings. I think all this, though, is instructive of how very prone we are to miss the point, which is part of the point of the parables. It’s sadly ironic that we took stories designed to surprise us into understanding and think we’ve understood them by taking all the surprise out of them. It’s yet another sign of how grievously lost we all are and how continually in need of a Savior we remain—both me and you.
Can you be saved? Will you be willing to be saved? That is the work of grace—opening you up to God, “finding you can change, learning you were wrong.” That’s being receptive soil. It’s about God’s work in you. His work is unexpected. The parables don’t begin God’s unforeseen work. He’s always been working in ways unforeseeable by people like us. The parables like Jesus with Saul on the way to Damascus blind you for a moment so that you can begin to truly see. They conceal for a moment so as to reveal. They aim for response.
So, how are you responding? How do you in your lostness respond to God searching for you? How do you respond to receiving His invitation to His party? How do you respond to your neighbor—as challenging as that curious boy or that beaten traveler might be? How do you respond to Christ who you will find the more curious the more you get to know him? Your life is your answer and will show that grace has either been concealed or revealed to you. Amen.