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“Why do you speak to the people in parables?” Jesus’ disciples asked him. And Jesus said, ”To you it has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but not to them. For to those who have will more be given, and those who have not will lose even what they have. That is why I speak to them in parables, because Isaiah spoke the truth about them when he said that they look without seeing, and they listen without hearing or understanding.” Get it? Instead of giving us two or three main points to memorize about God or the kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells a story. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like this,” he says. And then he adds, ”He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Or perhaps something like, “Go, and do likewise.” We have listened and listened to the parable of the sower for two thousand years, but we have never really heard it, Robert Capon says. We have not understood it because, like the people in Isaiah’s day and the people of Jesus’ day, we have stopped our ears and shut our eyes and have put too much weight on the “explanation” at the end of the parable rather than on the parable itself. And this is because we like test-passing religion with clear answers to life’s questions, says Capon. “Lord, why don’t you just give us the answers straight out?” we ask with Jesus' disciples. “Why don’t you just tell us the right answers to life, the right answers about God? Tell us what we should know and think, and what we should do. Wouldn’t that be a lot easier on everyone?” But as I read this parable, that doesn’t seem to be the way of God or Jesus. As I hear this story, God simply sows his Word and his grace with extravagant wastefulness, on any kind of soil, without discrimination, just as his sun shines on the just and the unjust alike. And then God waits, and leaves the rest to us. “Whoever has ears, let him hear,” says Jesus. Another thing I hear in this story is that God’s extravagance pays off. His seed produces abundantly, somewhere, somehow. It’s a story, it seems to me, about the profligate, indiscriminate grace and love of God, to which there is no right answer, only a response. And response is certain. The kingdom of heaven is like that, says Jesus. Now this good news is not original with Jesus, of course. Just a few moments before the Gospel reading and eight hundred years before Jesus, God spoke the same word through his prophet Isaiah: “Come to me and listen to my words,” says the Lord. “Hear me and you will have life. I shall make an everlasting covenant with you – to love you faithfully as I loved David.... Seek the Lord while he is to be found. Call to him while he is close at hand.... Let the people return to the Lord, who will take pity on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, says the Lord, nor are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways high above your ways and my thoughts high above your thoughts. As the rain and snow come down from the heavens and do not return to the heavens without watering the earth, making it produce grain and giving seed for sowing and bread for eating, so it is with my word that comes forth from my mouth; it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish that for which I sent it.” But Jesus offers this truth as a story, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. And some do hear and respond. Mary Clark, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, grew up in a mansion in Beverly Hills, California. Dinah Shore and Cary Grant were her neighbors. Twice married, divorced, and the mother of seven grown children, in 1977 she sold her belongings and went to Tijuana, Mexico, just across the border from San Diego. She had been making church-sponsored relief visits to Tijuana for some time, but this time she was moving there. In her late forties, with her children’s support, she decided to enter the religious life, to become a nun in an order with a convent in Tijuana. But Mother Antonia does not live in her order’s house. Instead, she is the only sister of her order permitted to live outside – or, depending on how you look at it, on the inside – because her home is a prison cell in La Mesa, one of Mexico’s border-town prisons. She rises at five o’clock each morning for an hour of silent prayer. At six o’clock she begins her rounds of the cell blocks, distributing clothing, blankets, soap, and love and hope to prisoners. She visits the prison hospital, counsels new inmates, and meets with prisoners’ families. In the time that she has lived at the prison she has mediated between desperate inmates and nervous guards and has helped some of the most recalcitrant convicts accept responsibility for their crimes and ask forgiveness from their victims. Shortly after she became a nun, Mother Antonia convinced both her convent superior and the warden to let her live in the prison, and for twenty-eight years – she is seventy-eight now – her ministry has been a ministry of sowing seeds of encouragement and grace, seeking to win over inmates with small acts of kindness. Like the Sower in today’s parable, Mother Antonia sows extravagantly and indiscriminately, sows seeds of joy and reconciliation, seeds of encouragement and love, without regard for the soil it falls on and with the confidence of Isaiah and Jesus that somewhere, somehow, through the power and love of God, it will take root and grow and save lives. Her confidence has not been disappointed. Mother Antonia is the most important person at La Mesa, the current warden believes. “She brings hope to men and women here, and they find hope in themselves. She spreads the love of God.” And lives are changed. “Whoever has ears to hear,” she must have heard somewhere. Perhaps she had heard the parable of the Sower. And maybe that of the Good Samaritan as well. “Go, and do likewise,” is how Jesus ended that story. God’s power is like that, it seems. Like seed. It’s not very big. In fact, sometimes it is so small you can hardly see it at all with your eyes or feel it with your fingers. It’s like those small seeds in the little packages you buy in the spring, seeds so tiny and light that you wonder if they really put any seed at all in your package. God’s power is like that, and it just floats down onto the world like seed and sunshine and rain, and is hidden in the earth and disappears. Literally disappears. Like seed. But not without bringing forth what God sent it to bring forth. It’s a mystery. Like sunshine and rain, and seed. But what about the waste? we wonder. In today’s story, seed is just thrown everywhere, helter-skelter, indiscriminately. Wouldn’t a prudent farmer sow his seed where he knew the ground had first been properly worked and cultivated and fertilized? If I were God, that’s the way I would do it. But you know, the more I think about this, the more I think of the Church. The Church is really a very wasteful place. The Bible contains thousands and thousands of pages of spiritual wisdom, but it’s scandalous how little time we actually give it. Sunday School teachers work hard on lessons for their classes every week, and we are disappointed that so few children are consistently there. Preachers work for hours and hours on sermons, but on a given Sunday more people are at the mountains or at a ball game or just taking it easy than are in church. We sing our hymns accompanied by a good-sized, expensive organ, when just an old upright piano would suffice. Often as not, we could make do with a smaller building rather than a larger one. It’s all very inefficient, wasteful. But maybe that’s just the way it is with the Word of God. Maybe that’s the way it is with forgiveness and love, with grace. God just throws it out on rocky soil as well as good, in small places as well as large, in prisons as well as in churches, in empty minds and hearts as well as full, on sinners as well as saints. And then God waits. It’s similar with teaching. Most students do enough work to do a creditable job of putting down straightforward, logical answers to exam questions. But I remember wondering, when I was a teacher, if it all ever really made any significant difference in any real lives – until one year when I received a letter from a young man who had been a student of mine five or six years earlier. I remembered him slightly. I remembered his name, but that was about all. I remembered him as an okay student, a so-so student. But here he was writing to tell me that he was about to enter graduate school, that he wanted to let me know that something I had said in his eleventh-grade class had started him to thinking about history in a new way, and that our class had been part of what led him into a new and exciting direction in his studies. And he just wanted to thank me. I didn’t even remember saying what he said I had said. You just never know. And I know that many, many teachers have had similar experiences. “The Word of God,” as Capon puts it, ”is like a word sown that you don’t even remember sowing, [and] even if you hear it, [it] doesn’t sound like very much.” Maybe you don’t even remember it. “And when it does finally get around to doing its real work, it is so mysterious that it can’t even be found at all.” Like seed. Like Jesus. Jesus, God’s Word Incarnate, is sown, and then dies and disappears. But not before bringing forth the growth God sent him to bring forth. Waste and prodigality, grace and mystery, just seem to be part of the way God’s good news comes into the world. God sent his only Son into the world, and we “wasted” him, crucified him. “To whom has the power of the Lord been revealed?” asks the prophet. “He came to his own who received him not. He grew up before the Lord like a young plant whose roots are in parched ground. He had no beauty or majesty to catch our eyes, no grace to attract us to him. He was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and rejected, an object from which people turn away their eyes. Yet it was our afflictions he was bearing and our pain he endured, while we thought of him as stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way.” We have stopped our ears and shut our eyes, our hearts have become dull and thin, like shallow soil, and there is no response in us. “And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was cut off from the land of the living.” Like seed among rocks and thistle. “For the transgression of the people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, a burial place among felons, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” He was crushed, and he suffered, and died. Like a word sown among those whose ears are stopped. “And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he has healed him who has given himself as a sacrifice for sin. He will see his children’s children, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” The will of the Lord will prosper, just as the rain falls from the heavens and does not return to the heavens without bringing forth the growth God sent it to bring forth. That God’s Word will do its work is a certain as that. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. God simply pours out his Word on the world like seed and sunshine and rain, on the just and the unjust. Like a sower who throws seed everywhere, indiscriminately, God just pours out his Word on everyone – on footpath and rocks and thistle and good soil alike. On foreigner and eunuch alike, on black and white and poor and rich and men and women alike, on sinner and saint alike, on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, on the deserving and the undeserving alike, on those on the inside and the outside alike, on the free and the incarcerated alike, on the receptive and the hostile alike, on Jew and Muslim and Buddhist alike. Even on Christians. He wastes it. God is prodigal, extravagant with his love and grace, like one anointing a dying man with precious oil. – that’s the story of the kingdom of heaven, says Jesus. That’s the way God is. And how better to reveal what is hidden – which is what a mystery is – than to reveal it in story, for those who have ears to hear. And then, like the farmer, God waits. The entire work of God in the world, from the beginning to Isaiah to Jesus to us, proceeds like the work of a seed sown by an extravagant, profligate farmer. God’s work takes place in mystery, in secret, in a way that can be neither known nor answered, only experienced and responded to. Or not. Maybe there will be a different experience this year, a different response. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. It’s the story of the Cross, of course, the story of grace and love. Despised and rejected by a hostile world, despised and rejected today as God’s power was rejected in the days of Isaiah and in Jesus’ day, God’s power is hidden, mysterious, a dying seed on a hillside outside of town. Is this our idea of how a respectable divine operation ought to be run? Shouldn’t there be something with flash, something more noisy and noticeable, like earthquake, wind, or fire? Like thunder or fireworks? But we know from Jesus that that’s not the way it is with God. With God, it’s more like a still, small voice. Like a story. Like a quiet, mysterious, hidden word. Like sunshine and rain. Like precious oil poured out on a dying man. Like love. Like grace. With God and his kingdom, it’s more like the love of one whose love is so great that he lays down his life for his friends, even for sinners, even for you and me. Like Jesus. To you has been granted to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |