Signs of
Jesus People 3:listeners
Matthew 13:1-9
Before
delving into the story Jesus tells, let’s look at what’s happening. There’s some controversy around Jesus in the
previous chapter; he leaves the house and goes to the beach—a move out of safe
tradition into a larger unknown that Chris talked about last week. The people gather around Jesus, he’s at the
center, he’s a man of the people…but then he moves to a boat so he can sit
down, the sign of a teacher, so he’s now a man of authority. So we listeners perk up our ears, he has
something important to say.
All three
synoptic gospels have this parable – even the Gospel of Thomas has it, so it
must be important. But, how many of you
have heard this story before and know what it means? Many of us have heard this linked with its
allegorical interpretation later in the chapter. But it’s not an allegory in its first form,
it’s a parable. By its nature, a parable
is open to the hearer’s interpretation.
So if you
haven’t heard it before, all you need to do is listen. But if you have, maybe we need to re-brand
the story, as one website suggested, like prunes are rebranded into dried
plums, Diet Deluxe was rebranded to Healthy Choice, or Diet Coke to Coke Zero,
or light or whatever.
Familiar or
not, we need to LISTEN, not just with our ears, but as St Benedict says in the
opening words of the Rule, listen with the ear of the heart—a disciple isn’t
just one who hears a story, but one who puzzles about it until she gets a
message for her life. We’ll try (as we
have before) to imagine ourselves into the story. (slide change)
Choose to
picture yourself as a seed, or the path, or a bird, or rocks or sun or
weeds/thorns or soil. Ready? Hear it again with some moments of silence
after
Read it
again….quiet reflection
Now let’s
hear it again with some musings as we go…
A sower went
out to sow, and as he sowed, some seeds…..
Seeds: a
small thing, a pretty insignificant image for what we think some grand divine
scheme might be about…it’s sown indiscriminately, at the mercy of chance, with
no choice in its landing place. A bird
might eat it …thorns or weeds might choke it, or the sun bake it. By itself, it doesn’t have much control
Some seeds
fell on the path…..
Path:
trodden down and hard, not receptive.
Literally “alongside the way”, on the edge perhaps…yet it offers the
seed to the
Birds:
hungry, opportunistic, grabbing what they can in competition with others. Yet even the birds pass the seed along
somewhere quite unwittingly…again perhaps we’re not in charge of the seed doing
its work
Other seeds
actually land in soil, but it’s rocky ground where they didn’t have much soil,
shallow, not prepared or worked over, so it can’t develop deep roots and is
easily destroyed by the fierce heat of life.
Some makes
it into soil full of thorns, or weeds in some translations…so many distractions
that get in the way, that keep out the light.
Tho many weeds look attractive, and thorns be on pretty stalks, they can
hurt us and end up choking the life out of us.
And some
seed, thank goodness, falls on well-tended, fertile soil, where rocks have been
removed and weeds kept under control, where turning over happens but is used to
enrich the soil……
It’s
tempting to think we have to be one or other kind of soil, that’s what the
church traditionally teaches, based on the later interpretation. But the reality is that the four landing
sites – hard path, rocks, thorns and fertile soil are all reflections of the
human condition—we have them all at various times of life.
Our calling
as disciples, as a community of faith, is to keep our ears, and our hearts
open, so we recognize what is going on in our life as it’s happening, so we can
be open to having our hard places loosened, our rocks recognized and removed,
our thorns kept under control and our shallowness deepened.
BUT, it’s
also a parable about the Sower. Did you
notice how careless and extravagantly the sower sows? No farmer would waste so much seed,
surely. The crowds listening to Jesus
would gasp in surprise at such poor agricultural practice. Surely such wastefulness will come to a bad
end; but no, the yield is extravagantly high!
It’s counter-cultural.
If we model
our lives on this sower, as if he or she is God, we’d share extravagantly and
not judge what is worthy of our gifts or time or effort, and what or who is
not. You and I might not waste our
energy on the worn out, the downtrodden, the hardened, but God does.
It reminds
me of the scene in the book Harry Potter
and the Sorcerer’s stone, where Hagrid goes to all sorts of lengths and
places to deliver Harry’s letter from Hogwarts—like the sower, Hagrid scatters
the good news in abundance so that somehow he will come to know who he really
is and move into a new, though unknown future.
The
extravagance and grace and determination of this sower makes me think of the
kin-dom of God, the way it’s supposed to be, not the way the church often does
it. In our Friday Benedictine group
Betsy shared
If The Church Were
Christian......Philip Gulley
1. Jesus would be a model for living rather than an object
of worship
2. Affirming our potential would be more important than
condemning our brokenness
3. Reconciliation would be valued over judgment
4. Gracious behavior would be more important than right
belief
5. Inviting questions would be valued more than supplying answers
6. Encouraging personal exploration would be more important than
communal uniformity
7. Meeting needs would be more important than maintaining
institutions
8. Peace would be more important than power
9. It would care more about love and less about sex
10. This life would be more important than the afterlife
Ouch.
Later on, Matthew says
Jesus explains the parable as God sowing the ‘word’, the LOGOS, that is the
Christ, absolutely everywhere….so not only was it counter-agricultural, it
would have sounded counter-religion—God does not sow everywhere, but only in
Israel (or America, or only to a particular faith). Some of Jesus’ listeners would have blocked
their ears in horror. And still do.
Jesus asks us to use the
ears we have, mostly because what he is saying is so counterintuitive, from
such a different paradigm, that it’s hard to really hear.
So what did your ears
hear? More importantly, what did your
heart hear?
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