If you’re starting to wonder whether you have heard this same passage of the Gospel last week, it means that you have been paying attention! The passage we have read last week was indeed quite similar to the one we have today, both in form and in content: Jesus tells the story of a sower sowing seeds in a field, and then he interprets the story to his disciples. If you remember, we have said that this kind of stories Jesus introduces in Chapter 13 in Matthew’s Gospel are identified as “Parables”, stories whose meaning isn’t obvious, told to introduce those who are willing to hear to the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, stories told to confuse those whose hearts oppose Jesus. Last week, we have talked about how those parables are meant to teach us the absolute value of the Kingdom of Heaven, how we are to seek it and to desire it above all things. While not teaching directly any kind of specific ethics we could directly apply to our everyday life, parables lead us to reorder our lives by helping us identify our own blindness and the foolishness of our hearts, which happens every time when we get too much caught in the business of the world, each time we forget to put God and God’s will – loving God, loving neighbor – above all things.
So that was for last week. The new parable Jesus puts before the crowd today, another parable of a sower sowing seeds with another lengthy explanation, comes to confirm what Jesus has said the first time and also to complement it. This is the second part, if you will. There is a last function to all the parables that is for us essential to understand, and that’s what I think this story reveals. So let’s dive in.
First of all, obviously, the parable tells a story and Jesus makes it easier for us to understand by giving us clues on how to read it. Like last week indeed, the story is about a sower and a field, but these are mere images for the kingdom of heaven. We heard last week that Jesus starts teaching in parables in a context of hostility and rejection from the religious leaders. Through this images, Jesus teaches to those who have “ears” and mostly “a heart” to listen that, in spite of all opposition Jesus encounters, the kingdom he is preaching will be victorious and extend to all the earth. Here he develops a little bit in a teaching worth hearing, because in all the Gospel this is I think the closer we come to an explanation of the presence of evil and suffering in the world: Evil is God’s enemy but God tolerates evil because if God decided to annihilate evil, God would have to destroy the whole world and God wants to protect the righteous. This evil causes many suffering, but now is the time of the growing and not the time of the reaping. The good seeds, like the sower, have to take patience. The promise is made that one day, when the kingdom is fully realized all evil and all cause of suffering will be taken away, and that the righteous will “shine like the sun” – all darkness being swallowed up in the furnace of fire. It is meant, of course, as an encouragement for those who follow Jesus and also for all those who strive to do good in a world full of violence and deceptions. And now we understand that, we can get to the moral teaching, or rather the re-ordinance of our lives: With the assurance of the absolute value and the certainty of the kingdom, we too are invited to patience and compassion. It does not mean that we have to be passive when confronted to evil – the Gospel of Matthew certainly teaches us to resist evil – but this should free us from what many theologians calls “The myth of Redemptive violence”: the belief that when the last bad guy will have been killed, we will at last taste peace. But violence only generates more violence and suffering. God renounced to destroy the evildoers once for all, and that is what the world should be, for now. Well, if it can be maddening to hear that, that we cannot take justice in our own hands once for all, it should also be reassuring. I think the layer under the teaching is thatin fact nobody can pretend to be a good seed, being in the world, we are, like the world, a mix of good and bad and we certainly need to rely on God’s patience and compassion as we grow. It also give us hope that the “bad seeds” could be led to change their lives, and we certainly see examples of such conversions in the Gospel. So that’s for the story, and it can already gives us a lot to think about.
And yet, yet the parables teach us something else that maybe the ultimate point of Jesus’s teaching but, again, because Jesus faces so much opposition, the meaning is hidden in the story (-ies) and we need to pay a little more attention to get it. The bottom line is that Jesus teaches about himself. Jesus tells us who he is. If you’re a frequent reader of John’s Gospel, you probably have noticed that already. There are no parables in John, all of Jesus’s teaching is directed towards revealing who he is. In the three other Gospels, Jesus does not often talks directly about himself but we have those parables. So what does the parables tells us about Jesus? Well, today certainly the parable teaches us that Jesus is patient, compassionate and yet powerful and just. But deeper than that, he reveals to the crowd that he is the Messiah and that the Messiah isn’t like they have ever expected. I won’t take you down the rabbit hole of quoting passages from the Old Testament and first century Jewish writings, but we have to realize that Jesus’s using agricultural stories isn’t an accident. The Messiah was identified as the one who would do just that, separate the wheat from the chaff: “The expectation that the Messiah would separate the wheat from the chaff to establish a pure community is beyond question. People expected that when the Messiah comes the Romans and all other enemies would go” (Snodgrass). If you refer to Matthew 3:12, this is actually exactly how John the Baptist introduces the Messiah to his followers: “His pitchfork is in his hand to clear the straw from his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the storeroom. But he will burn up the husks with fire that can’t be put out“.
Except that Jesus says, no, he does not do that and no, he isn’t like that. Jesus, in this passage, claims that if he is indeed the Messiah he has also given up some of his privileges, he won’t judge until the kingdom has been preached and we have made a response to it, not just with our lips, but with our lives. If you’re a fan of metaphors, you can notice that in John’s Gospel, Jesus identifies himself with “Jacob’s ladder”, the one we have just read about in our first lesson: Jesus says: “Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” (John 1:51). As Jacob’s ladder, Jesus has come to connect heaven and earth, to make God’s presence known in this world and to draw all the world to God. The Messiah isn’t coming into the world to “reign on an anthill for a day” (a powerful image by Khalil Gibran, Jerusalem being on a hill if you have that in mind). The Messiah’s mission is much deeper and much wider that anyone could have imagined.
Now why is it important to us?
Well, again, I think it helps us put things in perspective when we become too impatient with our lives, the evil in the world and the hardship we witness around us. We know that if it is the time of the suffering, it is also the time of compassion. We often hear that there would be no suffering in the world if God was good, but maybe this is the other way around. A more daring thought would be to wonder if there is suffering in the world because God is good, because we are evildoers God refuses to eradicate while working on bringing a new kingdom without death and without sin. The second thing we could learn from this passage is that indeed nobody can teach us who God is and who is the one God sent, not even the Old testament, not even John the Baptist can do that. They can certainly guide us towards Jesus but we have to experience Jesus for ourselves, we have to enter into the story and engage with them ourselves. In the end, the stories Jesus tells can answer some of our questions, but mainly they ask us a question, the question Jesus asked all those who came to hear him: Do you accept this is who I am? Would you accept this is the way it is and are you still ready to follow me?