“Other seed fell on good soil and bore fruit, in one case a yield of one hundred to one...Everyone who has ears should pay attention.” (Matt. 13:8-9)“Just give it to me straight preacher.” Well after hearing today's Gospel reading, would anyone like to go to Jesus and say, “Jesus, just give it to me straight.” The parables aren't straight. They're not meant to give those hearing Jesus a blueprint, or a well marked map, or the pleasant voice of your GPS navigator telling you step by step the road to the kingdom of heaven. In between his telling of today's parable and his “explanation,” Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah: “You will hear, to be sure, but never understand; and you will certainly see but never recognize what you are seeing.”
So what good are parables? Well let's start with this definition of a parable by C.H. Dodd: “At its simplest a parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”
At the very least, a parable is not an allegory. It's not like Aesop's fables, where the characters and images represent a specific thing, and there is a clear moral lesson to be taught. But the wonderful thing about Jesus's parables is that they can mean different things, depending on who is hearing the parable. This parable of the farmer and the seeds spoke to me in a particularly strong way this week. And as we see the beginnings of our new sanctuary, I think it speaks to all of us in a powerful way. This word of the kingdom that Jesus first scattered 2,000 years ago has been scattered in the minds and hearts of all those who have heard it since, and so it shall be to the end of the ages. And precisely because these parables sound so strange, and don't have an obvious meaning, they will always have a fresh meaning to those who pay attention.
I wonder if hearing this parable is more scary than reassuring. There are four categories of seeds, and three-fourths of them become useless, withered and dead. Are you afraid of being in one of those categories. Is there someone you love, who seems to have never had the chance to receive the word because of circumstances that, like the birds, just swooped down and ate the word up before it had a chance to take root? Are there people you’ve known who were raised in such rocky soil that the word of the kingdom could never get deep enough in their hearts to pull them out of the hole they were in? Are you afraid that you that as sincere as you are in your faith, that there are just too many distractions and worries choking you for you to become the faithful disciple of Jesus Christ that you want to be?
Hear the words of hope that Jesus has for those hearing him in that section of the Gospel between the parable and its explanation: “Happy are your eyes because they see. Happy are your ears because they hear. I assure you that many prophets and righteous people wanted to see what you see and hear what you hear, but they didn’t.” Jesus’s disciples struggled to understand his parables. They asked him to explain them. But Jesus didn’t say to them as he said about the crowds, “You will hear but never understand; see but never recognize.”
You are here this morning, or perhaps you are reading this online, and you see and hear what prophets and righteous people before you wanted to see and hear, but didn’t. The seeds have been planted. And I have been privileged to see shoots coming up from each of you, in spite of predatory birds, rocky soil, and choking thorns. And where the seeds and shoots are, so will come the yield of a hundred to one, sixty to one, thirty to one.
And here’s the best news in today’s parable. It’s not even up to you to produce that much of a fruitful yield. A good yield in the Holy Land of Jesus’s time would have been ten to one. What Jesus promises would have astounded those who first heard him. Such a yield would have been impossible for them to produce. And that’s the point. It’s not they, or we, who will produce such an astounding return on the investment of the word of the kingdom placed in our hearts.
In the past, I confess, I’ve read this parable as a symbol of the preacher, and wondered how much of the seed I’ve scattered would really produce any fruit. Are my words not “straight” enough for my hearers to even understand, much less apply to their lives? Will my words lack sufficient credibility with some? Those are just some of the questions I’ve asked myself about my preaching over the years. But reading through this 13th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, I read all of the parables that Matthew placed in this chapter, and I came to this verse later in the chapter: “The one who plants the good seed is the Son of Man.” Jesus says this about another parable using seeds as a metaphor. But looking at today’s parable, I finally realized what an idiot I’ve been. I’m not the farmer scattering seed. Jesus is!
Jesus is scattering the seed all around us. I am an imperfect vessel through which that seed can be scattered. But thanks be to God, I’m not the only one. You can already see the preparations for the scattering of the seed right outside our windows. The orange lines have been drawn on the ground to mark where our new sanctuary will be. This week, the ground will be plowed. After that, the bricks of the foundation will be laid. Those bricks are the seeds of the kingdom of heaven, where we will meet our God, and be nourished by our Savior, and be blown back out into the world by the Spirit, so that through us, Jesus will scatter the seeds of compassion and truth.
In the weeks ahead, we will hear the other parables that Matthew collected and placed in this 13th chapter of his Gospel. We will hear strange stories about the kingdom of heaven. We will have the gift and the opportunity to put ourselves in these stories, and to imagine what new thing Jesus Christ might be doing through us, in this community, at this time of anxiety. Let us imagine what a yield of a hundred to one might look like in this community, in this time. And let us trust that what we imagine, Jesus is revealing to us.
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