Suppose I gave everyone in Binghamton a $1000 bill. What if I just handed them out, with no strings attached. You could do with it whatever you wanted. It wouldn’t matter who you were – whether you were a long term resident or a newcomer from away, a homeowner, renter, or homeless. Everyone gets $1000. Now remember, this is just a thought experiment – I’m not actually going to hand out $1000 bills. It would be fascinating to see what people did with their free gift.
I imagine that many people would go out and quickly spend their money. Perhaps they would go to the off-track betting store, and most likely quickly lose their money. Or perhaps they would buy a toy or video game of some kind for themselves. It would please them for a time, they would find it fun and attractive, but before long they would begin to lose interest, and set their toy aside. Or perhaps they would invest it in a hot stock in a hedge fund, only to find their money has disappeared.
But there might be a few folks who invest their free money more wisely in other ways. Perhaps they would use it to pay tuition for a course they wanted to take, one that paid off in a promotion at work. Perhaps they tithed some of that money to their church so the church could help change the lives of others. Perhaps they paid off debt or put it in savings. Perhaps that gift would pay off for them thirty, or sixty, or a hundredfold.
What do you think people would do with the $1000? What would you do with yours?
Of course, you would think that I had gone crazy, giving away all that money with no expectation of getting anything in return. It’s all very unlikely, and goes against common sense. And yet, I’ll bet it makes you think.
That’s what Jesus’ parables are all about. They are unlikely, often go against common sense, and yet they make us think. They are a kind of thought experiment. I hope you caught that my little parable paralleled Jesus’ parable of the sower. The money that was gambled was like the seed that fell on the path and the birds came and ate them up. The money spent on toys and games was like the seed that fell among thorns, sprang up for a short time, and was choked. Money spent on a hot stock looked great until the heat scorched it and disappeared, like the seed that fell on the rocks.
Jesus’ parable would have been shocking to his listeners. Seed was a precious commodity, and farmers would have been very careful to plant them in the best conditions where they could grow. To just broadcast them willy-nilly would have been an unthinkable waste. You would never spread them on a path, or on hot rocks, or among thorns. $1000 bills are a precious commodity, too, and I am not likely to be giving them away willy-nilly either.
The first thing we need to do when we encounter a parable is to figure out who the players are, and what things stand for. The Sower is God. The seed is the Word, or Jesus himself. The different kinds of soil are all of us, in all of our human frailty, diversity, and conditions. The plants are the fruits that we bear in the interaction of seed and soil, the interaction of Jesus and us. Through the parable, Jesus is trying to tell us something very important about our relationship with God, with him, and about the nature of the kingdom of God.
So why doesn’t Jesus just tell us straight out? Why go around the barn, so to speak, to make his point? In fact, in the part in between the sections of gospel we read, that is exactly what the disciples ask Jesus. “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “ To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven…seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” In other words, if we try to use our normal vision and hearing and ways of thinking, we will never understand. We have to first accept that the kingdom he tells us about does not operate in the ways we assume our world works. There are secrets and there are mysteries. Only by accepting the mystery will we begin to understand. Only by accepting that God works in radically different ways than our culture assumes, will we know what he is talking about. It is a matter of faith.
The people expected a messiah who would come with sword and force and violence to free the nation from bondage. But Jesus says the word comes as a small seed, a seed that disappears when covered by the earth. He ministered to the least, the lost, and the lonely, hardly where one would expect a great leader to emerge. And yet his fruit is abundant, affecting the whole world, even two thousand years later. How could that be? It is a mystery.
The seed, small as it is, when it is planted even among thorns or on rocky ground, springs up and begins to grow. The seed does what it is supposed to do. Even the seed stolen by the birds, is likely to be dropped on more fertile ground. The Word, small as it is, also does what it is supposed to do. It is sown in the heart, it gives joy to the one who hears, it is heard even by those who cannot nurture it. Whether the seed or the word bears fruit, depends on the conditions in which it is sown. Unfortunately, much of the human condition is hostile to the word, because we are easily distracted by the cares of the world, the lure of wealth, or because of evil, trouble, and persecution. Jesus faced that hostility directly in crucifixion and death.
Jesus’ parables usually use common, everyday experiences, though perhaps turned upside down. Sowing seed and planting were activities most people could relate to. I think this was Jesus’ way of saying that the kingdom is not some distant event. The kingdom has begun here and now, in the real world. If we would only see the world through the mystery of the word, we would know that we are in the midst of it. It is not just something for after our death, or at the apocalypse.
While it may be hard to understand the parables, it does call from us some kind of response. The purpose of the Word is to produce people in whom the power of God bears fruit. We can walk away, shaking our heads, and go on the way we always have. Or we can begin to live as if the mystery of the word of God was growing in us. Our soil can be transformed into fertile ground. Rocks are broken down over time by wind and water, thorns can be weeded out, birds can be shooed away. We become fertile ground by practicing mercy, compassion, and love. The Word of God grows in us through prayer and study and worship. Then perhaps, seeing, we will perceive; hearing we will listen and understand.
We won’t be giving out $1000 bills today, but you do receive something even more valuable, the Word of God. May your soil be fertile so that it grows and bears amazing fruit.