Say What?

How It's So Hard To Hear What Jesus Is Saying And See What He's Doing

Abel Grimmer (c.1570-c.1619) - The Parable of the Sower

Not to be ungrateful, but I sometimes wish Jesus would have told one or two parables about the domestic considerations I am most familiar with, not about farming, but spending too much time online, or about peeling wallpaper. That’s what we did last summer after The First Wedding, and that’s what we’ve done this summer after The Second Wedding. Our house is really old, and the previous inhabitants preferred to glue each layer of wallpaper atop the ones already in place, rather than taking one layer off before adding another. In each room we’ve done, there have been three layers, each reflecting the aesthetic taste of its own particular decade. It’s messy work and also a little bit addicting. Once you start to tear, you can’t really stop. The heartbreak is in getting all the way down to the first layer and discovering it is a beautiful map of the world, repeated over and over, but so old and damaged and frail that it can’t be saved. Who, we asked ourselves day by day, wanted to plaster beige, taupe paper over this glory?

Nevertheless, one must turn from the sorrows of home decorating to the subject weighing upon the mind of the Lord Christ in this morning’s lectionary readings. He addresses himself to matters even more primary. What’s the point of worrying about what your house will look like if you don’t have any food? These more basic anxieties are difficult for me to inhabit, because when I am hungry, I stop by the vast grocery store on my way home from the place I go to “work out” so that I don’t get too fat, given all the food that’s available to me all the time. What sort of metaphor, I wonder, would Jesus utter about people paying actual money to beat their bodies using heavy equipment because nothing about their ordinary lives is difficult enough to keep them in the proper shape? Actually, I don’t really want to know the answer to that question. The things he does say are hard enough for me to be going on with.

The difficult thing, with Jesus, is that he uses deceptively simple imagery to show the human creature who he is, and the images are often so simple that the creature is allowed space to evade the point, or to run headlong in the other direction.

You might have seen, this last Friday, that I didn’t enjoy what Pieter Valk had to say about the phrase, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” After I posted my deep thought, the conversation continued online. Mr. Valk tweeted this:

It’s like phrases such as “everything happens for a reason” or “guard your heart” or “it’s not religion, it’s a relationship” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle”. There’s truth to each of these phrases, but each has a rhetorically problematic history such that it’s not an effective pastoral strategy.

The person to whom I am married responded thusly:

There is not just “some truth” in love the sinner, hate the sin. Unlike the last two phrases you compare it to (there’s nothing wrong with the first two since, yes, everything does happen for a reason and while it is a cliche to say “guard your heart,” it’s literally a biblical saying, Prov 4:23) there no falsehood in it. That people may use a true thing “problematically” (whatever that means) does not render a true word unusable.

Mr. Valk explained himself:

If a phrase has accumulated a loaded meaning beyond the literal words that becomes counterproductive for evangelism (and if other phrases are readily available without baggage), then why not use the more effective phrase with the same literal meaning?

As one might expect, my Caro Sposo said this:

Evangelism isn’t fitting the message to the felt needs of the hearer. We don’t have the power to persuade anyone to believe, that is the work of the Spirit working through the truth of God’s word.

Mr. Valk shot back:

Good luck with that! Seems a bit different that Christ’s strategy in the gospels :)

He went on to say that Jesus “encountered people on the margins,” that “he met them where they were at,” that he “empathized with their pain, asked insightful and nuanced question to show them that he noticed and care, and invited them into greater life (including turning from their sin).” Reading the thread, I was reminded, again, that most of us see in the Bible what we desire to see. The shape of the realm we inhabit is liable to determine who we think Jesus is and what he cares about.

Let’s trot over to the Gospel according to Matthew and try to puzzle out what Jesus’ thoughts and feelings about how people come to know and love him:

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. And great crowds gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat down. And the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.”

Every time I wander by this story, I feel a horrible sorrow, a deep and total sense of my own futility and helplessness. This is what it’s like to be a person. You try to grow something, you cast your seeds out upon the wide world, and a whole lot of them die or get eaten by awful birds. Wouldn’t the Sower want to carefully nurture each seed along? Wouldn’t you want to create the perfect conditions for each seed to grow in beauty and perfection?

It seems, though, that the crowds did not feel crushed to the earth by this short story. Sowing seeds this way was, then, the ordinary action of most people. This is how you would grow grain so that you would have sufficient bread until the time to plant the next crop. You cast abroad the seed and pray for rain. No one gets a hundredfold, except that one time when Isaac did, back in Genesis, and just the once.

The real source of futility, for the disciples, is that their Lord and Master would sit in a boat, speak to a vast and attentive crowd, and this is what he would say. Is this some kind of riddle? Why not utter plainly and openly what you mean? Why mess about with the seeds and the soils and those awful birds and the choking thorns? So they go and ask him, though this bit is left out by the lectionary arrangers, perhaps because the answer Jesus gives is even more upsetting than the parable itself:

Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” And he answered them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says:

“‘“You will indeed hear but never understand,
and you will indeed see but never perceive.”
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and with their ears they can barely hear,
and their eyes they have closed,
lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart
and turn, and I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

I expect the lot of them scratched their heads and stood on one foot, wondering what he was talking about. They had been listening to him all afternoon, and watching him, and all he had said is that there was a Sower—a person who puts seeds in the ground, not to be confused with a person who takes up a needle and thread and gets stuck into the fiber arts, I can never remember how to spell the one versus the other—and he threw his seeds everywhere without caring where they went. Only a few of those seeds landed on soil that was rich enough and fertile enough to produce any grain. The rest were all destroyed. What on earth is he talking about? Perhaps it was the blank and uncomprehending expression that elicited from Jesus a rare explanation:

“Hear then the parable of the sower: When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was sown along the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

This is the origin of many people asking themselves what kind of “soil” their neighbor or friend might be. That’s a much safer question to ask than wondering what might be the condition of your own mind and heart. We should all ask it, as honestly as we can. If the Word of God is heard, if it goes inside the person, what happens then? Does that person find her life altered in some essential way? Does it “take root?” Or does she wrestle uncomfortably and manage to cast it back out so that she remains unchanged in the hidden darkness of her inclinations and desires?

This is one of those rare occasions when going back to the Old Testament provides the definitional clarity one so often longs for—not only the bit that Jesus quoted, but the bit about the weather, where God says to the prophet, plainly and openly, how it all works:

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

The seed is the word. It goes everywhere, indiscriminately. Its productivity is as inevitable as the falling of rain and snow. It does what it is supposed to do. The person who casts it abroad has no control over what happens to it. And it is plenteous. There’s no reason to be chintzy with it, to worry that if you say it one time, there won’t be opportunity or necessity to say it again.

Neither is there any futility in the action of God sending forth his Word into the world. Not one time that it goes out does it do something that God didn’t want it to do. It accomplishes the precise outcome that God intends. Unlike most of the tasks I attempt, it succeeds every time. And that might make a lot of people throw up their hands and say, ‘Oh well, I guess there’s nothing I can do. I don’t need to try to believe, or obey, or love, or understand because God is going to do whatever he wants anyway.’ But that’s not the way either. Whatever kind of soil you might be, you are still responsible to hear the Word and let it transform you. When you hear the word spoken, you should try to listen, you should try to understand. Two things are true at the same time—the perfect action of God and your responsibility to find him and love him. And there ought to be some urgency, some desire to find out what the Lord Christ is talking about. This point is also made abundantly plain to the Prophet:

“Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

What’s so shocking, in every age, is that you or I can read that plainly written line—God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways are not our ways—and then go away and assume, continually, with tenacious and bitter persistence, that God’s thoughts are indeed our thoughts and our ways his ways. Jesus does things the way we want him to, of course, because the way we do things makes sense to us.

If we think it important to empathize with each person in her pain, however justified that pain might be, then that is exactly what Jesus would do. If we think that the inclinations of the heart and mind aren’t always wicked, but are often precious and even sometimes adorable, then Jesus, likewise, feels the same way. If we think that obedience and adoration of the principalities and powers of this world are the only way to accomplish peace and justice, well, obviously Jesus shares our anxieties and concerns. Meanwhile, the things Jesus does and says go by unnoticed by us, just as they did for the crowds two millennia ago.

They don’t have to, though. You can get up and go to church and wrest your mind and heart away from the pathways you’re so accustomed to. You can meekly ask for a miracle, to be transformed into the rich soil that produces the perfect harvest of God’s own thoughts and ways and love. The futility of your actions and habits of mind do not govern the thoughts and ways and love of God. He said so himself.