Homily by Fr R Christopher Heying
In this season after Pentecost, we mark time according to whatever the number of Sundays there are after the Feast of Pentecost, today being the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost.
This is the longest season of the church year, what the church refers to as “ordinary time,” a time focused not on the great events of Jesus—his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension—but on following him as Lord, on growth as Christians, growth even symbolized by green being our liturgical color.
During ordinary time our focus is discipleship, following Jesus as Lord, living day by day in the Spirit of God that has been poured into us so that we may move further and further into “the kingdom of God,” that time and space—or better, that arena and sphere—of God’s presence and activity, where God’s rule is established and God’s will is done even here on earth even as in heaven.
To grow as disciples of the Lord Jesus we gather near him as our teacher. The scriptures show that, like the rabbis of his day and great teachers since, Jesus often taught by telling odd and perplexing stories which we call “parables.”
Today, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, we begin a few weeks of such stories, these which happen to be in the narrative and theological center of Matthew’s gospel for they are parables on the kingdom of God, a “kingdom” not as something that exists somewhere over there beyond the grave but a kingdom that is drawing nigh, breaking in, in the life of Jesus Christ and in the life we have as Jesus’ disciples.
This morning Jesus begins by telling the “Parable of the Sower,” and he ends by providing an explanation, an explanation that when analyzed may raise as many questions as answers.
Those with even a glancing familiarity with the gospels know that Jesus taught in parables, but they—and perhaps we—might be hard-pressed either to give an clear definition of what a “parable” is or, more importantly, how we might apply these often perpelexing stories to our own lives.
C.H. Dodd, a protestant theologian of the twentieth century, may quite possibly be the most widely quoted today by Christian teachers in all denominations as to what a parable is:
At its simplest, the 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 [the mind] into active thought. (Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, Rev. ed (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1961)
Let’s break that apart.
A parable is a metaphor or simile.
A “metaphor” we remember is a figure of speech applied to something or to someone it is not. We might think of Martin Luther’s hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God” or Jesus who says, “I am the light of the world,” “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” “You are the salt of the earth.”
The parable of the prodigal son is an extended metaphor, where God’s love is encountered in the prodigal father, generous to a fault with forgiveness for his wayward son who has “come to himself” and returned to his father. We see ourselves not only in the son who demands his inheritance and spends its wastefully but perhaps so too in the bitter elder brother who has always played by the rules and yet is given no party!
A “simile,” on the other hand, is a figure of speech using “like” or “as” to make the comparison. “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in the field.” Or close to today’s example, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But, while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. . . .”
A parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life.
Removed by some twenty centuries from Jesus’ own day, it may take some explanation of these elements of common life, but it never ceases to amaze me just how easy it in fact is to connect with parables of farmers sowing seeds or an old woman wearing down an unjust judge in order to obtain what is “right.”
These stories, even after two thousand years, can engage us in deeply personal ways as we see ourselves in one or more of the characters. Our imagination is captured and we are provoked to thought.
As Dodd points out, we are gently and sometimes not-so-gently stretched by the “strangeness” of these parabolic stories. The familiar elements engage us but the embedded twist which can defy “common sense” leaves us perplexed or in Dodd’s understated way, with “sufficient doubt as to its precise application as to tease [the mind] into active thought.”
Take the Parable of the Sower, for example.
Just what kind of farmer goes about dumping seed, without concern for the nature of the ground that is to receive it, be it impervious rocks, hostile thorns, or fertile soil. Would any of us hesitate to fire such a feckless farmer?! Tossing seeds where they may be no chance of a fruitful harvest.
But all the barriers notwithstanding there will be, at least in some places, a wildly productive harvest, thirtyfold, sixty, a hundred. . . . Does not compute. Does not readily make sense to us but leaves us in “sufficient doubt as to its precise application as to tease the mind into active thought.”
When we remember that it is actually Jesus who is telling the story, we quest for meaning, understanding, but just what is going on?
Who is this farmer? Who the soil? And might there be more than one “answer,” perhaps a myriad of possibilities, not unaffected by our particular situation, to these questions that take begin to take root in us and grow?
Arrested by the “vividness” or “strangeness” we are provoked to active thought as to what the story means.
There is a saying among storytellers: “The story begins when the teller stops speaking.”
When the teller stops speaking . . . we continue the story in our mind, exploring the the characters or elements, consider different possible “endings,” try to grasp what it might mean and how we might apply it to our lives.
It has been said that some preachers explained the Parable of the Sower quite simply by saying, “Friends, now choose to be good soil and give generously to the building fund!”
But when our mind is teased to active thought, we may wonder how we may prevent the evil one from coming and snatching the word from us, just what are our preoccupations that threaten to steal peace, wholeness, even salvation from us, is to possible to remove the rocks and cut back the thorns that we can be more fertile receptacles to that which God longs to plant within our soul to bear fruit in due season?
And what kind of God do we have who recklessly pours forth grace, without measured concern for how or perhaps even whether it is received? If that is the kind of God we worship, how might we begin to love in a more generous way, without undue concern for what we are to get out of it? And is the “we” me? Or may it be the church? What what might all this say to the best laid plans of mice and men?
So engaged by the strangeness, the weird twists and turns of the story, we are provoked to thought, perhaps even to prayer, and move a just a little bit further, a little deeper into the kingdom of God, that arena and sphere of God activity, where God’s will is done here on earth as in heaven.
“Thy word is a lantern to me feet. A light upon my path.” Wisdom! Let us attend! Give us ears to hear. Amen.