Matthew 13:1-23
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
February 2, 2025
Do you wish, as I often do, that God were clearer, clearer about what He’s doing – or even about what He’s saying!
We celebrate Jesus’ parables for their accessibility, but they too can be hard to interpret. We may get what’s going on at every point in the story, but often still be scratching our heads about what’s the point of the story.
Might it be that God doesn’t mean to be always clear because the struggle with uncertainty is good for us?
When the disciples ask Jesus why He speaks in parables, He tells them the reason is, quoting the prophecy of Isaiah, that people would look but not perceive and listen but not understand – as if the purpose of parables is not, at least at first, to make things clear, but to perplex and bewilder. Mark, in his Gospel’s account of this moment in Jesus’ ministry, renders Jesus’ words thus: “For those outside, everything comes in parable, in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand.’”
If, however, the initial purpose of a parable is, not to reveal truth, but to hide it, the ultimate purpose is still to reveal it. Jesus says here in Matthew that the disciples’ eyes are “blessed” – by God, obviously! – to “see”, and that their ears are “blessed” to “hear”. This is so because to them, Jesus says, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven”. Though they start out as baffled by the parable as everyone else, they end up being given revelation by which to grasp its meaning. That this is God’s ultimate intention with parables, Mark makes obvious in his Gospel. For there he cites a statement Jesus makes, after telling today’s parable, that Matthew does not: “There is nothing hidden,” Jesus says, “except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.”
But why do things come to light for the disciples when they don’t for the others? Because the disciples have a different agenda in listening to Jesus and react differently to their initial bewilderment. Everyone is bewildered by the parable at first. Most just shrug their shoulders, give up the effort to understand it, and go about their business. The disciples, however, refuse to give up on understanding Jesus. They refuse to stay in the dark. They come to Jesus and ask for His help in interpreting his parable. They seek revelation of the truth, and seek it from the right source. Thus, whether they realize it or not, they have already been given the foundational secret to the kingdom of heaven: that the key to grasp it is found in Jesus Himself! By their awareness of this fundamental truth, they represent the people whom Jesus in verse 12 describes as “those who have” but to whom “more will be given”. They already have at least a vague awareness of who Jesus is; and, because they do, they turn to Him and are from Him given more. They are given an elaboration of the parable and His inspiration for living it out.
By contrast, those who got nothing out of the parable, but leave it at that, will have even the nothing they have “taken away”. For they will soon think there’s nothing to Jesus’ teaching, and likely to Jesus Himself.
So why doesn’t Jesus make things clear from the get-go? Why doesn’t He just plop the truth in everyone’s lap and make its meaning obvious right off the bat?
For two reasons, I think: First, more important to Him than getting His message across to people is getting into a relationship with people. When they have to seek to understand Him, they have to interact with Him – and that interaction creates a closer relationship between them. Second, Jesus “gets” human beings and realizes how a gift becomes more of a gift for us if we have to pursue it and invest more of ourselves in obtaining it. It’s like what I as a schoolboy heard from many a teacher: “The more you put into my class, the more you will get out of my class.” It wasn’t that those teachers were playing hard to get with the gift of the knowledge they were offering, but that they wanted us to get more from the gift by having to apply ourselves to make it our own. The struggle in the pursuit of the gift enlarges the gift for us.
Actually, having to seek a gift rather than having it simply handed to us doesn’t change the gift; but it does change us so that the gift means more to us and does more for us. The struggle to get it causes us to appreciate the gift more, and our increased appreciation of it gives it more opportunity to have a big impact upon us. In fact, the greatest gift changes our very soul.
And the kind of soul we are affects our powers to perceive and to appropriate those “secrets of the kingdom of heaven”. This idea is echoed in the beatitude of Matthew 5:8, where Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God”. Who we are in our soul determines how much ultimate meaning we can take in.
This parable is most often called the parable of the sower, but it would probably be better called the parable of the four soils. In His explanation of the parable’s symbols, Jesus repeatedly identifies what is sown as “the word of the kingdom”; but He never explicitly identifies the sower. Is it He? The disciples? Both? Does it matter? What does matter is that the sower is always the same, and the seed is always the same; but what is brought forth from the four landing spots of the seed is never the same. The different outcomes are due to the different soil in each spot! Hard soil, shallow soil, weed-invested soil and good soil produce very different results.
Each kind of soil represents a kind of human soul. We know this because, each time Jesus talks about a different soil, He talks about it in terms of a different person who hears the word and responds to it in a certain way. The state of the person’s soul affects the chance they give the word to bear its fruit in them.
Do you want to become the kind of soul which is good soil for the word to grow in and to produce a bumper crop of righteousness, happiness and love?
Well, just as soil cannot improve itself, none of us can significantly improve our soul on our own. But we can put ourselves close to the Savior who will water the soil of our soul with the grace of His Spirit and fertilize it with the Miracle Grow of His Spirit. We can put ourselves in a position that allows Him to do all that for us when we worship with each other, engage in mutually supportive fellowship, maintain a daily practice of a personal time alone with God, and serve our neighbors – and encounter Jesus in them.
What our soul is like determines what we bring forth in life. And what our soul is like is determined by whether we keep coming to Jesus and sticking close to Him! Let us pray.
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