11/16/11 Mark 4:21-34 GUMC Youth
Chapter four of Mark is something of a chapter of parables. It was in this chapter that we saw the first of Jesus' parables, the parable of the sower, and it contains almost all of the parables we find in the whole book. Tonight, we are going to look at three parables that Jesus tells, one right after another.
What is interesting to me is how many people I have met that are only interested in trying to understand the parables one at a time, in isolation from one another. That means, they would want to look at the first parable in our passage first, then the second, then the third, but never really all at the same time. The thing is, these parables aren't put side by side by accident. It is actually only when we look at the parables one at a time, but also look at them all together, that we really understand what Jesus is getting at. Parables are the kinds of things where, if you want to understand one of them, you really need to try to understand them all, preferably at the same time.
The first parable that Jesus says here is about a lamp. He says, "Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?" The answer, of course, is that it would be stupid to do those things with lamps, not least because, since lamps at the time ran by burning fuel, it would be dangerous. The point is that you don't light a lamp for no purpose (especially if fuel was expensive, which it was). You light lamps so you can see. And because you light lamps so you can see, you put them in prominent places in the house, high up so the light doesn't get blocked by all your furniture.
He continues on and says, "For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light." The point that Jesus is getting at here is that, as Christians, we are not saved, we are not indwelled by the Holy Spirit, to have it be our little secret. To be a Christian and to have nobody be able to tell is like lighting a lamp and then carefully hiding it so nobody can see it. It is simply pointless. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that you should go to school and sports practices and make a really big deal about how you are a Christian. After all, a lamp doesn't stand on its lampstand and say, "Hey everybody, I'm a lamp!" Everyone can just tell that it is a lamp. Words are important and a willingness to talk about Jesus is important, but if people can't tell that there is something different about you, all the words in the world won't make a difference.
The other thing that Jesus says on this topic is, "The measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. For those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." The big point is of reciprocity, that what we receive and what we give are to be related to one another. If you give a lot, you will receive a lot. You don't always receive back the same kind of thing you gave, like, just because you give a lot of money, doesn't mean you will get a lot of money back, but you will receive joy, peace and love. If you don't put much into your relationship with God, you won't receive much in return. If you want your faith to impact your life, if you want to be someone who doesn't just go through the motions, but is actually impacted by the reality of God, you have to participate. You can't be surprised if God doesn't move in your life if you don't participate and take advantage of what you have already received.
There is another side to this. Not only is what we receive from God proportional to what we give, we are also called to give to God in proportion to what we have received. You see, God made the first move, took the first step. The fact that we can give anything to God at all is based firmly in the fact that we received from him long before we ever dreamed of giving anything to him. I want to give a somewhat silly example of this kind of thing. When I was in high school, I was in American History and I had just about the best teacher I'd ever had. We had real, hands-on projects, where we got to engage in the stuff we were learning. Like when we talked about the roaring twenties and the stock market crash, we all started with the same amount of money, and tried to trade with each other to end up with the most money.
Well, one project we did was we were each given a nation that fought in World War I, and we had to make alliances and fight battles with each other. As you can imagine, the people who had America, England, Germany, France, and places like that were able to conquer all kinds of people, they had hugely superior firepower and could easily win in battle. My partner and I ended up with some tiny country in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't get much done, but we did our best. At the end of the game, our teacher told us to take our scores and modify them according to a table that he showed us. As it turned out, the superpowers didn't do so well at the end of the day because they had to take away so many points. You see, anyone would have expected them to do well. They actually had to do really well in order to show that their victories were not simply because they started off with all the advantages. My partner and I ended up coming in like second or third place, not because we won the war, but because we did what we could with what we had.
We are held accountable for what we receive. If we have received only a little bit, God knows it and has tremendous grace. We are not judged according to what we don't have but what we do have. On the flip side, if we have received a lot, we are expected to give and live accordingly. I know that, from time to time, it seems like we really haven't received all that much, but we really have, especially in Spencer. Did you know that Clay County has one of the lowest poverty rates in Iowa? That doesn't mean that there isn't poverty, but that it is remarkably low, compared to places like Des Moines, Waterloo, and lots of places down in the southern part of the state. Simply looking at that, you can tell that you have received much. On top of that, you have been taken care of by your parents, which lots of young people simply haven't. The fact of the matter is that you have already received much. When you succeed, you don't simply succeed on the basis of your own natural talent, but because other people have paved the way for your success. You have received much. Will you give much with your life?
The other two parables don't take as much time to explore. Jesus says this. "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how." Now, any farmer will tell you that they don't just sit around after they've planted their seeds. Farming is hard work and, though there are seasons where it is less intense, there is always something to do. The point that Jesus is making is that, in spite of all the work that a farmer might do, the farmer really isn't causing the seed to grow, or even helping it to grow. The farmer is doing whatever he can to remove every obstacle to growth. The growth happens slowly and gradually. If you are like me and you don't spend all your time on a farm, when you get out into the country every few weeks, it seems obvious how much the corn, for example, has grown. I imagine that if you were a corn farmer, the difference in growth from the last time you looked at your plants to the next time is pretty small. In fact, you probably can't even tell, from to day to day, that they are growing at all.
I am always amazed at how closely this applies to my Christian life. One of the things that there is no shortcut for is establishing a relationship with God. The longer you've been a committed Christian, the more you know how God works in you. I have these times where it feels like I've completely plateaued, when I don't feel like I'm growing, but just kind of floating through the days and weeks. I'm still doing the things I should be doing. I'm still reading my Bible, I'm still praying, I'm still trying to put my faith in practice, but I don't feel like I'm going through any breakthroughs, like I have at certain points in my life.
At times like this, what I've tried to do is to force myself to remember where I've been. When I do this, I start to see that lots more was happening in those dry times than I ever imagined. To give an example of this, I talked last week about beginning to read my Bible and I said that, if you approach the Bible expecting to have your mind blown every single day, you will just get frustrated and quit. I spent a lot of those first years studying the Bible thinking that, in spite of my discipline, in spite of my desire to understand what was in the Bible, I just wasn't really learning it. Then, one day, I woke up and I found myself knowing the passages that the people around me were referencing. I started to be able to predict which passages people would use to make which points, I found myself being able to identify verses just from their references, which I could never do before. After all, like I told you, I was the worst Bible navigator ever. When you feel like God hasn't been moving in your life, take some time to remember where you used to be. Sometimes we just need to take a step back to see that God really has been at work.
The last parable is the parable of the mustard seed. It starts from a tiny seed, a seed so small that it takes 700 of them to even weigh a gram, which is not much. The mustard seed was so small that it was a common thing to use to emphasize how tiny something was. And yet, it grows up into a large bush that sometimes can even reach three meters high, which is like nine feet. We have had a phrase in English that gets at the same point. "Tall oaks grow from small acorns." At times, especially early on, our faith might seem amazingly small, so small that it couldn't turn into anything significant. Jesus' parable reminds us that the size of the seed doesn't tell us anything about the size of the plant. Our faith starts out small, but through a dynamic relationship with God, it grows and grows until it can even become a support for others.
Before we finish up tonight, I want to make a point drawing on all three of these parables. Faith cannot be hidden (like a lamp on a stand, like a growing plant, like a seed that is planted). It must be shown. It doesn't need to be shown because we will let someone down if we don't, it doesn't need to be shown because we have to force ourselves to do it, but it needs to be shown because that is what faith does. So, even though I'm not asking you to try to make a big deal about your faith (because that is counter-productive as well), I want you to think about whether anyone else can tell that you are a Christian.
I want to tell a story from my life to try to show what I mean. Now, you all have only known me as a pastor. It is probably pretty hard to imagine me as someone who is not a pastor, harder still to imagine me as someone who is not a Christian. And yet, as I have pointed out several times, I have not always been a Christian, and even after I became a Christian, I really didn't take it really seriously until I was in college. A few years ago, after I'd been a pastor for a while, a friend of mine from high school got married and I went to his wedding. While we were at the reception, we sat with some other folks we knew from high school There was one girl, a pastor's kid, who asked me what I'd been up to. When I told her that I was a pastor, she was astonished. She said, "Wow...um...wow. That really surprises me. I just never imagined that you would become a pastor."
Now, in my defense, I wasn't exactly that hard partying, heavy drinking, drug using wild man in high school. In fact, my first thoughts about her reaction were, "Wow. What did I do in high school that would make it so amazing that I could become a pastor." I really wasn't all that bad of a kid. And yet, that actually makes the point even stronger. Whatever my faith looked like in high school, it certainly didn't show itself to other people. I might have been a fairly good kid, and people might have noticed that, but there was nothing about who I was or how I lived that would have given anyone a clue that I had the Spirit of God dwelling inside of me and was following in the footsteps of Jesus.
Guys, that isn't what faith is supposed to be. Our faith is supposed to be like a lamp on a lampstand, it is supposed to be like a crop that, even though it starts small, grows up into a healthy, mature plant that everyone can see. It is supposed to be like the seed that might seem small at first, but grows into a mighty bush. The difference between someone who loves the Lord and one who does not is described in the New Testament as the difference between life and death. It can't be reduced to what we say or what we do, but it involves those things. Jesus Christ has given his life for us. The only thing that makes sense is that we would give our lives for him. Let us pray.
AMEN
Showing posts with label Parable. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Parable. Show all posts
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Mark 4:10-12
11/02/11 Mark 4:10-12 GUMC Youth
It is possible to take what I am about to say and completely misunderstand it. It is possible that you might hear this first thing I have to say and interpret it to mean that I have a low view of the Bible. That is not the case. I do, however, want to point out something that you may have already noticed, or may one day notice all on your own.
Even though there is a tremendous amount of similarity between the four gospels, especially between the first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, they are not identical. This is a good thing because, if they were identical, we wouldn't need all of them. The different gospels do not all tell the same stories. Sometimes, when they tell the same stories, they put them in a different order. What is interesting is that there are times when two different gospel writers will have differences between their accounts of the same story. This passage is a wonderful example of this. In it, we have Jesus quoting the prophet Isaiah, but the quotation is a little different depending on which gospel we read it in.
In Matthew, for example, we read this. "You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - and I would heal them." Mark's account, that we just heard, reads a little differently. "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables," and now comes the quote, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."
Do you see the difference between the two? In Matthew, we get the sense that the problem is that the people are just being stubborn, that they are shutting their eyes and ears and hardening their hearts so they can never hear what God is saying to them. It is a lamentable situation that breaks Jesus' heart. In Mark, however, we get the idea that the telling of parables and the hardening of hearts are related. We get the impression that Jesus tells the parables precisely in order to harden people's hearts.
If we look at these two accounts side by side, we can see that Mark's account is just a bit harsher, isn't it? In Matthew, the parables just happen to be met with stubbornness; in Mark, the stubbornness is caused by the parables, that Jesus tells the parables in order to provoke the stubbornness. Because of this, you almost never hear anyone preach on Mark's version of this. In fact, even when someone does set out to explain Mark's version, it almost always works itself out that they say that we should understand Mark's version to be saying what Matthew's version says, and not the other way around. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to deal with the boldness of Mark's account so we hide in Matthew's account.
But why would they be so different? Here's a thought. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, but it was translated into Greek about four hundred years before Jesus was born. By the time the New Testament was being written, far more people were reading the Greek version than the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. As it turns out, the difference between Matthew and Mark's version of this quotation is the same as the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew version of Isaiah. You see, the Greek version is exactly like Matthew's account and the Hebrew version is exactly like Mark's. Even though the Hebrew version is the "original," we cannot pretend that people would not have had both versions in their head. This is why they are both important and why we must take them both seriously. But what it means is that, even though they are both important, the fact remains that we are considering Mark's account of this event and not Matthew's, so we need to deal with what Mark has to say in all its harshness.
But, because Jesus is quoting Isaiah, in order to really understand what Jesus is saying, we need to take a moment and go back to the book of Isaiah and understand what he is saying. This is what we read. "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.' The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said, 'Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!' Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: 'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I; send me!' And he said, 'Go and say to this people: "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand." Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.' Then I said, 'How long, O Lord?' And he said, 'Until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.' The holy seed is its stump."
You see, the first verses of that passage are famous and well beloved in the church because it is a wonderful account of being called by God and the response of a faithful person. But once we get beyond those first verses and get closer to the end of the chapter, things get more than a little uncomfortable. Isaiah lived in a time when all of Israel thought that Jerusalem, their capital, was the home of God and God would never, could never, allow Jerusalem to fall into enemy hands. One of the big points that God's command to Isaiah is that this is simply not true. God not only can allow Jerusalem to fall, but would indeed do so.
Part of what we learn from this passage in Isaiah is that God is not concerned about the things we are concerned about. For the people at the time, the idea that God might allow the capital of Israel to fall was unthinkable. If that were to happen, it seemed, everything would be lost. If it happened, it would mean, they thought, that God was defeated. Isaiah's difficult message is that the fall of Jerusalem, when it happened, would be so far from being a defeat of God that it actually would be at God's hand. Whatever else this passage might mean, and I think it has lots of levels of meaning, it shows us that God is not limited by the things that limit us, that the most stable things in the world might be taken away from us to remind us to trust in God and in God alone. The success of God is not and can not be tied to the success of any human project.
I think that this helps us to understand what Jesus is getting at in our passage from Mark. It is a tearing down of everything that we think needs to be the case for God to be successful. Just like the invasion and defeat of Jerusalem does not carry with it the defeat of God, the attack on and even crucifixion of Jesus does not mean that God has been defeated. Instead, we need to remember, at every step of the way, that God was so aware of what was happening, that he walked right into it, knowing that even death could not stop him.
On another level, we need to look at it in its context. If you remember back to when we met last, two weeks ago, I said that this first part of chapter four is an example of Mark's so-called "Sandwich technique," where he takes one story, splits it in two, and includes something else in the middle. One of the things I said was that both the story that gets split apart and the stuff that goes in the middle have something to say to each other, that we can't understand them correctly unless we think them through together.
Jesus has just told a parable that explains why some people listen to him and other people do not. The parable talked about people who are on the "inside" and those who are on the "outside." There are some soils that can make a seed grow and others that cannot. What is more, we cannot always tell right away which is which. Sometimes, a plant will sprout right up but it has no roots and will ultimately not grow but die out. One of the things that Jesus is saying by quoting that chapter from Isaiah is that we should not think for a moment that, when lots of people reject him, when people just don't get excited about following Jesus, that God has somehow failed. Even when Jesus is betrayed and murdered, God is still working and overcomes death through resurrection.
I promised that this would be a message that did justice to Mark's account of Jesus' reference to Isaiah and not just resolve it into Matthew's reading. So far, the message has focused on things that are in common between the two, things that would need to be said, regardless of which version we were looking at. However, we still have to deal with the fact that Mark's account seems to be quite harsh. It certainly seems that Jesus is saying that he is intentionally causing people to stop up their ears, close their eyes, and harden their hearts, that it isn't just a coincidence that people aren't listening, but that he is, in a sense, causing them to reject him. What are we to do with that?
I have the tendency to give myself difficult preaching assignments, for one reason or another. Once, for example, I preached once from every single book of the Bible. One that I did last year for Advent was particularly interesting and challenging and I think it speaks to the troubles we have with this text. Since Advent and Christmas celebrate the time when God himself came into our world of space and time and encountered us, I asked the question over three weeks, "What happens when God comes close?" When we look at the Bible and take it seriously, we find that the answer to that question is very interesting indeed.
The first week, we looked at a passage in Paul's letter to the Romans, where he talks about the law that was given to the ancient Israelites. He says things like, "If it weren't for the law telling me not to covet," that is, to be jealous and want things you can't have, "I would have never known covetousness." He says that, if God had not ever said, "Don't do this," he never would have wanted to do it. In some fairly small way, when God took just one small step toward the Israelites, giving them a law that simply said, "These things are not allowed among the people of God," all of a sudden, the part deep inside of them that did not want God to tell them what to do woke up and said, "Well, I'm going to do them."
The next week, we looked at this passage from Isaiah that we have been considering tonight. We saw that, when even the great prophet of God came into God's presence, the impact was overwhelming. This man who was called to speak the word of God to the people of God realized that he had unclean lips, that he was not, in himself, worthy of the message he had been given. This feeling of inadequacy was so strong that he felt like he was going to die.
The third week, we looked at a passage that almost nobody talks about, the slaying of the innocents. Remember when Jesus is born and the wise men from the East come and Jesus' family has to get up in the middle of the night and run away to Egypt? It was because Herod was going to come in and have all the children under two years old killed. We read and rejoice that Jesus was saved from that, but there were lots of children who were not. The very entrance of God into our world so offended the secular authorities that it had serious consequences.
So what does this have to do with those tough words in Mark? It has everything to do with them, because it seems to be the case that, if God comes close, it can be extremely uncomfortable. We sometimes hear people talk about God coming close as if it was always a warm and happy time for everyone, but it simply isn't so. It is true that, in telling the parables, Jesus was blinding the people and stopping up their ears and preventing them from really listening, but it isn't as though he was doing this because he was being mean, but rather because there was no other way. Time and time again, we see that, when God moves among his people, we react badly. This is not a weakness in God, but a weakness in us. It just so happens that, when God demonstrates his love toward us, we freak out and don't want to receive it.
When we see it this way, we can see that, however harsh Jesus' words seem to us at first, it is really unbelievably gracious, from beginning to end. We see that God does not give up his good plan when he sees that we don't accept it right away. If he was worried about what grace looked like at first, he would never do anything for us. It is precisely because he cares about us more than what we think about it that he keeps going, he doesn't give up, but follows through with his good plan.
Jesus' purpose in coming to us was not so that we could know a lot of interesting things, neither was it first and foremost that we should live a certain way, though it is definitely good if we learn things and live in a faithful way. His purpose was to redeem us, to show us the Father, and to transform us from the inside out. And in order to do that, he did not stop when we got offended, but kept going. His perseverance pushed him to be killed for us, but that did not stop him. He was raised from the dead, ascended to heaven and gave us his Spirit, that we might know what we could never understand before. Our God has gone to tremendous lengths to renew us. Let us give thanks and lean on him in all things. Let us pray.
AMEN
It is possible to take what I am about to say and completely misunderstand it. It is possible that you might hear this first thing I have to say and interpret it to mean that I have a low view of the Bible. That is not the case. I do, however, want to point out something that you may have already noticed, or may one day notice all on your own.
Even though there is a tremendous amount of similarity between the four gospels, especially between the first three, Matthew, Mark and Luke, they are not identical. This is a good thing because, if they were identical, we wouldn't need all of them. The different gospels do not all tell the same stories. Sometimes, when they tell the same stories, they put them in a different order. What is interesting is that there are times when two different gospel writers will have differences between their accounts of the same story. This passage is a wonderful example of this. In it, we have Jesus quoting the prophet Isaiah, but the quotation is a little different depending on which gospel we read it in.
In Matthew, for example, we read this. "You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people's heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - and I would heal them." Mark's account, that we just heard, reads a little differently. "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables," and now comes the quote, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."
Do you see the difference between the two? In Matthew, we get the sense that the problem is that the people are just being stubborn, that they are shutting their eyes and ears and hardening their hearts so they can never hear what God is saying to them. It is a lamentable situation that breaks Jesus' heart. In Mark, however, we get the idea that the telling of parables and the hardening of hearts are related. We get the impression that Jesus tells the parables precisely in order to harden people's hearts.
If we look at these two accounts side by side, we can see that Mark's account is just a bit harsher, isn't it? In Matthew, the parables just happen to be met with stubbornness; in Mark, the stubbornness is caused by the parables, that Jesus tells the parables in order to provoke the stubbornness. Because of this, you almost never hear anyone preach on Mark's version of this. In fact, even when someone does set out to explain Mark's version, it almost always works itself out that they say that we should understand Mark's version to be saying what Matthew's version says, and not the other way around. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to deal with the boldness of Mark's account so we hide in Matthew's account.
But why would they be so different? Here's a thought. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, but it was translated into Greek about four hundred years before Jesus was born. By the time the New Testament was being written, far more people were reading the Greek version than the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. As it turns out, the difference between Matthew and Mark's version of this quotation is the same as the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew version of Isaiah. You see, the Greek version is exactly like Matthew's account and the Hebrew version is exactly like Mark's. Even though the Hebrew version is the "original," we cannot pretend that people would not have had both versions in their head. This is why they are both important and why we must take them both seriously. But what it means is that, even though they are both important, the fact remains that we are considering Mark's account of this event and not Matthew's, so we need to deal with what Mark has to say in all its harshness.
But, because Jesus is quoting Isaiah, in order to really understand what Jesus is saying, we need to take a moment and go back to the book of Isaiah and understand what he is saying. This is what we read. "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.' The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said, 'Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!' Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: 'Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.' Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I; send me!' And he said, 'Go and say to this people: "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand." Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.' Then I said, 'How long, O Lord?' And he said, 'Until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled.' The holy seed is its stump."
You see, the first verses of that passage are famous and well beloved in the church because it is a wonderful account of being called by God and the response of a faithful person. But once we get beyond those first verses and get closer to the end of the chapter, things get more than a little uncomfortable. Isaiah lived in a time when all of Israel thought that Jerusalem, their capital, was the home of God and God would never, could never, allow Jerusalem to fall into enemy hands. One of the big points that God's command to Isaiah is that this is simply not true. God not only can allow Jerusalem to fall, but would indeed do so.
Part of what we learn from this passage in Isaiah is that God is not concerned about the things we are concerned about. For the people at the time, the idea that God might allow the capital of Israel to fall was unthinkable. If that were to happen, it seemed, everything would be lost. If it happened, it would mean, they thought, that God was defeated. Isaiah's difficult message is that the fall of Jerusalem, when it happened, would be so far from being a defeat of God that it actually would be at God's hand. Whatever else this passage might mean, and I think it has lots of levels of meaning, it shows us that God is not limited by the things that limit us, that the most stable things in the world might be taken away from us to remind us to trust in God and in God alone. The success of God is not and can not be tied to the success of any human project.
I think that this helps us to understand what Jesus is getting at in our passage from Mark. It is a tearing down of everything that we think needs to be the case for God to be successful. Just like the invasion and defeat of Jerusalem does not carry with it the defeat of God, the attack on and even crucifixion of Jesus does not mean that God has been defeated. Instead, we need to remember, at every step of the way, that God was so aware of what was happening, that he walked right into it, knowing that even death could not stop him.
On another level, we need to look at it in its context. If you remember back to when we met last, two weeks ago, I said that this first part of chapter four is an example of Mark's so-called "Sandwich technique," where he takes one story, splits it in two, and includes something else in the middle. One of the things I said was that both the story that gets split apart and the stuff that goes in the middle have something to say to each other, that we can't understand them correctly unless we think them through together.
Jesus has just told a parable that explains why some people listen to him and other people do not. The parable talked about people who are on the "inside" and those who are on the "outside." There are some soils that can make a seed grow and others that cannot. What is more, we cannot always tell right away which is which. Sometimes, a plant will sprout right up but it has no roots and will ultimately not grow but die out. One of the things that Jesus is saying by quoting that chapter from Isaiah is that we should not think for a moment that, when lots of people reject him, when people just don't get excited about following Jesus, that God has somehow failed. Even when Jesus is betrayed and murdered, God is still working and overcomes death through resurrection.
I promised that this would be a message that did justice to Mark's account of Jesus' reference to Isaiah and not just resolve it into Matthew's reading. So far, the message has focused on things that are in common between the two, things that would need to be said, regardless of which version we were looking at. However, we still have to deal with the fact that Mark's account seems to be quite harsh. It certainly seems that Jesus is saying that he is intentionally causing people to stop up their ears, close their eyes, and harden their hearts, that it isn't just a coincidence that people aren't listening, but that he is, in a sense, causing them to reject him. What are we to do with that?
I have the tendency to give myself difficult preaching assignments, for one reason or another. Once, for example, I preached once from every single book of the Bible. One that I did last year for Advent was particularly interesting and challenging and I think it speaks to the troubles we have with this text. Since Advent and Christmas celebrate the time when God himself came into our world of space and time and encountered us, I asked the question over three weeks, "What happens when God comes close?" When we look at the Bible and take it seriously, we find that the answer to that question is very interesting indeed.
The first week, we looked at a passage in Paul's letter to the Romans, where he talks about the law that was given to the ancient Israelites. He says things like, "If it weren't for the law telling me not to covet," that is, to be jealous and want things you can't have, "I would have never known covetousness." He says that, if God had not ever said, "Don't do this," he never would have wanted to do it. In some fairly small way, when God took just one small step toward the Israelites, giving them a law that simply said, "These things are not allowed among the people of God," all of a sudden, the part deep inside of them that did not want God to tell them what to do woke up and said, "Well, I'm going to do them."
The next week, we looked at this passage from Isaiah that we have been considering tonight. We saw that, when even the great prophet of God came into God's presence, the impact was overwhelming. This man who was called to speak the word of God to the people of God realized that he had unclean lips, that he was not, in himself, worthy of the message he had been given. This feeling of inadequacy was so strong that he felt like he was going to die.
The third week, we looked at a passage that almost nobody talks about, the slaying of the innocents. Remember when Jesus is born and the wise men from the East come and Jesus' family has to get up in the middle of the night and run away to Egypt? It was because Herod was going to come in and have all the children under two years old killed. We read and rejoice that Jesus was saved from that, but there were lots of children who were not. The very entrance of God into our world so offended the secular authorities that it had serious consequences.
So what does this have to do with those tough words in Mark? It has everything to do with them, because it seems to be the case that, if God comes close, it can be extremely uncomfortable. We sometimes hear people talk about God coming close as if it was always a warm and happy time for everyone, but it simply isn't so. It is true that, in telling the parables, Jesus was blinding the people and stopping up their ears and preventing them from really listening, but it isn't as though he was doing this because he was being mean, but rather because there was no other way. Time and time again, we see that, when God moves among his people, we react badly. This is not a weakness in God, but a weakness in us. It just so happens that, when God demonstrates his love toward us, we freak out and don't want to receive it.
When we see it this way, we can see that, however harsh Jesus' words seem to us at first, it is really unbelievably gracious, from beginning to end. We see that God does not give up his good plan when he sees that we don't accept it right away. If he was worried about what grace looked like at first, he would never do anything for us. It is precisely because he cares about us more than what we think about it that he keeps going, he doesn't give up, but follows through with his good plan.
Jesus' purpose in coming to us was not so that we could know a lot of interesting things, neither was it first and foremost that we should live a certain way, though it is definitely good if we learn things and live in a faithful way. His purpose was to redeem us, to show us the Father, and to transform us from the inside out. And in order to do that, he did not stop when we got offended, but kept going. His perseverance pushed him to be killed for us, but that did not stop him. He was raised from the dead, ascended to heaven and gave us his Spirit, that we might know what we could never understand before. Our God has gone to tremendous lengths to renew us. Let us give thanks and lean on him in all things. Let us pray.
AMEN
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Mark 4:1-9,13-20
10/19/11 Mark 4:1-9, 13-20 GUMC Youth
As we start our way through chapter four of Mark's gospel, we are confronted with something that actually shows up quite a few times in Mark and certainly more in Mark than any other book of the New Testament. He will take a story, split it in two, then stick something else in between the two parts. Sometimes, this is called Mark's "Sandwich" technique, because he sandwiches a point between two parts of a story. What we need to know about this is that, when Mark does this, it isn't just for good story-telling purposes, but he is making a very important point. Both the "bread" and the "meat" of the sandwich, to use those terms, are tied together and must be interpreted together.
The reason why I bring this up is because, if you noticed, we simply jumped over three verses out of the middle of our text for tonight. This is not because they are not important, nor is it because we are going to just pass by them, but because this is an example of this sandwich technique. We are going to deal with the story that Mark splits apart this week and with the stuff he stuck between the two parts the next time we get together in two weeks. Now, this might not sound fair, because we've got seventeen verses to look at this week and only three for next time, but it really isn't that odd. Those three verses are so interesting and raise so many problems for so many people, it might even take longer to unpack what they mean than it does for the rest of this passage.
We start out by seeing that Jesus is surrounded by a big crowd, there's that crowd again, so he has to get into a boat in order to teach them. Here we have the first of Jesus' famous parables in the Gospel of Mark, but what exactly are parables? You will hear most people talk about the parables as if they were told to make everything as clear as can be, that anyone can understand the parables if they just take a moment and think about them. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to line up with the facts. You see, the first part of our passage is spoken to the crowd of people who had come to listen, but the second part is spoken just to the disciples, just to those who were close to Jesus.
People will often talk about the parable of the sower as if it were as plain as day to understand, but we forget that, to my knowledge, nobody talks about the parable without talking about the interpretation that Jesus gives. We need to remember that the crowd of people who heard the parable didn't hear the interpretation. All they heard, after traveling a long way, was a story about a man who went out to plant, some of his work bore a lot of fruit, but some of it didn't. You know, if we are honest, we could say the most natural interpretation (if we ignore Jesus' interpretation) is that farming is not an exact science (especially at the time); you win some and you lose some. The important thing is that you keep trying. If you get so worried about wasting some seed, you'll never get the benefits of that seed that lands on good soil. That's an interesting interpretation, but that isn't what Jesus is getting at.
Let's take the different soils one at a time and see what is going on. The seeds fall on a path, "and the birds came and ate it up." When we look at this from the point of view of agriculture, the problem is that the seed is exposed before it has had a chance to grow. Once it grows, it can withstand great forces (as we can see here in Northwest Iowa. All kinds of crazy things can happen before the crops are wasted), but it is in the greatest danger at the beginning. But when Jesus interprets this in terms of human beings, he says, "When they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them." If you are a new Christian and you are exposed directly to all kinds of attacks, it is easy to cut and run, or to be so discouraged that you give up. Once you've grown in your faith, you can withstand a lot of those kinds of attacks, but it is dangerous at the beginning.
The next seeds fall onto rocky ground, "where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away." The problem here, looking at it from an agricultural point of view is that, at first glance, the plant is strong, just like a plant ought to be. However, the roots are weak, or nonexistent, which means that it does not take much to destroy the plant. Jesus makes it seem that the plant grew quickly because there was not much soil, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. When we understand his statement in light of his interpretation, it seems to be clear that his point is mainly the difference between the appearance, at first, of real growth, contrasted with the destruction of the plant, because it had no roots.
When Jesus talks about what this means for Christians, he says, "When they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away." There are many people who are intrigued by the gospel, who seem to respond really well, who make all kinds of great professions, but, when the going gets tough, it turns out they aren't really all that different than those around them. I can't tell you how many people I went to high school and college with who were like this. In fact, you could say that this was me at the beginning of high school, and even partly into college. As a bit of a side not, it is interesting that these are the only ones that Jesus says, "they immediately receive it with joy." Appearances can be very deceiving.
The third set of seeds fell onto ground that had a bunch of thorns in it, "and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain." With the plant, the thorns and other plants around suck up all the resources so that there is nothing left to nourish the plant. With only so much food and water to go around, some plants get it and the weak die out.
Interpreting this for his disciples, Jesus says, "These are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing." As far as Christians are concerned, we need to realize that we only have so much time and energy. We have to decide what to spend it on. If we spend all our time, energy, and money on things that do not help us grow in our faith, we won't have much left for that growth. Also, if we spend all our time trying to get more money, we won't grow. We have to prioritize our lives and take the limitations we have seriously, so we can make good choices. For example, we don't have cable and I don't miss it. I have so much to do, so many books I want to read, so much time I want to spend with my family, so much time at the Y trying to be more healthy that, if I sat down and got sucked into a few hours to TV a day, I wouldn't be able to do the things that really mattered.
The last seeds we hear about land in good soil, "and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold." When the sower gets the seed where it can be received and nurtured, it grows and brings forth incredible abundance. The difference between the growth that comes from being in good soil and from being in the other kinds of soil is amazing. Biblical Scholar R. T. France makes this comparison. "The first never started, the second started but died, the third survived but could not produce grain. But in the end none is of any value to the farmer, since he is looking for grain, not mere survival."
Interpreting this for his disciples, Jesus says, "They hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundred-fold." It is interesting that, when Jesus describes what it means for someone to receive the word as good soil, he does so in terms of "bearing fruit." This is a term that has a few shades of meaning in the New Testament. Sometimes it means that your Christian faith does not just sit in your heart but makes a difference in your life. However, it often means, and does in this case, the spreading of the gospel and the making of disciples. Jesus talks about a person receiving the good news in faith then going out and making disciples, thirty, sixty or a hundred. To be a Christian is to bear fruit like this. You need to understand that I am not concerned with numbers. I'm not so excited about myself that I feel we need to have a huge number of people here in order to feel good about myself. The reason that we are called to reach out is twofold. First, it is because we have something to share. We have a God who loves us, who is our hope, even in the midst of trials, tribulations, and even death, and there are all too many people who have no hope in the world. Secondly, it is because it is the natural response to hearing in faith. Faith drives us to grow; not out of obligation, not because you're going to disappoint me or anyone else if you don't, but simply because it is what faithful people do, like a plant grows, not because it has to, but because it is simply what it does. This takes many forms (for example, I talk about science with atheists, but that is not isolated from the gospel), but it happens.
So the question that we each need to ask ourselves, and ask ourselves seriously, is, "What kind of soil am I?" Are you someone who has never really received the seed of the Word, that is, are you someone who has never given yourself to Jesus at all? Are you, instead, someone who gave yourself to Jesus once upon a time, but you quickly, whether it was days, weeks, months, or even years down the road, let your faith die, or at least slip into inactivity? Perhaps you are doing your best to grow but are so surrounded by things that drain your time and energy, or are so influenced by destructive relationships that you can't seem to grow, in spite of your best efforts. It is also possible that you have received the seed and are growing, bearing fruit in the way God has called you. I'll tell you what; only you and God know the answer to that question. In fact, it might even be the case that you are not prepared to admit to yourself what kind of soil you have been, so you may not even realize where you fit into this parable. But its something that you should think through, both tonight and in the days to come. Do your best to think back through your life and recent history and see if it looks more like one of these patterns than the others.
A while back, we talked about the fact that the communities in which we find ourselves play a role in who we are and how we even think. I emphasized the fact that we are not imprisoned in the way things are, or the way things have always been, but that, in order to break out of old ways of thinking, sometimes we need to leave behind old ways of living. This is one way in which the parable is an incomplete picture of our situation. You see, the path cannot somehow magically move to become good soil, nor can the rocks and thorns just magically disappear, but you and I do not need to stay the same as we used to be.
Jesus tells this parable and he isn't, first and foremost, talking about us, inasmuch as we are living rather a long time after him, though it still applies to us as we have seen. The fact of the matter is that, God has entered our world of space and time and has met all kinds of people, but not everyone likes him. There were some, like the disciples who, at a word from Jesus' mouth, dropped everything and followed him. There are others, like the scribes from Jerusalem, who seemed to have no place in their hearts and lives for him, and there were people all the way in between. The people who loved Jesus could make no sense of why some people hated him and the people who hated Jesus couldn't understand why anyone would love him.
According to Jesus' parable, the difference between the people is like the difference between different kinds of soils that have seed thrown onto them. The same seed is given to every kind of soil, but only some soils are prepared to do anything with them. The same message of salvation and a transformed life is offered to all, but only some people are prepared to do anything with that. When we look at things through this lens, we see that to expect everyone to jump for joy at the mention of the name of Jesus would be as unrealistic as to have all soil be of the same kind.
So, there is a sense in which there is not much we can do about what kind of soil we are, but we need to be careful not to push this to the extreme. You see, even though there were exceptions to this, there were whole groups who either hated Jesus or loved him. Jesus was consistently loved by the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, the unpopular, the dirty, the smelly, those who had no hope. He was consistently hated by the people who saw themselves as self-sufficient, as those who understood themselves as people who already understood God, by the powerful and the popular. In general, the Pharisees hated Jesus with a fiery passion, but in the Gospel of John, we read about a Pharisee named Nicodemus who accepted Jesus for who he was and was made fun of by the other Pharisees because of it. There was something about being a Pharisee that seemed to keep people from accepting Jesus and if one of them did so, there was tremendous peer pressure to keep them from acting on it.
The fact of the matter is that changing from one type of soil to another is hard work, but it is not impossible. And the reason that it is not impossible is because Jesus has done the impossible, on our behalf and in our place, has responded to God in perfect obedience, long before we ever thought to do so. Remember this. Nobody, not even Jesus' closest disciples, really really got it until after Jesus was not only raised from the dead, but until he poured out the Holy Spirit onto the disciples at Pentecost. Until that happened, nobody really understood what Jesus was doing and teaching. Before all the dust settled, we read that some of Jesus' greatest enemies became great heroes of faith and some of his closest friends turned out to be his enemies. Never give up on your friends or your family. And never give up on yourself. Even if you have never really given yourself to Jesus, or even if you have done it once, or many times, but it never seems to stick, never give up. Jesus died for you. He deeply wants you to know him, which means he also wants you to become the kind of person who can know him, and what is amazing is that there isn't a set, narrow pattern for what that looks like. Keep striving after Jesus, because he has striven after you. The seeds keep getting planted and are just waiting for a chance to be received and grow. Let us pray.
AMEN
As we start our way through chapter four of Mark's gospel, we are confronted with something that actually shows up quite a few times in Mark and certainly more in Mark than any other book of the New Testament. He will take a story, split it in two, then stick something else in between the two parts. Sometimes, this is called Mark's "Sandwich" technique, because he sandwiches a point between two parts of a story. What we need to know about this is that, when Mark does this, it isn't just for good story-telling purposes, but he is making a very important point. Both the "bread" and the "meat" of the sandwich, to use those terms, are tied together and must be interpreted together.
The reason why I bring this up is because, if you noticed, we simply jumped over three verses out of the middle of our text for tonight. This is not because they are not important, nor is it because we are going to just pass by them, but because this is an example of this sandwich technique. We are going to deal with the story that Mark splits apart this week and with the stuff he stuck between the two parts the next time we get together in two weeks. Now, this might not sound fair, because we've got seventeen verses to look at this week and only three for next time, but it really isn't that odd. Those three verses are so interesting and raise so many problems for so many people, it might even take longer to unpack what they mean than it does for the rest of this passage.
We start out by seeing that Jesus is surrounded by a big crowd, there's that crowd again, so he has to get into a boat in order to teach them. Here we have the first of Jesus' famous parables in the Gospel of Mark, but what exactly are parables? You will hear most people talk about the parables as if they were told to make everything as clear as can be, that anyone can understand the parables if they just take a moment and think about them. The only problem is that it doesn't seem to line up with the facts. You see, the first part of our passage is spoken to the crowd of people who had come to listen, but the second part is spoken just to the disciples, just to those who were close to Jesus.
People will often talk about the parable of the sower as if it were as plain as day to understand, but we forget that, to my knowledge, nobody talks about the parable without talking about the interpretation that Jesus gives. We need to remember that the crowd of people who heard the parable didn't hear the interpretation. All they heard, after traveling a long way, was a story about a man who went out to plant, some of his work bore a lot of fruit, but some of it didn't. You know, if we are honest, we could say the most natural interpretation (if we ignore Jesus' interpretation) is that farming is not an exact science (especially at the time); you win some and you lose some. The important thing is that you keep trying. If you get so worried about wasting some seed, you'll never get the benefits of that seed that lands on good soil. That's an interesting interpretation, but that isn't what Jesus is getting at.
Let's take the different soils one at a time and see what is going on. The seeds fall on a path, "and the birds came and ate it up." When we look at this from the point of view of agriculture, the problem is that the seed is exposed before it has had a chance to grow. Once it grows, it can withstand great forces (as we can see here in Northwest Iowa. All kinds of crazy things can happen before the crops are wasted), but it is in the greatest danger at the beginning. But when Jesus interprets this in terms of human beings, he says, "When they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them." If you are a new Christian and you are exposed directly to all kinds of attacks, it is easy to cut and run, or to be so discouraged that you give up. Once you've grown in your faith, you can withstand a lot of those kinds of attacks, but it is dangerous at the beginning.
The next seeds fall onto rocky ground, "where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away." The problem here, looking at it from an agricultural point of view is that, at first glance, the plant is strong, just like a plant ought to be. However, the roots are weak, or nonexistent, which means that it does not take much to destroy the plant. Jesus makes it seem that the plant grew quickly because there was not much soil, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. When we understand his statement in light of his interpretation, it seems to be clear that his point is mainly the difference between the appearance, at first, of real growth, contrasted with the destruction of the plant, because it had no roots.
When Jesus talks about what this means for Christians, he says, "When they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away." There are many people who are intrigued by the gospel, who seem to respond really well, who make all kinds of great professions, but, when the going gets tough, it turns out they aren't really all that different than those around them. I can't tell you how many people I went to high school and college with who were like this. In fact, you could say that this was me at the beginning of high school, and even partly into college. As a bit of a side not, it is interesting that these are the only ones that Jesus says, "they immediately receive it with joy." Appearances can be very deceiving.
The third set of seeds fell onto ground that had a bunch of thorns in it, "and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain." With the plant, the thorns and other plants around suck up all the resources so that there is nothing left to nourish the plant. With only so much food and water to go around, some plants get it and the weak die out.
Interpreting this for his disciples, Jesus says, "These are the ones who hear the word, but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing." As far as Christians are concerned, we need to realize that we only have so much time and energy. We have to decide what to spend it on. If we spend all our time, energy, and money on things that do not help us grow in our faith, we won't have much left for that growth. Also, if we spend all our time trying to get more money, we won't grow. We have to prioritize our lives and take the limitations we have seriously, so we can make good choices. For example, we don't have cable and I don't miss it. I have so much to do, so many books I want to read, so much time I want to spend with my family, so much time at the Y trying to be more healthy that, if I sat down and got sucked into a few hours to TV a day, I wouldn't be able to do the things that really mattered.
The last seeds we hear about land in good soil, "and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold." When the sower gets the seed where it can be received and nurtured, it grows and brings forth incredible abundance. The difference between the growth that comes from being in good soil and from being in the other kinds of soil is amazing. Biblical Scholar R. T. France makes this comparison. "The first never started, the second started but died, the third survived but could not produce grain. But in the end none is of any value to the farmer, since he is looking for grain, not mere survival."
Interpreting this for his disciples, Jesus says, "They hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundred-fold." It is interesting that, when Jesus describes what it means for someone to receive the word as good soil, he does so in terms of "bearing fruit." This is a term that has a few shades of meaning in the New Testament. Sometimes it means that your Christian faith does not just sit in your heart but makes a difference in your life. However, it often means, and does in this case, the spreading of the gospel and the making of disciples. Jesus talks about a person receiving the good news in faith then going out and making disciples, thirty, sixty or a hundred. To be a Christian is to bear fruit like this. You need to understand that I am not concerned with numbers. I'm not so excited about myself that I feel we need to have a huge number of people here in order to feel good about myself. The reason that we are called to reach out is twofold. First, it is because we have something to share. We have a God who loves us, who is our hope, even in the midst of trials, tribulations, and even death, and there are all too many people who have no hope in the world. Secondly, it is because it is the natural response to hearing in faith. Faith drives us to grow; not out of obligation, not because you're going to disappoint me or anyone else if you don't, but simply because it is what faithful people do, like a plant grows, not because it has to, but because it is simply what it does. This takes many forms (for example, I talk about science with atheists, but that is not isolated from the gospel), but it happens.
So the question that we each need to ask ourselves, and ask ourselves seriously, is, "What kind of soil am I?" Are you someone who has never really received the seed of the Word, that is, are you someone who has never given yourself to Jesus at all? Are you, instead, someone who gave yourself to Jesus once upon a time, but you quickly, whether it was days, weeks, months, or even years down the road, let your faith die, or at least slip into inactivity? Perhaps you are doing your best to grow but are so surrounded by things that drain your time and energy, or are so influenced by destructive relationships that you can't seem to grow, in spite of your best efforts. It is also possible that you have received the seed and are growing, bearing fruit in the way God has called you. I'll tell you what; only you and God know the answer to that question. In fact, it might even be the case that you are not prepared to admit to yourself what kind of soil you have been, so you may not even realize where you fit into this parable. But its something that you should think through, both tonight and in the days to come. Do your best to think back through your life and recent history and see if it looks more like one of these patterns than the others.
A while back, we talked about the fact that the communities in which we find ourselves play a role in who we are and how we even think. I emphasized the fact that we are not imprisoned in the way things are, or the way things have always been, but that, in order to break out of old ways of thinking, sometimes we need to leave behind old ways of living. This is one way in which the parable is an incomplete picture of our situation. You see, the path cannot somehow magically move to become good soil, nor can the rocks and thorns just magically disappear, but you and I do not need to stay the same as we used to be.
Jesus tells this parable and he isn't, first and foremost, talking about us, inasmuch as we are living rather a long time after him, though it still applies to us as we have seen. The fact of the matter is that, God has entered our world of space and time and has met all kinds of people, but not everyone likes him. There were some, like the disciples who, at a word from Jesus' mouth, dropped everything and followed him. There are others, like the scribes from Jerusalem, who seemed to have no place in their hearts and lives for him, and there were people all the way in between. The people who loved Jesus could make no sense of why some people hated him and the people who hated Jesus couldn't understand why anyone would love him.
According to Jesus' parable, the difference between the people is like the difference between different kinds of soils that have seed thrown onto them. The same seed is given to every kind of soil, but only some soils are prepared to do anything with them. The same message of salvation and a transformed life is offered to all, but only some people are prepared to do anything with that. When we look at things through this lens, we see that to expect everyone to jump for joy at the mention of the name of Jesus would be as unrealistic as to have all soil be of the same kind.
So, there is a sense in which there is not much we can do about what kind of soil we are, but we need to be careful not to push this to the extreme. You see, even though there were exceptions to this, there were whole groups who either hated Jesus or loved him. Jesus was consistently loved by the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, the unpopular, the dirty, the smelly, those who had no hope. He was consistently hated by the people who saw themselves as self-sufficient, as those who understood themselves as people who already understood God, by the powerful and the popular. In general, the Pharisees hated Jesus with a fiery passion, but in the Gospel of John, we read about a Pharisee named Nicodemus who accepted Jesus for who he was and was made fun of by the other Pharisees because of it. There was something about being a Pharisee that seemed to keep people from accepting Jesus and if one of them did so, there was tremendous peer pressure to keep them from acting on it.
The fact of the matter is that changing from one type of soil to another is hard work, but it is not impossible. And the reason that it is not impossible is because Jesus has done the impossible, on our behalf and in our place, has responded to God in perfect obedience, long before we ever thought to do so. Remember this. Nobody, not even Jesus' closest disciples, really really got it until after Jesus was not only raised from the dead, but until he poured out the Holy Spirit onto the disciples at Pentecost. Until that happened, nobody really understood what Jesus was doing and teaching. Before all the dust settled, we read that some of Jesus' greatest enemies became great heroes of faith and some of his closest friends turned out to be his enemies. Never give up on your friends or your family. And never give up on yourself. Even if you have never really given yourself to Jesus, or even if you have done it once, or many times, but it never seems to stick, never give up. Jesus died for you. He deeply wants you to know him, which means he also wants you to become the kind of person who can know him, and what is amazing is that there isn't a set, narrow pattern for what that looks like. Keep striving after Jesus, because he has striven after you. The seeds keep getting planted and are just waiting for a chance to be received and grow. Let us pray.
AMEN
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