Monday, March 23, 2015
Today’s Scripture: Matthew 13:10-17 and Mark 4:10-13
(These passages comes after Jesus’ tells the Parable of the Sower)
“When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; 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.'" (Mark 4:10-12)
Finding salvation in heaven is part of the message, getting closer to God is part of the message, but the heart of the message of Jesus was a new order breaking into history, changing everything about the world, including us.
That is why we can offer such hope to the world. The church is supposed to be saying, and the church is supposed to be showing, that our life together can be better. In our shallow, superficial, and selfish age, Jesus is indeed calling us to a completely different way of life that people are supposed to be able to see. He called it the kingdom of God, and it is a very clear alternative selfish kingdoms of this world as we say at the very beginning that better way of living was meant to benefit not just Christians but everybody else too. That’s what makes it transformational. - Jim Wallis, “On God’s Side: What Religion Forgets and Politics Hasn’t Learned about Serving the Common Good”, Brazon Press, 2013, pp. 22-23.
These two passages in Matthew and Mark has always been a challenge to those who have attempted to understand Jesus’ parables and the whole of the gospel. Some assume that there must have been things that Jesus told his closest disciples that were not revealed to us. The King James Version speaks of the “mystery” of the Kingdom of God. Now this word used for a “mystery” or “secret” was used by the Greek with a technical meaning; it does not mean something which is complicated and mysterious in the sense we normally understand the term. It means something which is quite unintelligible to the person who has not been initiated into its meaning, but which is perfectly clear and plain to the person who is been so initiated. Because of the close relationship the early disciples had travelling with Jesus and hearing the whole context of the gospel proclamation, they were in a position to understand better, while for those who paid attention to hearing, seeing and understanding Jesus words and actions, comprehending was not beyond their ability.
The challenge and difficulty of the passage lies in the section that follows. If we take this passage at its face value it sounds as if Jesus taught in parables deliberately to cloak his meaning, purposely to hide it from all ordinary men and women. Jesus used parables not to cloak his meaning and to hide his truth but to compel men and women to recognize the truth and to enable them to see it.
This passage has a similar context to a quotation from Isaiah 6:9, 10. From the beginning it worried people. In the original Hebrew translation: that seems on the face of it that God is telling Isaiah that he is to pursue a course deliberately designed to make the people fail to understand. The Greek Septuagint translators (Greek version of the Old Testament) were worried at this strange passage and they translated it differently.
“And he said, go and say to this people, 'Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not perceive.' For the heart of this people has become gross, and with their ears they hear heavily, and their eyes they have closed; least at any time they shall see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and shall be converted, and I should heal them.” (Isaiah 6:9, 10)
The Greek version does not say that God intended that the people should be so dull that they would not understand; it says that they had made themselves so dull that they could not understand, which is a very different thing. When Isaiah spoke he spoke half in irony and half in despair and always in love of God’s people. Isaiah was thinking, “God sent me to bring his truth to His people; and for all the good I am doing I might as well have been sent to shut their minds to it. I might as well be speaking to a brick wall. You would think that God had shut their minds to it.” Those of us in leadership within the church very well know how Isaiah feels.
So when Jesus spoke his parables; he meant them to flash into the minds of his audience and to illustrate the truth of God. But in so many eyes he saw a dull incomprehension. He saw so many people blinded by prejudice, deafened by wishful thinking, and too lazy and apathetic to think. He turned to his disciples and he said to them; “do you remember what Isaiah once said? He said that when he came with God’s message to God’s people Israel in his day they were too dull to understand that you would have thought that God had shut instead of opened their minds; I feel like that today.”
When Jesus said this, he did not say it in anger, or irritation, or bitterness, or exasperation. He said it with the wistful longing of frustrated love, the pungent sorrow of a man who had a tremendous gift to give which people were too blind to take. If we read this, not hearing a tone of bitter exasperation, but a tone of regretful love, it would sound quite different.
It will tell us not of a God who deliberately blinded his people and hid his truth, but of God’s people who were so dull to comprehend that it seemed of no use even for God to try to penetrate their hearts. God tells Isaiah at the end of the passage that his people need to “turn and be healed." (Isa. 6:10) This lack of comprehension has always been the challenge for the church and continues, today. Our ability to extend an invitation to enter and receive the kingdom will often begin by offering first, healing and forgiveness to those around us, in order, to provide a path for them to comprehend the proclamation of the kingdom.
“The kingdom of God is for the broken hearted” ― Fred Rogers
Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning: Psalms 119:73–80; 145
Evening: Psalms 121; 6
Jeremiah 24:1–10
Romans 9:19–33
John 9:1–17
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