by CCW | 4 February 2018 15:00
“He spake by a parable: A sower went out to sow his seed.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us this parable but only Luke explains that “the parable is this.” In other words, Luke provides us with a deeper understanding of the meaning of this parable and, by extension, all the parables. Parables are stories with meanings, usually of a moral sort. They all work by way of analogy, making a likeness between one thing and another. They only work because we sense or grasp the analogy and its application to our lives.
But there is a paradox about the parables, it seems to me. Far from being easy and self-evident, they require considerable reflection and even explanation. We don’t always get the message. This parable reveals wonderfully that paradox in the realization that something is being made known that not all will understand. “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to the disciples (literally, the learners) only to go on to say “but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand,” a point which both Matthew and Mark also make. In Matthew’s case, it refers to a passage from Isaiah about hearing and not understanding because “this people’s heart has grown dull,” “their ears heavy of hearing,” and “their eyes closed.” But only Luke gives this fuller explanation of the parable, making explicit what we might say is at least implicit in the other Gospels.
It is his directness of expression that is noteworthy. It conveys the idea that perhaps in the explanation of the parable we just might hear and understand rather than be left in our ignorance and indifference. In other words, this parable in Luke’s telling suggests a kind of necessary interchange between story and meaning, between parable and instruction. That is the challenge to us. It speaks to our desire to learn which Luke here somehow wants to encourage and promote. Those that “are the good ground” as Luke alone explains “are they which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.”
While his treatment of the parable of the sower and the seed has its parallels with Matthew and Mark, the emphasis is significantly different. It emphasises explicitly the meaning of the seed. Matthew later explains that the seed is “the Son of Man.” Luke here says “the seed is the word of God” and further provides a fuller explanation of the analogy between ground and soul: “they which in an honest and good heart”.
Luke wants us to get the meaning of the parable and its application to our lives in Christ. It is not too much to say that he is emphasising the virtue of prudence as an active principle in our lives. Prudence is a kind of wisdom. It is about our knowing – both the desire to know without which there can really be no knowledge – and our acting upon what we know. Thus prudence is an active principle; our minds actively taking a hold of what we are given to know and letting it live in us. That is to be the good ground rather than the ground of the way-side, the rocky ground or the thorny ground from which no fruit comes.
There is no other aspect of contemporary religion and of the contemporary churches of the Christian faith, it seems to me, that is more important than the idea of the teaching church and the learning church. Luke senses that the parables can and must be explained. There can and must be teaching and learning. It has its application to our lives since doctrine must live in devotion, the teaching shaping our lives in faith and practice; all our shortcomings notwithstanding. The teaching is not only about who Christ is and who he is for us in God’s engagement with our humanity; it is also about the true worth and dignity of our humanity in which our living is entirely bound up in our knowing, albeit each according to the capacity of the beholder to behold. The point is that there is always something for each of us to learn and to grow into a deeper understanding.
Prudence is the virtue of wisdom which has to be active in us. Plato in his Symposium argues for that activity in us as “eros,” deliberately taking a word with its connotations of things erotic and physical, one of the words for love, to embark upon an upward journey of education and learning. Eros becomes the passionate desire to learn and to know. I like to think of this Gospel story as being about that eros, that passionate desire to learn and to know what Christ is saying to us so that it may begin to live in us; the seed of his word planted in the ground of our souls.
The analogy to the ground is at once obvious and profound. It requires humility rather than presumption. That, too, belongs to prudence. “An honest and good heart,” Luke suggests, is one which seeks to know, seeking in terms of the parabe to take hold of the seed which is the word of God planted in us. How? Through the seed sown as the Word proclaimed but also as actively received in us. Such is the eros, the desire to know. In that seeking alone there is fruit an hundred-fold but only through patience. To learn this and to know this is prudence. It is to be alive to the teaching of Christ through parable and instruction.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/02/04/sermon-for-sexagesima-6/
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