Year: 2018

“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.”

“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”.

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“They brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord”

It is a double-barrelled feast; a feast at once of Christ and of Mary. All the festivals of Mary are tagged to the feasts of Christ, but here uniquely they are together in one. This is signaled explicitly in the Luke’s first sentence of this evening’s Gospel reading in the words “purification” and “presentation”. A most intriguing scene, it is also rather complex. The celebration itself is more familiarly called Candlemas, acknowledging the words of the aged Simeon who sees in the infant Christ the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy about Israel’s vocation to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel.” Few passages concentrate so wonderfully the interdependence, connection, and difference between Judaism and Christianity in the interweaving of the particular and the universal.

Candlemas marks the transition from the light of Christmas to the life of Easter. It reminds us that the twin centers of the Christian contemplation are Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each bound up in the other, each incomprehensible without the other. Once again we are presented with something very different from a linear narrative. Instead, the focus is doctrinal. With Candlemas, we learn with Mary about the deeper and truer significance of her holy child. Throughout the Christmas and Epiphany mysteries, Mary has been very much in the picture both in the paradox of virgin and mother and in the activity of “pondering in her heart all the things that are said” about the child Christ.

Here on the fortieth day after Christ’s birth and in accord with the cultural and religious custom of Israel, she and Joseph are in Jerusalem “to do for him after the custom of the law” – honouring God for the gift of the first-born male. It is also “when the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished” – forty days after childbirth. This has its later expression in the little service “commonly called The Churching of Women,” a service of “Thanksgiving After Child-Birth” in the Prayer Book (pp.573-575), a service that also acknowledges the frequent loss of children in childbirth. These are very real human realities and experiences. Both presentation and purification are in keeping with the customs and practices of Israel and yet both presentation and purification open us out to something universal and for all.

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