Day: February 12, 2023

“Now the parable is this”

Not just a parable but the explanation of the parable! We are often as not, at least if we are honest about ourselves, much like the disciples, asking in our hearts, “what might this parable be?” Yet here on this Sexagesima Sunday we are given a parable and its meaning. Jesus is didaskalos, the teacher and the substance of the teaching. “The seed is the word of God”, and he is the logos, the Word and Son of the Father opening out to us a way of thinking about our lives in pilgrimage.

The imagery is down to earth; it is agricultural. It has very much to do with the idea of cultivation in terms of the question ‘what kind of ground are we?’ That is the challenge for us. It demands a kind of self-examination, a metanoia, which means at once repentance and a thinking upon what has been revealed, literally, ‘a thinking after’. Constantly we are being challenged to call to mind, to think after or upon the things of God. What this parable and its interpretation provides belongs to the radical nature of our lives as spiritual and intellectual beings who are embodied and embedded in the particularities of cultures and places. It is a strong message to us about who we are and how we act in the cultures and places of our lives. It is an illusion to think that we are utterly independent and free from the restraints and features of our world and age; but nor are we simply determined or condemned to a social, economic, political and ideologically driven world. Unless we ourselves choose to be. So here is a parable and its interpretation which perhaps can help us to better understand ourselves as the children of God and to our growing up in the truth of God’s Word.

We are the ground upon which God’s Word, like a seed is sown, and sown for a purpose and one which requires something from us; the cultivation of that word within us and in our lives with one another.

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