Justin Appel

Beloved in Christ,

Today's Gospel lesson is a bit of a puzzler. In it, Jesus explained to the disciples why he spoke in parables, with the result that many people rejected his message.

Read Matthew 13:10-17

This passage gets wildly different interpretations, depending on your viewpoint. One particularly harsh view I encountered growing up was that Jesus spoke the parables to illustrate his choice to save some while ignoring others -- to their damnation. This interpretation is a logical extension of the idea that we are born into the world fundamentally guilty of the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, together with the notion that God only breaks some people free from that bondage. A bitter theological cup to drink from! It is nonetheless possible to discern a more traditional (and also catholic) approach to reading the parables, and I will try to briefly set it out here. Although the reading is dense, I hope the application is not!

First, it seems necessary to point out -- as N. T. Wright has -- that Jesus challenged his listeners to believe that he was inaugurating the Kingdom of God, an 'already/not yet' reality embodied in himself as Messiah and the Son of God. After all, Jesus was announcing the 'breaking in' of the Kingdom of God to a people that were expecting something else. Such a re-framing of Israel's history around himself was clearly paradigm-shifting. Stories function powerfully in this context.

Challenge doesn't necessarily mean obfuscation, though, and this is where the traditional interpretation of the parables comes in. Jesus was teaching the people around him to understand themselves within the deep symbolism of story -- a form of communication that relies on concrete, everyday illustrations, yet one that also speaks to the heart and to faith rather than to the intellect, to a wholesome understanding of things. On the other hand, the parables also provide a kind of linguistic depth that suggests to us the reality that God's thoughts are indeed higher than ours. We can't just parse them out and comprehend them fully. Faith really implies absolute trust in the Person, words, and deeds of Christ, not in our own understanding of things. In other words, Christ's teaching in parables sounds a lot like 'Come and follow me!'

This notion that Jesus was eliciting a simple and fundamental faith (leading to action) from those around him explains why many would reject his teachings. According to this traditional interpretation, Jesus did not tell parables to blind people or to lead them to punishment. Rather, he openly taught everyone around him about the Kingdom of God, and many responded with 'hearts grown dull', 'ears deafened' and 'eyes shut'. They simply could not respond with faith because they had lost the ability to repent -- to turn to God. Their intellective organ of faith (what the early Church Fathers constantly referred to using the language of the Greek philosophers: the nous), that ability which humans have to know God intuitively, was clouded and murky.

The beauty of such a reading, is that it speaks clearly to our own situation. Has anything really changed since the first century? Individual and collective histories vary across the centuries, but we still encounter Jesus in his words, and in the sacramental life of the Church. The Kingdom of God still is present to us, event if the full reality awaits us in the future, and we are still confronted by it. How will we respond? This passage from Matthew suggests that we bear a responsibility to hear, see, and discern Christ with the eyes and ears (and even the mouths!) of faith. It suggests our duty lies in saying 'yes' to Christ -- like our beloved Theotokos said 'yes' to Gabriel. It consists in sitting adoringly at Christ's feet, like Mary did. But the passage also warns that we can develop hardness of heart in ourselves, thus the need for humility.

In the end, we can only turn to God with face turned down and beating the breast, like the publican -- the one from a parable -- and make our prayer like his: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'

Yours in Christ,
Justin