Parables are Weird

Text: Matthew 13:1-0

The Bible is authoritative.

When you start thinking about theology, which you might call philosophy about God, the first thing you do is establish what you consider authoritative. That is, if you want to settle an argument, to whom can you turn? Who has the final say? What is the source of information that is at the foundation of what you say? One common source of authority is tradition, which is a jargon word meaning what the church has taught for centuries. Another source might be your own experience, such as things that have happened to you or maybe revelations you have had. Perhaps you have heard God speaking to you. Another source might be expert witnesses, which could be pastors or the Pope or other theologians.

For Lutherans, and for most of the churches that came from the Reformation—that is, most Protestants—the only authoritative voice is the Bible. Sola scriptura is the Latin motto. Only scripture, or scripture alone. The other sources of information might be useful and interesting and thought-provoking, but when it comes down to it, the only real recognized authority is the Bible. This is the ground on which Martin Luther stood, saying to the church in essence: I don’t really care what you are teaching, if I can’t find it supported in the Bible, I won’t consider it to be true.

One nice thing about the Bible is that it is a book. That means it is written down and you can go look things up in it. It is a book, but it is not really much like a handbook or a reference book. It is not a book of doctrine. You can’t look in the index, for example, under “grace” and expect to find all the teachings about grace. Or love. Or judgment. Or prayer. Grace and love and judgment and prayer are in the book, but they are in the whole book, they are common themes in the book, not found in little treatises or bullet points.

The Bible is a book, but it would be better to think of it as a library of books. No one sat down and wrote the Bible from cover to cover. The Bible is a collection of writings, written, recorded, gathered, and assembled over a long time.

Most of the writings in the Bible are stories. The Bible is mostly a story book. There are lots of stories from lots of different periods and about lots of different people. But all the stories have one point. The point of every story is God and God’s relationship with people. Scary stories, nice stories, weird stories, they are all about the same thing. God and people together. And it is a love story, mostly.

There are other writings in the Bible, and they too are about the same thing: God and people. There are prophetic writings, like the book of Isaiah, from which we heard this morning. Prophecy is a kind of commentary, sort of a cross between political analysis and rhetoric. In the Bible also are teachings. The ones we are most familiar with are the teachings of Jesus. The teachings of Jesus are in the form of sermons (like the sermon on the mount), or in long talks or discussions called discourses. And they are also in the form of parables. Like the parable we just heard, sometimes called the Parable of the Sower.

The Bible is a book in print. The words are there on the page. But the meaning of those words depends a lot on what the reader brings to them. It is not always clear what the Bible is saying to you. Or sometimes what is clear to you is not at all the same as what is equally clear to someone else. Wars, alas, have been fought over different readings of the Bible. And many lesser battles.

The Bible demands interpretation. Not only because it is open to interpretation, but because we want to get something out of the Bible. We come to the Bible because we want to know God. So when we hear or read something from the Bible, there is always this question lurking in the back of our brains: what does this tell me about God? Parables especially bring that question to the foreground, because parables are weird.

Parables are strange stories that are disturbing. That is the point of them. To shake up the listeners’ thoughts. To jar people out of an accustomed way of thinking. To make people question things that seem to “go without saying.”

Nonetheless, there is a long tradition of interpreting parables as allegories, in which things in the parable stand for other things in our world. Mostly the goal of that tradition is to domesticate the parables, to blunt their edges a bit, to make them seem not weird but simple illustrations of our own standard and acceptable way of looking at things. One of the first in this tradition was Matthew, of the book of Matthew, writer of today’s Gospel passage.

Matthew explains the parable. His explanation would have been sort of the official interpretation of this parable. The early church needed to explain why some people responded to Jesus and others did not. You could consider this explanation as Matthew reporting a common interpretation of the time. Matthew as Fox News. In Matthew’s presentation, the problem was the devil, shallow-minded people, and the cares of the world. Maybe Matthew is right about these causes, but he is misusing the parable. Sort of like pounding in a nail using a wrench. It might work, but it is not the best tool for the job.

A parable has a meaning, but it is not easily expressed by explaining it in words. In that sense, it is like a painting or a piece of music. To explain a parable as Matthew does is like an artist explaining his or her work. What good is that? The work itself is the thing. So it is with parables.

Jesus tells parables, he says, so that people might understand things (that is, to know God, the constant topic of the Bible). The parable itself is a way for people to know God. Just as, for example, in worship we sing, hear organ or piano music, see images, participate in rituals. These are all ways to know God. They are not illustrations of some other, verbal or intellectual, understanding. We stick them all in our worship because we need lots of ways to know God, each of us in different ways and at different times.

It is easy to hear in this parable of the seeds and the sower a call to action. That is, it is easy to think this parable is about us. Perhaps we feel we are called to be like the sower, to spread our faith to all people, the ones who listen eagerly as well as the ones who seem like they couldn’t care less. Or perhaps we are called instead to be good soil. To listen well to God’s word, to observe Christian practices, to turn our backs on distraction and evil temptation. Or perhaps we are called to be the gardener, the one who tends the crops, to help others grow in faith, to teach and to clarify our understanding of Jesus, and to serve others. We might in truth be called to do any and all of these things, but not by this parable.

What is shocking about this parable is not what happens to the plants. What is shocking is the way the sower sows. He spreads the seeds everywhere. The sower violates our usual ideas about being frugal, about wasting things, about saving. The sower violates our usual ideas about being effective, about applying resources to their best use, about eliminating slack and sloppiness. The sower violates our ideas about being good stewards, about being careful, about planning ahead.

The sower sows the seeds any old which way. Some on the fertile soil, and some on the rocks, and some on the path, and some in the weeds. We assume that most of the seeds went into the soil, and the rest somehow accidently spilled over into less fertile areas. We assume that because that’s how we would do it. But the text says nothing like that.

This is a parable in the Bible, and thus about God. Jesus reveals God to us in this parable. The sower sows everywhere. He sows wastefully. He sows ineffectively. He sows without discriminating between one kind of ground and the other. He sows without evaluating the expected return. He sows without careful consideration. We would never sow this way. No farmer would. But God does.

What Jesus teaches us in this parable is not how we should behave but how God does behave. God sends abundance. God brings life. God is extravagant. From God comes all that is good. We are not commanded in this parable to plant more carefully. Nor to plant less carefully. We are not commanded to be like God or to do God’s work. We are not commanded at all.

Jesus guides through the parable to know God better. And in the face of that, we need only to stand in praise, and awe, and wonder, and gratitude. To know we are blessed, and to be thankful.