We may not be as familiar with the harvest and sowing as the people of Jesus’ time or before, but we can still relate to God watering the ground and giving us food (Isaiah 55:10-11) – we repeat the sentiment every week in the Offertory prayers of our Eucharist when we thank God for the bread and the wine. We can also understand the analogy between the sowing and the preaching of the Gospel (Matthew 13:1-23). And we know that the outcome of that preaching is not a given – looking around us we may well feel that there is a lot more rocky, stony, and weed-choked land than there is good soil. I suspect that’s been true throughout the ages.
So this is all good stuff, and we’re caught up with it. We aren’t even puzzled, in the way the disciples were, that Jesus spoke in parables.
But what about the response he gave when when they did ask him about the parables?
“Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven
has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.
To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich;
from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
“To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Really!
What about “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Matthew 20:16)?
We can’t even suggest this disconnect is down to a difference between gospel writers – both these sayings come from Matthew. Luke tells us “Blessed are the poor” and “Woe to the rich”. What Jesus says in response to the question about why he doesn’t talk directly to everyone doesn’t seem consistent with the whole body of his teaching – which tells us that the worldly scale of wealth and riches is upended in the Kingdom.
So what is he really telling us – it can’t be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Jesus isn’t here commenting on worldly wealth – the amount of money we have. He’s taking about the gift of perception, the ability to understand what God is telling us – why it is that some soil is stony or rocky. He says to his disciples “blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear”. He builds on the prophesy of Isaiah that he quotes – people will close their eyes and block their ears, they will refuse to understand, because it requires them to “convert” – to change – and change is difficult and painful.
So Jesus works around our obstinacy, our reluctance, he finds ways to tell us what we need to know, to bring us to that understanding and conversion and healing that Isaiah talks of, when maybe we don’t even realize what is happening. The stones can be removed, the weeds cleared.
If we live in the rich soil then we are indeed blessed. Let us pray for those blessings on those not similarly graced. Then they may start with very little but gain more and more, especially if we support and help them.