Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23
The next chapter of Genesis offers a striking echo to this parable: Isaac sowed seed, and reaped a hundredfold, for the Lord blessed him (26.12). But the key background, I think, is Isaiah 40.6–8 and 55.10–13. All flesh is grass, but God’s word will last. It will not return to him empty, but will accomplish his purpose, making the desert blossom like the rose.
The Sower, in other words, is not simply an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, a moral lesson about listening carefully (though it is that too; there are many Esaus in today’s Church, despising their birthright of hundredfold blessings through hearing and understanding the word). It is full of the music of the Kingdom, the new song of God after the long silence of the exile. It encapsulated Jesus’ challenge to his contemporaries to be Israel, because God was at last ‘sowing’ them again; and the warning that if this final word was not heeded the alternative would be catastrophe.
Note carefully what the lectionary’s omissions might lead us to ignore: the ‘interpretation’ is given to the disciples, not the crowds. This isn’t a ‘story with a moral’. It is a prophetic word. It performs that of which it speaks. You only say ‘If you have ears, then hear’ after something which is cryptic because, if stated explicitly, it would be explosive. Jesus’ hearers were presumably listening to him that day, benefiting from the natural acoustic properties of the Galilean shoreline, because they had already seen the Kingdom at work in what he was doing. Now he was telling them, in the only way possible, that this Kingdom was breaking into their world not simply to solve their problems, to endorse their agendas, but to do God’s strange work of judgement and mercy. They couldn’t take it for granted. They couldn’t hijack it for their own purposes. That’s dangerous talk.
Take this picture of Jesus as himself the sower, sowing God’s powerful word, and transpose it into the Pauline key. The Son of God is sent into the world to accomplish the Father’s will; and (an easy transition in Jewish thought) the word that goes forth to implement this work is the powerful breath of the Spirit. Romans 8, that most noble of Pauline passages, stresses here the new-Temple theme, another powerful image from Israel’s hope of restoration. The Spirit ‘indwells’ the people of God, as the Glory had dwelt in the wilderness tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple.
Here, too, there are warnings against presumption, against the Esau-attitude of ‘those who have the mind of the flesh’. But here, supremely, is the promise of all promises. What the Torah could not do, God has done in Jesus’ death and the power of the Spirit. He has given life and peace. In a world of death and war, God’s human temples have an awesome responsibility. If you have ears, then hear. And if you have breath, then speak.
Proper 11
Genesis 28.10–19a
Romans 8.12–25
Matthew 13.24–30, 36–43
To get the full flavour of the Pauline passage, hold in your mind the story of the children of Israel on their way through the wilderness, having left Egypt but not yet having arrived in the promised land. Paul’s vision of the Church in the present age is frequently informed by this picture (compare, for instance, 1 Corinthians 10). The crossing of the Red Sea is picked up in his thinking by the death and resurrection of Jesus; baptism, in which the Christian shares in that dying and rising, is the sign and seal of our liberation from slavery, and the starting point for the pilgrimage to our promised inheritance. This is one of the key ways in which Paul envisages the Christian life as both already and not yet redeemed: ‘we were saved’, he says (past tense), ‘in hope.’
Those ‘in Christ’ are thus ‘the children of God’; ‘Israel is my son, my firstborn’, says God through Moses to Pharaoh. They are led through the present wilderness by the personal presence of God himself in the Spirit, just as the Israelites were led by the pillar of cloud and fire. Instead of the Law on Sinai, they are given the personal, intimate prayer, Abba, Father (notice how the Lord’s Prayer occupies the centre of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s New Sinai). And instead of a geographical territory as their ‘inheritance’, they are given – the world. All things belong to you, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 3.21. The entire cosmos will have its own Exodus (8.21), and will be your true inheritance.
Among the dozens of important lessons from all this, one of the most significant for today’s Western Christians is that we unlearn the idea that our destiny, our ‘inheritance’, is simply ‘heaven’, conceived in entirely otherworldly terms. The present world is good, and will be redeemed, just as our bodies are; notice that Paul distinguishes between ‘body’, which is more or less what we mean by ‘person’, and ‘flesh’, which is corruptible, rebellious, and will die for good. The imperatives of 8.12–15, seen from within the Exodus theme, mean ‘Don’t even think of going back to Egypt’; the point is that if the body will be redeemed, what you do in and with it in the present time matters. In the same way, if creation is going to be redeemed, rather than abandoned as in much sub-Christian thought, what we do in and with it here and now matters more than we have usually thought.
This setting explains well enough why the Christian pilgrimage involves suffering. We are not yet home, not yet shining like the sun, and the weeds still grow among the wheat. Like Jacob, we go out into the threatening unknown, with the vision of the risen Lord, promising us the inheritance, to inspire us on the long road ahead. And every place where the angels meet us becomes another house of God, another gate of heaven.
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