delivered 14 June 2009
by Rev. Dr Wes Campbell
It has been said that in all the stories told by humankind, there are only seven basic stories. Seven basic plots:
- Tragedy
- Comedy
- Overcoming the Monster
- Voyage and Return
- Quest
- Rags to Riches
- Rebirth
Perhaps it doesn’t matter how many stories there are: three or ten – the point is that we human beings love to tell stories. And we tell stories to make sense of our life.
And that is what Jesus does; Mark says, ‘He spoke in parables’. And I know that many Protestants opt for Jesus’ simple faith – contrasting it with the Apostle Paul and his dogma. That view got going in the nineteenth century when biblical scholars began to search for the real Jesus: that is, the Jesus who was not corrupted by the church’s later complications.
That discussion is still powering on. The Jesus Seminar, a group of New-Testament scholars based in the United States, is still searching for the original Jesus. And they have come up with Jesus the sage, the wise man, a teller of parables.
So, that chimes in with Mark as he says of Jesus, ‘he spoke in parables, as they were able to hear it.’ Here, in a very short form, we are told how Jesus communicated. This was his teaching technique: the story instead of abstract formulas. This is the simple Jesus, who is presented in the child’s prayer as: Jesus meek and mild. A considerate Jesus.
Oddly, for all that, when you read the whole of the Gospel written by Mark, there are very few parables recorded. The most familiar ones come to us from Luke. Mark tells us that he taught in parables – more to the point, he did not speak except in parables. Mark gives us a couple early in Jesus’ ministry, and another in his last days in Jerusalem. But beyond that, nothing!
Even more startling is this: in Jesus’ public ministry, in his words to the crowd that pressed in on him, he spoke only in parables; his hand-picked followers, the twelve apostles, disciples were given special treatment. Jesus explained everything to his disciples in private!
But hang on: if stories are easy to grasp, why do the disciples need extra explanation?
Well, early in chapter 4, following the parable of the seed thrown onto the ground, it goes like this (Mark 4:10-13):
When [Jesus] was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that
“they may indeed look, but not perceive,
and may indeed listen, but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.”
And [Jesus] said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?’
These are odd words:
Everything comes in parables; in order that
“they may indeed look, but not perceive,
and may indeed listen, but not understand.”
This is a quote directly from the call of the prophet Isaiah. A prophet is called with the warning that the words he speaks will not produce listeners and hearers – but the opposite – no perception, no understanding – incomprehension!
Now they apply to Jesus the parable teller.
Mark taps into a deep and abiding memory. Jesus came, spoke and gained a great popular following, but the crowd that crowded in on him got it wrong. And what’s more devastating, the hand-picked band, even though they were given special instruction, home tutoring, they missed the point. Jesus, the parable teller, was taken by those around him and fitted his words into what they wanted to hear.
Will we end up doing the same?
You will know of Albert Schweitzer (left) as a doctor who went to Africa. Before that, however, he did a study of many nineteenth century attempts to strip the church’s clothes from the New Testament Jesus. They wanted to encounter the real Jesus. Schweitzer read their books on the life of Jesus and discovered something quite shocking: he said it was as if these scholars had come to a well, leaned over and peered into the water, and saw their own face reflected back to them. They had tried to picture Jesus but had ended up with a Jesus who looked like them: bourgeois, modern Germans.
That led, at the beginning of the 20th century, to a widespread skepticism about the historical Jesus. We have the church’s picture of him, it was said, but we cannot get to the details of his life. We know that he was crucified, but little else.
Well, as is the way of these things, nothing stops still. Biblical scholars decided that such skepticism was not adequate. In their reading of the New Testament, they said it is true we do not have much historical detail about Jesus in the New Testament, but there are some things that come through as certain: Jesus was a prophetic figure who announced the nearness of the reign of God; he taught in parables; he was crucified.
Perhaps that doesn’t seem much. But it does fit with what we heard in the Gospel today: Jesus taught parables of the ‘kingdom’ or ‘reign of God’. This was public ministry. And it matched with a longing abroad then: the vivid expectation that the God of Israel would enter human history, to bring it to a close, and to side with those who had believed.
PM Kevin Rudd at church (image: Glen Mccurtayne, SMH)
Jesus seems to match these pictures. But, notice this, he spoke of the ‘secret’ of the kingdom of God! The Secret. And there is the puzzle for us. We are in a city littered with church buildings. The Lord’s Prayer begins sittings of Parliament; the Queen of England (and Australia) is the head of an established church in England. The United States, centre of today’s empire, has on its dollar note: In God we trust, and has soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we do, with a Prime Minister who attends church!
And alongside this are those who refuse to believe in God. A young woman of our son’s age spoke at the funeral of her father, a man who had searched for God, for Jesus, and acknowledged how he had accepted her atheism. After a century of brutal mass warfare, often in the name of God, why would you believe?
Here we are driven back to the figure of Jesus who speaks of the secret of God’s reign. And we must admit as an unavoidable fact that the words we read in the New Testament come through the grid of the church; the words from Jesus, and the words about Jesus, come from the book written and preserved by the church.
The words we heard today were constructed by the first writer of Gospels; a writer of a new genre of literature in the first century, several decades after the death of Jesus. And this writer Mark grapples with the puzzle of the secret in Jesus’ ministry and death.
The parables themselves are simple enough; quite lucid. From a tiny seed, a mighty tree shall grow; yeast hidden in a pot of flour will cause the whole to be altered. And then there are those verses we hear only in Mark:
[Jesus] also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’
Here is a clue to the secrecy Jesus speaks of: something is happening here with the seed that is hidden, and has nothing to do with human effort. The seed of its own accord sprouts and grows. This is not the result of the farmer’s efforts. While the farmer sleeps growth takes place.
Martin Luther (left) was a great producer of one-liners. He said of his own ministry:
“I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip [Melanchthon] and [Nicholas] Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”
That is in the spirit of the words of Jesus. The Sower lives from day to day, sleeps and eats, and all the while in secret there is something new happening.
But let’s not tame the activity of God here by saying, well, God is just part of the natural process. Or we might say as we have in the past: the kingdom of God is extended by our efforts. And in a classic mis-reading of this parable, we might even say God has no hands but our hands!
Go to the New Testament. Go to it as a church book. And read the parables as words from Jesus. But this is more than Jesus the parable teller, far more than the producer of wise sayings, a sage; this is Jesus who was crucified and was lowered into the earth of the tomb. Now the parable of the seed that grows in secret interprets Jesus’ own death in the name of God. As he announced the coming rule of God, he pinned his own life on that God; for it, he even went into a god-abandoned death. There, condemned, godless, deserted, he is like seed thrown onto soil. Can there be anything more?
Here the church carries the secret: Jesus who died in such inhuman and hopeless manner has been given new life. He is now the parable of God’s coming. In the darkness of a cold tomb, when every human effort has ended, the Spirit of God breathes again, and Jesus is raised into the future God has in mind for everyone. You might say that Jesus is both Sower and seed of a new future: Sower of the present hope of a new future; and the growing seed of that future.
That is the secret we carry here. It is the secret that must inform all the church lives for: we are called now to trust that the God who raised Jesus from the tomb is at work now in all parts of our world, at work secretly in human hearts, working to generate love and forgiveness in relationships, prompting those with responsibility to seek peace with enemies, prompting hearts to break when faced with human hurt, boosting human courage when faced with a planet that seems destined to die for lack of water and food.
The secret we carry here is this: –- or perhaps it is that the secret carries us! — the God who generated new life in the tomb is taking the small and hidden things of our world, to make all things new. That is why we are here – to keep that secret alive and to share it with others who live in this world with us. To live in hope.
So, let us learn from the one who died into the parable; and place our confidence in him alone. And to him, Jesus the Sower and the seed, with the Father and the Holy Sprit, be all thanks and praise, glory and honour, now and forever. AMEN
