Peter Bolland
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
Hello St. Paul’s! Please be seated.
Did Jesus keep secrets? Did he hold something back? Is there such a thing as “the hidden teachings of Jesus?”
And this question too—did the Rabbi from Nazareth, the Master Teacher, sometimes struggle to impart the wisdom he himself seemed to embody?
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew opens a door though which we might engage in that inquiry, and I want to walk through that door with you.
The Parable of the Sower appears in all three of the synoptic gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke. And in all three versions it unfolds just about the same.
When I was invited to speak today, and when I got the readings, I was surprised to see that our lectionary excluded what is to my mind the most interesting part—and that’s the part I want to focus on with you this morning.
As we just heard, Jesus was met with a large crowd—so big in fact that he climbed in a boat and pushed away from the shore in order to be seen and heard by as many folks as possible.
“Then he told them many things in parables,” Matthew tells us, but we only get this one. And it’s a doozy.
“Listen,” Jesus said, “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”
And then Jesus said what he often said at the end of parables: “If you have ears, hear.”
And in our reading today we skipped over the next nine verses—in my mind the best part. Here’s what we skipped:
Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
And Mark’s version makes it even clearer, that this conversation is happening long after Jesus’s Sermon on the Shore.
It’s later, it’s backstage, it’s probably nighttime. His disciples seem genuinely puzzled. And they say to him, and I’m paraphrasing: Jesus, why do you talk like that? They just want to want to know what the kingdom of God is, what the Kingdom of Heaven is. Why do you speak in riddles? Why can’t you just speak plainly?
And again, Jesus answers their question, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”
There are two layers of awareness, and therefore Jesus employs two different methods of teaching, one for insiders, and one for outsiders. The parables are for the outsiders, like us.
Insiders like the disciples—people who walked and talked and ate and traveled and lived with Jesus all day everyday—they experienced the Master Teacher directly, without mediation, one on one. They were there. They breathed the same air. The transformational consciousness of the Kingdom of God came into them not through concepts or doctrines or language—it came into them through spiritual osmosis. Or simply put, presence.
I’m borrowing the term osmosis from biology here. Remember that from 7th grade biology? Osmosis is when the material in one cell passes through its own semi-permeable membrane and travels across space to pass through the semi-permeable membrane of another cell, to become part of the substance of that second cell.
We all remember our favorite teachers. I remember one of mine, Barrett Culmback, my first philosophy professor at Ventura College. I can’t tell you one thing he said, or wrote on the board. But I can never forget how it felt to be in that room, as my entire life changed in his presence.
To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “People will never remember what you said. They’ll never remember what you did. But they will never forget the way you made them feel.”
That’s spiritual osmosis.
And the Indian traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism—are full of stories like this, about the wordless transmission of wisdom. Like the Flower Sermon, when Buddha held up a flower and didn’t say a word, and only one man Kashyapa signaled with his eyes that he understood what was being said.
In religious studies we often speak of two levels of teaching—esoteric or inner teachings, and exoteric or outer teachings. Clearly, according to Jesus, you cannot convey the transformational wisdom of the Kingdom of God through ordinary language. It can only be apprehended through non-conceptual awareness, that is, direct experience.
So if you believe that Jesus is God—as many across Christianity do—then even God himself cannot convey the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, through words and concepts. It cannot be received second-hand. The best Jesus can do is offer a parable—an analogy, a metaphor, a symbolic story which does not convey directly, but merely suggests.
Now, about those problematic explanations of the parables, and there was one in our reading today, where Jesus suddenly goes back through the parable and explains the meaning of all four sub-metaphors (seeds on the path, seeds on rocky soil, seeds choked by weeds, and seeds in good soil).
Am I alone here? Do the explanations of the specific meaning of each element of the parable feel forced, out of place, tacked on after the fact?
I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that after Jesus said, “If you have ears, hear,” he would then pull his disciples aside to explain the meanings of all four metaphors, when as he’s already established, his disciples didn’t even need the parable in the first place!
In screenplay writing this is what we call “expository dialogue”—dialogue not meant for the characters in the story, but for us, the audience.
So if you’re like me, you might be relieved to learn that it is widely understood across Biblical scholarship that the explanations of the Parable of the Sower in all three synoptic Gospels were added later.
Jesus did not explain his parables. He dropped them like seeds.
So a parable is not an explanation—it is an invitation to engagement. A parable is also exoteric teaching—teaching designed to convey the inner mystery as artfully as possible to folks outside the mystery. To those inside the mystery, that is to say, to those already awash in the direct experience of God-consciousness, the parables are simply not necessary, redundant even.
The parables are the menu, not the food; the map, not the place. As the Zen saying goes, “The picture of a plumb does not take away one’s hunger.”
So what else did Jesus tell his disciples about why he used parables? Jesus said “The reason I speak to them in parables is that (citing Isaiah) ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’
And then Jesus said to his disciples, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”
So the disciples are held up as a paradigm of openness. They are the good soil. We, not so much.
So we have a challenge here, and an opportunity. Jesus is clearly delineating two distinct levels of understanding, and consequently two camps or categories of people.
But rather than seeing this as elitism or as exclusionary, I think it’s much richer to see all of this as deeply instructional, and ultimately as an invitation. The depth of esoteric knowledge is available to all of us, if we make certain sacrifices, certain shifts, certain accommodations—if we move from conceptual knowledge to embodied awareness. If we move beyond words and scriptures to the depth of knowing that gave rise to those words and scriptures in the first place.
This whole scene, this whole scenario, is calling us to open up to higher consciousness, to metanoia, to allow and receive. Not coerce and achieve.
Do you get it up here (pointing at head), and then fall into the trap of spiritual pride? Or do you live it from here (pointing at the heart), humble to the bone and falling in love with the whole world and everyone in it?
Is God an idea to be understood and explained? Or is God where we live, move, and have our being?
Time for a little check in.
Is our mind like the soil of the path, packed down by many feet and impenetrable to wisdom?
Or is our mind shallow and there’s nowhere for wisdom to take root?
Or is our mind overrun with briars, choked with busyness, distraction, and fear?
Or is our mind open and receptive and uncluttered?
At the heart of the Parable of the Sower is this question: What if our consciousness is the soil upon which the ever-falling seeds of God-consciousness continually rain?
Are you empty enough, soft enough, open enough to receive, not someone else’s second-hand dogma, but the wordless mystery of God-consciousness itself, a realm of being beyond all concepts and doctrines?
The good news is that it is always raining down around us. The bad news is we do not allow it to enter and take root.
We do not have a proximity problem—we have a perception problem.
If you have eyes, see. If you have ears, hear. Let go of what you think you know, and make room for what is raining down all around you.
In stillness, less and less do we need to speak, and more and more do we experience the mystery.
As God calls us in the 47th Psalm:
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
(Silence)
May God be with you.
Namaste
