Isaiah 55:10-11

Reflections and Questions

1. The going out of God’s word is to be followed by the going out of God’s people. God’s promise goes before them making the way back home.

2. Confidence in the effectiveness of God's word here in Isaiah 55 has the same context as it does in Jesus' parable of the Sower: namely, the call of Isaiah in chapter 6, which Jesus quotes (vs. 8-12:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!" And he said, "Go and say to this people: 'Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.' Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed." Then I said, "How long, O Lord?" And he said: "Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the LORD sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land."

Romans 8:1-11

Resources

1. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 148-150, makes some sense out of the terms "flesh" and "Spirit" as describing ways of life that correspond to living under the Sacred and being free from it. Link to an excerpt of this section on "The Law and the Flesh."

2. Gil Bailie, "Paul's Letter to the Romans" audio tape series, tape #4.

3. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. Correctly interpreting Romans 8:3 ("For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh..."), along with 2 Cor. 5:21 ("For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin..."), is a central task of Schwager's section entitled "The Cross as Judgment" (pp. 160-169). He contends that eminent theologians of the cross -- he names no less than Luther, Barth, and von Balthasar (one of his own mentors) -- as having erred in their interpretations by not correctly reading the Pauline and wider NT contexts. Their blunder is to read passages like Romans 8:3 and 2 Cor. 5:21 as too directly implying God as the agent of judgment and condemnation. This creates possible contradictions. One is that the gospels clearly show the opponents of Jesus as both against God's will and as judging Jesus. Yet if we read Romans 8:3 and 2 Cor. 5:21 as showing us God's will to have Jesus condemned in our place (as Luther, Barth, and von Balthasar do), then we have the apparent contradiction that Jesus' opponents, who almost by definition are opposing God's will, are still somehow acting according to God's will by their judging of Jesus.

The second possible contradiction is within the Godhead. Many passages (e.g., John 3:16-17) witness to God sending Jesus to save the world not condemn it. So we get ourselves into a fix if we read Romans 8:3 and 2 Cor. 5:21 as God having sent Jesus to be take on the condemnation of the world. Which is God's will? To condemn the world or save it? It's not quite good enough to say that the world is saved by Jesus' taking the condemnation for us. For according to this position Jesus is merely a sacrificial substitute for the more basic divine will for having sinners punished and condemned.

The first key to seeing Paul's theology as consistent, both internally and with the gospels, is to read passages like Romans 8:3 and 2 Cor. 5:21 in the context of Romans 1:18-32, where we see how Paul deals with the issue of God's anger. God's anger isn't a simple and direct will to act as judge over sinner's. There God's anger is interpreted three times as a "handing over" (Gr: paradidomai) of sinners to the consequences of their own sin. (This is in consonance, in fact, with the gospel view of judgment above: we are judged according to the measure of our own judging of others. In short, we are handed over to the consequences of our own sins of idolatry.)

Paradidomai is the same word that the gospels repeatedly, and even St. Paul himself (Romans 8:32), use to describe Jesus' fate on the cross. He was handed over to the will of his opponents, a will which was trapped precisely in this self-punishing mode described in Romans 1:18-32. Jesus' handing over was in the same category as sinners' being handed over to the consequences of their own sin. That's why Jesus in the flesh was condemned by sin (Romans 8:3). It is also the term which Paul uses to reinterpret the notion of God's wrath (Rom. 1:18) with a rapid-fire use of paradidomai in Rom. 1:24, 26, and 28: God hands us over to the consequences of our idolatry.

A second key is to see Paul's understanding of the law as being a good gift from God which has been corrupted under the power of sin as becoming a tool for deadly human judgment. Taken together, these insights of the wider Pauline and NT contexts, show God's will as unambiguously being on the side of salvation, not condemnation. Schwager concludes:

Certainly, [God] sent [Jesus] into the world of sin, but entirely with the aim of saving humankind. However, the power of sin was so great that it was able by means of its own mechanism and dynamic to draw him into its world and thus to make him into sin. (p. 168)

Reflections and Questions

1. The lection cuts off before the "therefore" which begins vs 12. Vs. 12-17 ring out the theme of our adoption as children of God. Does the imagery here imply that we are children of God not by nature but by gracious adoption? The orientation of nature, "flesh," is fallen; in Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, we are adopted into God's spirit-filled way of life.

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Resources

1. René Girard, Things Hidden, p. 189. Link to an excerpt of the section on "Apocalypse and Parable."

2. René Girard, The Scapegoat, pp. 192-193:

Paraballo means to throw the crowd something edible in order to assuage its appetite for violence, preferably a victim, someone condemned to death. Obviously, this is a way out of a very difficult situation. The speaker has recourse to a parable -- that is, a metaphor -- in order to prevent the crowd from turning on him. Ultimately, there is no discourse that is not a parable. All human language, and other cultural institutions, in fact, originated in collective murder.

As we begin ch. 13, take a peek at the end. After Jesus tells these parables, he goes to his hometown (13:54-58), where "they took offense (skandalizo) at him." Matthew's Jesus uses the Greek root skandal in both explanations of parables in this chapter. The rocky soil yields those who, "when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away (skandalizo)." (vs. 21) According to the explanation of the wheat and weeds parable, at the end of the age, "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin (skandalon) and all evildoers..." (vs. 41)

This chapter falls into McCracken's view of both parable and skandalon: they are the occasion for either taking offense or responding with faith. (He is influenced not only by Girard but also by Kierkegaard's Either/Or.) Here is his conclusion (p. 106):

Parables do not 'contain' knowledge; they cannot be understood as we understand a moral tale, and argument, or a statement. Parables precipitate internal action, forcing the hearer or reader to a crisis or collision that requires movement, which in New Testament terms is an either/or: either stumbling or changing-and-becoming, either enacting a lie that we desire or being transformed.

Jesus was indeed teaching about the arrival of something which is, for his listeners, very weird. That's why he has to teach in parables. And please note the justification which he gives for teaching in parables. He quotes Isaiah, when he says:

Listen as you will and you will not understand; look as you will and you will not see, because this people's heart has waxed gross. They are dull of hearing and have closed their eyes against seeing and their ears against hearing lest they be turned to me that I may heal them. (Mt 13:14-15 quoting Is 6:9-10; cf. Mk 4:12 and Lk 8:9-10)

That is, there is no direct understanding of the kingdom: it is a strange thing, and people's minds are dulled, which is exactly what we would expect as a result of what we've seen about the human condition, our own included, shot-through with death.

It's worth our while to stop a little to see what this teaching in parables consists in. The parables are highly creative little stories sprung from Jesus' imagination and have as their aim helping people to overcome their being blocked-up with respect to God and his project. However, behold, they are two edged weapons, capable of different interpretations. It is perfectly possible to interpret the greater part in terms of a violent God. In that case the parables only serve to reinforce what people already think anyway, and they move on no further. What I'm suggesting is that this would be the 'dull-hearted' reading of the parables. At the same time it is perfectly possible to read the same parables as obliging us to overcome this vision. This means that there is an interpretation for those who understand, and that what they understand will increase exponentially, and there is another interpretation for those who do not understand, so that what little they do understand is in the process of being lost, for they will get into an ever more tied-up and painful understanding of the things of God. ⁽¹⁾

What we can see in the light of this is the way Jesus' teaching and practice leading up to his death had, already, as its object the setting free of his hearers and disciples from their being scandalized by him precisely so that they could become part of the new edifice that was to be founded in his rejection. There is ample evidence that the apostolic witnesses were able to re-read Jesus' practice with them exactly in terms of his attempting to lead them out of scandal, to prevent them being caused to stumble by him. So, he tells the disciples of John the Baptist, at the end of a list of signs that accredit him as the "one who is to come," "And blessed is he who is not scandalized at me" (Mt 11:6; Lk 7:23). Those who are unable to accept his teaching are described as having been scandalized by him (Mt 13:57; 15:12; Mk 6:3). In the parable of the sower some are scandalized by persecution (Mt 13:21; Mk 4:17) and so do not bear fruit. The process of Jesus attempting to lead his hearers beyond scandal is shown in John 6. There Jesus attempts to bring his hearers on from their understanding of his miraculous feeding of the five thousand, an understanding rooted in food and a kingly messiah, towards his own subversion of the Passover and the Manna in the desert as pointing to himself as the authentic bread from heaven. During the discourse, the eager listening of his audience is gradually turned into furious questioning, linked by allusion with the murmuring of Israel against Moses on its way to the Promised Land. Finally even many of his disciples find it hard to take, and Jesus asks them if this scandalizes them (Jn 6:61). The scandal is what prevents people perceiving the unity of Jesus and the Father (v 62), and for John the flesh is precisely the human condition locked in scandal, while the spirit is what leads people beyond scandal into a belief in Jesus as revealing the Father, and the Father as he who sent Jesus into the world (vv 63-65). Many of the disciples are caused to stumble, but Peter and the other eleven stay, having perceived that Jesus has words of eternal life: that is, they have overcome the scandal, at least to some extent. Even so, Jesus knows that one of them is a 'diabolos' who will betray him (v 70). The word 'diabolos' here is quite specifically not used to indicate a metaphysical entity, but a human person locked in scandal.

Speaking in comparisons and teaching by means of stories are, of course, two of the oldest instructional techniques in the world. And in the hands of almost all instructors except Jesus, they are a relatively straightforward piece of business.... With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all previous explanations and understandings (p. 6).

Bernard Scott's book Hear Then the Parable uses a methodology which might remind some of the Jesus Seminar, but he can generally be relied on for an insightful and unusual reading of Jesus' parables. His treatment of the Parable of the Sower is in ch. 17, "What Did the Farmer Sow?", pp. 343-362.

7. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation. On pp. 63-69 in the section entitled "Doubling of Sin and Hell" (excerpt), Schwager has crucial insight into Matthew 13, the parables, and many of Jesus hard sayings when he elaborates on Mt 13:12: "For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." The passage which best helps to understand such sayings is Matthew 7:1-2: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." Roll into these sayings a parable such as "The Talents" of "The Unforgiving Servant," and you can see the idea Jesus is developing: the measure by which we judge others is the measure by which we end up being judged. In short, we judge ourselves according to the measure by which we judge others. In the parable of the Talents, the third servant judges his master to be a hard judge, and so he is judged accordingly, having all his investment funds taken away from and given to the other servant who judged his master most graciously.

Applied to the parables of Matthew 13, Schwager says,

All these everyday experiences of life can, when they are read correctly, give witness to the kindly Father, his proximate coming and dealings with people. Even if the new community in the Kingdom of God contrasts completely with the old laws of the human world, it is however not something unrealistic. It only needs a fresh look to see signs of it everywhere in our everyday world. If people defend themselves against this new vision of reality, if they remain in their old positions of fear and self-defense, then they necessarily defend themselves also against what Jesus brings. Thus they lock themselves even more into their old world and give themselves up to a process of judgment, which runs according to self-chosen and stubbornly defended norms. Hence the parables lead those who hear them, and yet do not hear, into a process of self-induced hardening of heart (Mark 4:10-12 and parallels). (p. 66)

...I had the same response I always do to this parable: I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God. I started worrying about how many birds were in my field, how many rocks, how many thorns. I started worrying about how I could clean them all up, how I could turn myself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for the sowing of God’s word. I started worrying about how the odds were three to one against me — those are the odds in the parable, after all — and I began thinking about how I could beat the odds, or at least improve on them, by cleaning up my act.

That is my usual response to this parable. I hear it as a challenge to be different, as a call to improve my life, so that if the same parable were ever told about me it would have a happier ending, with all of the seed falling on rich, fertile soil. But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable, because if that is what it is about, then it should be called the parable of the different kinds of ground.

Instead, it has been known for centuries as the parable of the Sower, which means that there is a chance, just a chance, that we have got it all backwards. We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?

If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.

Moreover, Tolbert proposes that the interlude between the parable and the explanation -- namely, the explanation of Jesus' parabolic teaching through his quote of Isaiah 6 -- is the structuring center of Mark's entire Gospel. Having 'ears unhearing and eyes unseeing' gives the outline to Mark's telling of the story of Jesus. Mark 4 gives us his teaching with the watch word "Listen!" The disciples show their lack of understanding throughout. Are the disciples themselves among those who are confounded by the parables? The first section focused on "Listen!" transitions to the next section with the healing of a deaf person, Mark 7:31-37.

Then, the second half is about having eyes unseeing. A second feeding story is follwed by "Watch out!" (8:15) and a repeat of the Isaiah 6 quote in 8:18. Then, Jesus' teaching about discipleship (following what Jesus does and not just what he says) is flanked by healing of blind men (Mark 8:22-26; 10: 46-52). In between, there are three passion predictions that they will witness, each followed by an act of incomprehension by the disciples. Mark 13, the other long sermon by Jesus in Mark's Gospel (Mark 4 being the other), rings out the theme word "Watch!", continued in the Garden of Gethsemane as prelude to the passion -- which the disciples will fail to see because they all run away. They fail to watch and behold Jesus' stand against the Satanic powers of death. Will they also fail to witness the victory of God's power of life in the resurrection? Mark's Gospel infamuosly ends with none of Jesus' chosen witnesses having heard or seen and then giving witness. The women at the tomb run away in fear and tell no one. Mark leaves it to his readers to be those faithful witnesses. The fertile ground in Mark's Gospel is illustrated through the unnamed folks like the woman with a hemorrhage (Mark 5:34: Jesus said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease") -- and hopefully through subsequent unnamed disciples like Mark's own community.

Why rehearse all this concerning Mark during the year of Matthew? First, in one of the most grievous omissions in the lectionary, the Parable of the Sower complex, which Tolbert persuasively shows as being central to Mark, is skipped in Year B, the year of Mark! We go from the Parable of Satan Casting out Satan (Mark 3:20-35; central to a Girardian reading of the Gospel) in Proper 5B to the middle of Mark 4, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, for Proper 6B. Mark 4:1-20 -- the Parable of the Sower and it explanations, the pivot point of the whole Gospel -- is bypassed. How can this be?

Second, since we don't get a chance at this parable during Year B, we might ask how much Matthew understands and passes on, and/or reformulates, Mark's theme of using the disciples themselves as a chief instance of rocky ground, as examples of ears unhearing and eyes unseeing. How much of the Markan viewpoint can we pass on through the engagement of this important parable in Matthew's rendering? There are many ways in which Matthew obviously reformulates what he gets from Mark. The ending is a big change. The historic, named disciples have a role as witnesses to the resurrection. And Peter, Mark's exemplar of rocky soil, is famously the Rock on which the church is built in Matthew's Gospel (16:18-19).

But I would propose that Matthew's seeming elevation of the historically named disciples has its paradoxical elements. After the 'Peter as Rock of the Church' episode, for example, Matthew adds to Jesus' rebuke of Peter. To Mark's Jesus rebuking Peter with "Get behind me, Satan!" (Mark 8:33), Matthew adds "You are a stumbling block (skandalon) to me" (Matt. 16:23). As we have already highlighted, Matthew is the evangelist who most highly develops the theme of skandalon (very significant in the context of a Girardian reading), including in this important chapter of Matthew 13. Even within Matthew's ending, there are double elements of positive and negative, such as, "When they saw [the resurrected Jesus], they worshiped him; but some doubted" (Matt. 28:17). Rather than simply overturn Mark's theme of the failure of the historical disciples, I would propose that Matthew takes the historicity of the disciples' failure as overturned by the power of the resurrection. Yes, different than in Mark's Gospel, Matthew shows Peter and the gang called to be faithful witnesses to the resurrection (and everything before it), but it was paradoxically and precisely as those who, like the rest of us, fall into the power of scandalized desire and Satanic violence. The power of the resurrection is manifested in that it begins to free us from those Satanic powers of death and turn us into faithful witnesses to God's power of life. For Matthew the example of the historically named disciples goes beyond their failure. They can be examples to the rest of us (Mark's unnamed disciples) that, even to the extent that we may fall away as rocky, scandalized soil, God's generous sowing of the Word can still find fertile soil in us through the power of the resurrection, the power of forgiveness.

Reflections and Questions

1. In 2008 a key insight for me, in preaching this parable to today's congregation, is that our North American middle-class temptation is to fall into being the thorny ground: “this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.” Among our cherished cultural values are comfort, convenience, entertainment, and wealth. Also (per one of the themes sown by Maryann Tolbert described above), one of the examples of thorny ground in the Gospels themselves is the Rich Young Man, who asks Jesus, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" I take the young man's question to illustrate a central manifestation of the thorny ground of too much contemporary Christian faith, namely, to be too focused on personal salvation to notice the biblical theme of justice. In the face of growing awareness of huge problems in our world created by injustice, our too-small-faith leads to hopelessness and/or turning to other possible solutions (many of them bad). I quote Brian McLaren's diagnosis (from his excellent book, which I highly recommend, Everything Must Change) along the way:

Sadly, in too many quarters we continue to reduce the scope of the gospel to the individual soul and the nuclear family, framing it in a comfortable, personalized format -- it's all about personal devotions, personal holiness, and a personal Savior. This domesticated gospel will neither rock any boats nor step out of them into stormy waters. We have in many ways responded to the big global crises of our day with an incredible, shrinking gospel. The world has said, "No thanks." (p. 244)

2. Reading Jesus’ parables in terms of strange twists on familiar images, there are two such aspects of this parable that might have caused Jesus’ audience to do double takes. One is that the Sower seemingly has done nothing to prepare the soil; there seems to be an awful lot of unprepared ground for his seed. The other involves the amount of yield: even if the Sower had taken great pains to prepare the soil, thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold yields would have been amazing for the farmers of Jesus’ day. They represent the yields of today’s farmer using hybrid seeds, irrigation, and sophisticated machinery.

3. The emphasis of the allegorical interpretation is on the different kinds of soil, while the emphasis of parable itself would seem to be on the generous sowing of the Sower and thus on the certainty of the seed to produce amazing results despite formidable obstacles.

4. Link to a sermon entitled "The Prodigal Sower" (1999 version). Capon, in his reading of this parable, emphasizes Jesus himself as the Word (made flesh) which God sows for the sake of the world. God prodigally sows Jesus everywhere, for all people, even those who will resist his bearing fruit in their lives. In the 2002 update of this sermon, the following twist in interpretation is finally suggested in the end:

In light of the sowing of God's mercy in the cross and the incredible harvest of the resurrection, then, I'd like to suggest one further twist to this parable. If I am to unlearn the usual human story filled with divisions and strife, then I need to unlearn looking at myself as good soil and someone else as bad soil. No, the most basic field into which God sows his grace is my life, where it sometimes meets with hard soil and rocky soil and weeds, and sometimes with good soil that bears the fruit of extending God's limitless love with others. It is my constant prayer, then, that my heart and life be good soil today.

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