15th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2014

At the end of today’s parable Jesus said, Listen, anyone who has ears. Listen! He started it by saying, Imagine… Look! Take a second look! Do we do that? Or do we tend to tune out – heard it all before, know what it means, ho-hum!

You remember how Jesus started off his mission around Galilee? The Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent; and believe the Good News. It’s too familiar. We don’t hear it. The Kingdom of God is close at hand – not way off in the indefinite future. And he says, That is Good News! The catch is the bit in the middle, Repent. At least, that is how the word is usually translated. So really it just sounds like more moralising, good-behaviour stuff; and really, that has not worked. But that does not do justice to his urging. Repent.

To see the closeness of the Kingdom of God as good news, we need to change the ways we instinctively think. Repentance happens with an insight or sense of God or myself or life that is so joyful or so disturbing that “business as usual” is no longer a satisfying option. Only then might behaviour actually change.

God is not what we generally believe. We have constantly to let our sense of God deepen and grow – radically. God’s judgment is not future. It has already happened – and it is no secret. Guilty! We are all guilty. But, knowing that only too well, God says, “Forgiven!” Not: “not guilty”; not: “excused”; not: “extenuating circumstances”; but simply forgiven, outright; and forgiven because loved! Remember the Gospel of a few Sunday’s back, God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, not to condemn the world but to save it. Not save it from himself, but to save us from ourselves, from each other, and from the vicious ways we react to ourselves and interact with each other.

In Jesus’ mind, repenting means firstly being open to let our sense of God change, or be changed – radically. He challenges us to stop defending ourselves against a new vision of the ways things can be, and in fact, from God’s point of view, already are. That is why Jesus says so insistently, Listen. Listen to him. He knows what God is really like. Sit lightly with our former certainties. Imagine …

That is why he spoke in parables – to shoot down our tired expectations, to stimulate our imaginations. Parables are not illustrations. They are not another moralistic version of Aesop’s fables. They are not about good behaviour, but about the different way things are in the Kingdom of God. In no way is it business as usual, but unimaginably good news.

Take today’s over-familiar parable. Who/what is it primarily about? The early Church interpreted it as an allegory about soils, and that interpretation found its way into the Gospel text. That interpretation might encourage people to try harder, but does not lead to unexpected insight. It also sets people up to categorise and pass judgment on others. Rather than about the different soils, might it be more about the one paddock where they all occur? Who or what might that refer to? To complicate things, the punch-line, which is often the point of the story, seems to be about the unbelievable abundance of the seed.

The Gospel refers to the parable as the Parable of the Sower. What if it really is about the Sower, who surely knows his farm, yet sows his seed with uncalculating abandon along the track, on stony areas, among thistles as well as in his good soil? What might that say about God? Imagine! Can you warmly relate to an incorrigibly hopeful God like that? I do.

Why does Jesus leave us up in the air?

Perhaps it might be worthwhile taking time, this time, to listen, to let our imaginations run loose. That is what praying can be, even perhaps, is meant to be – or at least can be at its nourishing best.