Jesus doesn’t seem to get the book business. Imagine Jesus walking into the offices of the For Dummies publishing house. This is the company that has books on almost every subject known to earthlings but not known well enough: Windows XP for Dummies, English Grammar for Dummies, Personal Finance for Dummies, Catholicism for Dummies. They thought about doing Baptists for Dummies, but they figured that was redundant. So if you have a hard time figuring something out, you swallow your pride and go buy the book that takes you back to basics. Well, the editor looks across the table at Jesus and says, Good sir, you don’t seem to understand the concept we are going for here. We publish self-help books. We are trying to inform people about things they do not get. We want to print something on theology for dummies. Your little book of parables only makes people feel dumber, not smarter.
And that’s the surprising thing about Jesus. We like to think the parables are a teaching technique that helps make spiritual things easier for people to grasp. Jesus is the master teacher who comes from God with insight into the nature of things that can make sense of things for us mere mortals. We expect him to make complicated things simple, confusing things plain. After all, isn’t that the point?
Apparently, not always. Look at what Mark says: With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
So why does Jesus speak in parables with the aim of confusing some and explain things to only a few in private? Wouldn’t that be like hiding your light under a bushel? Didn’t Jesus know the Prayer of Jabez? Wouldn’t he have wanted to expand his boundaries? Wouldn’t he have been better off telling stories about how to have Your Best Life Now like Joel Osteen?
I think the answer is in the parable itself, so let’s look closer. Jesus says the kingdom of God is like a seed that a sower scatters on the ground. Once the sower sows, he goes to bed after the ten o’clock news, sleeps like a baby—never wondering or worrying about whether the seed will grow. Then he wakes up in the morning and has his corn flakes and coffee, runs a few errands, and after a couple of weeks of doing nothing more at all about the seed, he sees it start to grow—first the stalk, then the head, and then the full grain in the head. When the time comes for harvest, he goes to the barn, sharpens his sickle, and sets to gathering in the bounty of the earth.
The seed grows, Jesus says. How? Of itself. The actual word in Greek yields the English word automatic. The harvest is right there in the seed all the time. It doesn’t need the man to do anything to make it something else, because it’s all there all along. And how it does that, all Jesus can say is that the farmer knows not how.
Which is odd. You’d think the farmer would know how things work on the farm. My front door at the house has never fit for 17 years. The door latch was always off. I tried everything, to no avail. So Steve Conner came by, and in no time it was perfect. He’s just a mechanical genius at that stuff. If I get on an airplane, as I did yesterday, I don’t have to know how the thing can possibly get into the air and carry me and 200 of my closest strangers back to Dallas with most of our luggage. But I expect someone to know how it can do that. If I were to find out, I would have to go get Home Repair for Dummies or Aeronautical Physics for Dummies, since that’s what I am about those things—a certifiable dummy.
But if you want to know something about God’s rule of the world, then you would think someone like me would know the answer to that. I am after all, a bona fide theologian, don’t you know?! I’ve got the sheepskin on my wall that says so. And usually what that means is that I talk over my head about things over my head, because like everyone else, I like to be an expert. The truth is, I am more like the farmer who spreads his seed and it grows, and he does not know how.
This is true of fatherhood, too. I spoke to young adults in Sunday school today about parenting and tried to act like I know something. But the truth is, I planted a seed, so to speak, and it grew of itself, and it came out first the head … well, you get the idea. How did it happen? Actually, I have recently learned this from one of our preschoolers. Every year in Vacation Bible School I suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not. I sit on the floor with them and we talk. Well, one child asked about where babies come from. God, I said, which, along with Jesus, is always a safe answer in the pastor’s study. And isn’t it wonderful, I continued, that God allows mommies and daddies to share in the making of babies? That satisfied most of them, but one precocious boy raised his hand to correct me. It seems that there’s an egg inside the mommy, and the daddy has something called SHERM that goes after it. Orange sherm for a boy and, I think, yellow for a girl. I confess I might have gotten the colors of sherm wrong because I was so fascinated with the whole egg-and-sherm explanation. So now you know.
Yet it doesn’t change the fact that most of the time I did nothing much to make my kids grow up. I slept a lot; and when I woke up 22, 21, and 18 years later, I marvel at how they’ve grown. Now, you will probably want to hasten me on to take some credit for the way they have turned out so far. You will want to remind me that I had to love them and discipline them and provide for them or they would have turned out to be rascals or criminals. Aside from the fact that most of that credit goes to Kim, and that I am not being the slightest bit humble in saying so, you have moved way off point in rushing to the moral-development thing. I was just talking about how life grows from “egg and sherm” to infant, child, adolescent and adult. Why not pause there and marvel at all that first?
This is what Jesus seems to want us to do first with God’s astonishing presence in the world. He wants us to learn that it’s okay not to know the How as much as the Who. We do not know the ways of God in the world, no matter whether we have Ph.D.s in theology or drive a cab in Chicago and moonlight as a theologian. Like my cabbie, John. We had a beautiful day in Chicago when I poured into his back seat; one of about 12 such days per year there. He was aflutter about it, praising God. He wanted me to know what a gift that day was, that no one could have made it happen for us except God. I told him that was kind of like my sermon on Sunday. Jesus said something about how life is a gift we know nothing about and can do nothing about. I mentioned the parable of the growing seed, and he immediately went off on another parable, the one about the four grounds that seed is sown in. He wanted to make sure we all avoided sowing seed on rocky ground, or thorn-and-thistle ground, or on ground where birds can come steal the seed. He wanted me to know how important our sowing in good soil is if God’s word is going to make good in the world. But that isn’t Jesus’ point in this parable, and not even in the other one. John the cabdriver theologian illustrated Jesus’ point by rushing right past the miracle and mystery of the kingdom in the world around us that we have nothing to do with and know nothing about in order to get on to what we can do and what we can know.
This is exactly the problem Jesus is trying to address. Knowledge is power; and when you have power, you want control. But you can think you know too much about what God is doing, and that becomes dangerous. We think we have the right and then to act in the interest of God against God’s enemies, to clean up the streets of the bad guys and to speed the growth of the kingdom in the world.
Someone asked a question the other night at our interfaith conversation about Moses in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She wanted to know what we thought of fundamentalism in all our religions. The rabbi said something clever to the effect that some people take things so literally you cannot take them seriously. My response was less pithy but, I hope, helpful nonetheless: Fundamentalists know too much too soon. They think they have the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help them God. They think they don’t have to wait until the end of days to see it clear. This perfect knowledge gives them perfect permission to do God’s work for God right now—correcting sinners, whether they see the error of their ways or not; executing God’s justice, by force if necessary; and generally doing the end-times police work now that God seems content to wait to perform until after history runs its course.
Jesus tells the parable of the growing seed precisely to undermine the know-it-alls. He tells the parable of the mustard seed in order to encourage the know-nothings. No matter what you do or don’t do, no matter whether you understand the ways of God or not, God is in charge of God’s work in the world. We are meant to trust and obey the little we know and not try to speak for God or act for God in ways God will not own.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 led to the hanging of 19 people on testimony of two hysterical young girls—9 and 11—with wild and, as it turned out, wicked imaginations. The nine judges who sent the innocents to the gallows, and the entire Puritan community that got caught up in devil fever, succumbed to what Jesus warns against: knowing too much about what God is doing and acting in God’s name. One of the judges, Samuel Sewall, became so spiritually convicted over the wrongness of his actions that five years later he begged forgiveness of God and his church in a remarkable little-known act. The Puritans were sure that God had sent them to colonize America and build the city on a hill that cannot be hid, from the Sermon on the Mount. They thought they were agents of God to bring about the New Jerusalem. They believed that because of it, the devil was trying to set up a counter-colony right in their midst. The devil had to be rooted out. The problem is that good and evil live together in every human heart and cannot be so neatly identified in this good man and that bad one, this godly woman and that witch.
Life is a mystery. What God is up to in any given event is not for us to know completely. We should concentrate more on the Who than the How. And the Who is the Word of God himself that has been sown in the world—Jesus Christ our Lord.
If you want to understand better what God is doing, you have to first declare yourself dummy enough to learn from him. Humility and trust make the knowledge of God and God’s kingdom possible. Jesus shared his secrets with his disciples, because, unlike the professional religious leaders of the day, they gave him their ears and their hearts. Will you?
under the chosen Sunday to hear audio of sermon (mp3 format) (beginning March 11, 2007).
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