Jesus explains to His disciples why He teaches in parables. It is so that those who are merely curious and not real seekers after the truth, who have denied the hunger for God within themselves, would only hear stories, not discerning the spiritual content and truth in them. The disciples, and the spiritually hungry would move beyond the surface to begin to grasp the spiritual meaning within the stories. Jesus knew whom He was calling, and as we reflect on the call accounts, we notice that these men are described as immediately leaving their occupations and their families to follow Him.
The hunger in them, the spiritual character in them, was already known to Jesus when He called them, and they responded without hesitation. Not that they wouldn’t face the trials of doubt and discouragement, but even after abandoning their Lord in the garden, they would all, save Judas, repent and return and become those God used to turned the world upside down.
We are blessed to have Jesus’ own spiritual interpretation before us. He describes four responses to the Word of God. And in the descriptions we begin to discern how the Word operates in the human heart, how the heart responds, and what the effect is in those described. First we have those by the wayside – bystanders, the merely curious, the skeptical, the self-sufficient and proud, with no real openness to Truth. They are like auditors of courses, who have no real investment and no real stake in outcome of the teaching.
As Hebrews puts it, here the word does not mix with faith in the hearers, and the devil takes the word away before it can be planted in the heart and begin to act upon the one who has received it, because it is just lying on the surface, easily snatched.
Then we have those on the rock. These are the flighty, the unstable, the impatient who expect immediate results with little effort – it also describes those for whom it is all about feelings; if they don’t get an emotional high, then they soon dismiss what they have heard. It doesn’t penetrate to the heart, but lies on the surface of their emotional life. It describes as well as those who listen only with their own pre-conceived ideas, and judge only by their own categories. They hear and receive the word with joy, and believe for awhile, but they do not allow the Word to take root in their hearts, and when the first temptation comes, the first trial of their newfound faith arrives, they abandon what they have received and are off to try something new, but they won’t likely stick with that very long either. “Spiritual, but not religious” as they say, in other words, they are superficially attracted to spiritual things, but refuse to be bound to a tradition, a path which they can walk to the end. Or, to use last week’s images from St. Paul, at the first sign of a stitch in the side, they drop out of the race. Next are those who come to an incipient faith, but the world is still so bound up in their hearts that they cannot relinquish their grip on it, nor resist its grip on them.
They too are unwilling to do the work of learning to rest in the Word, and to trust in the One who gave it. The Word never becomes more alluring than the world, and soon they are back to business as usual. The spirit is willing, but the flesh and will is weak, and easily succumbs to the demands and attractions of the world. It is also those who spend their time worrying about the future, and fretting about the past, and have no rest in the grace and joy of Christ, never able to truly trust in the Word. Or they are too bound up in the pursuit of worldly success and its fleeting pleasures to find time to nurture the seed into fruit. Self-love and pride are never eradicated from their hearts to make any room for the fruit of faith.
Finally, we have the picture of those who put their hand to the plow and never look back. These “hear the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.” They know the race is long, and that perseverance is demanded. They willfully enter the spiritual struggle against the world, the flesh and the devil, the unseen warfare, and they trust in the Lord to bring forth the fruit of their faithfulness. Like Mary, they keep the Word and ponder it in their hearts where it then takes deep root and produces a healthy tree, bearing the fruit of the Spirit for eternal life.
Their lives are slowly transformed, and they don’t pull the plant up by the roots every day to see how it is doing. Instead, knowing that God is doing the work of transforming them, they seek to align their will with His, and look to Him in faith and trust, striving to keep the commandments to love God and their neighbor, and feeding the tree of faith with prayer, Scripture and the nourishment of the Body and Blood of Christ.
What is the difference? Not the seed of the Word, but the soil, the hearts on which it falls. We are dealing with a realm of great mystery within the human heart. While we know that faith is a gift, I believe it, like love, is also an act of the will. We choose to believe every day, and each choice sends the roots of faith deeper into our hearts. We deny the impulses to trust in men or their philosophies for our solutions, and look instead to the promises and faithfulness of God.
It all relates to that wonderful statement of St. Paul in Philippians 2 : “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in you both to do and to will of his good pleasure.” The fear and trembling come from our discovery of what is mixed in the human heart as a result of the Fall, and that we are sinners: the faith and trust come from the realization that as we are obedient, God is at work in us, in the work of the purification, illumination and glorification of our very being.