Hearing God’s Word

            In a rather mysterious way, our Lord answers His disciples’ inquiry in today’s Gospel as to why He speaks to the people in parables.  Christ responds, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.  To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.  This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.  Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them, which says:  You shall indeed hear but not understand, you shall indeed look but never see.  Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and be converted, and I heal them.”

            Our Lord’s strategy seems hardly fair:  why speak the truth to someone in such a manner that he cannot understand?  We might think this unjust until we really think about the nature of a parable and the use to which Christ put it in order to accomplish His mission, which He summed up to Pontius Pilate as “to bear witness to the truth.” 

            A parable is, after all, in itself an effective means of communication, but much depends upon the disposition of the hearer.  A parable is a somewhat lengthy expression or narrative drawn from nature or human circumstances, the goal of which is to reveal a spiritual lesson.  The hearer must become aware of the analogy – the use of earthly things to impart a spiritual meaning – so as to receive the point of Christ’s words.  But what if the hearer is not interested in anything beyond earthly things?  What if the hearer is only after the “facts,” as Joe Friday used to put it on Dragnet, or interested only in “useful” information geared toward worldly ends?  Thus, Isaiah the prophet’s condemnation of the people of his time – “Gross is the heart of this people.”

            This word – “gross” – has a real breadth of meaning in English, but the prophet’s intention here is obvious as one reads through its dictionary definitions:  “brutishly coarse…crude; offensive, disgusting; lacking sensitivity or discernment; unrefined; carnal; sensual” (from the American Heritage Dictionary) – a gross heart, that is, is one set on things that are beneath true human dignity and honor, the valuing of that which is so much less than the one making the valuation.  Such grossness blinds, makes higher things uninteresting, seem unimportant in the “light” of present urges and desires.  (And so St. Thomas Aquinas’ very realistic observation that sins against chastity darken the intellect.) 

            And perhaps here is the real difference between the disciples, to whom the knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven has been granted, and “the people,” to whom it had not been granted:  the disciples – already followers of Christ in spite of their slowness of heart to believe – and the people, who paid attention only to the extent that they expected some present, aching need of theirs to be met.  Our Lord used parables to awaken in people, through their experience of ordinary things, the realization that precisely there, in the everyday circumstances of human activity, there is a message from God.  A good example of this is another parable of our Lord concerning a seed:  “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains by itself; but if it does die, it will bring forth much fruit.”  One can imagine an autumn acorn, taken up from the ground where it has fallen from the tree, kept safe from the forces of nature, polished and kept on the mantel for show (such a pretty, shiny little thing!); but it will only remain a small acorn, when it has the potential of becoming a great and mighty oak tree… if only, first, it fall into the ground and die.  Or, to use another of Christ’s examples:  how that a woman does dread the labor pains of childbirth (a kind of “dying”) but then rejoices greatly at the coming of her baby into the world, a precious human life, the fruit of her womb.

            There is then, our Lord is saying, a kind of death that is the preparation for hearing the Word of God – the human heart plowed up and fertilized with an interest in the things of God, the heart becoming “rich soil” in its longing for something more than the satisfaction of passing needs and daily exigencies, a human heart that sees the analogy writ in nature that points to God’s activity in the soul and welcomes that activity… and “indeed bears fruit.”  How could a parable, such as our Lord spoke, be understood by those who have no concern about what the parable is pointing to?  The earthly reality of planting a seed in the ground for a future harvest is understood by them, but the fact that this basic agrarian practice just might open up to them a spiritual lesson is of no interest to them.  Gross of heart, bloated with nothing but day-to-day concerns, they are truly blind, deaf and lacking in understanding.

            “Knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven” was granted to the disciples, the followers of Christ, because they had come to realize – in spite of their sluggishness to believe sometimes, their temptations to fall back into the habits of concern for merely worldly things – they had come to know that there is more to life than their fishing nets (Peter, James, John and Andrew), tax collector position (Matthew), and the political movement for Israel’s independence from Rome (Simon and Thaddaeus of the Zealot Party).  In them was a longing for something more, and the answer came to them in the person of Christ, whom they followed at His call, and so their eyes could see, ears could hear and their minds and hearts could begin to understand the point of the parable:  the seed of the Word of God can only grow in hearts like theirs were becoming.