Struggle.

Homilette for Morning Prayer on Wednesday in the Second Week of Lent

Mark 4:1-20.

The Parable of the Sower: the proto-parable. The one where Jesus explains that it’s a metaphor, and then goes on to explain what the metaphor means.

Now, I love a good metaphor, and I was really looking forward to digging into this one… but I didn’t even get there. I kept getting stuck.

It’s this middle part that I got caught on.

‘To you has been given the secret, but for those outside, everything comes in parables.’

In order that ‘“they may look, but not perceive; listen, but not understand… so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.”’

The way this reads, it sounds like there are some people—those outside—who aren’t meant to be forgiven, who aren’t meant to repent… who aren’t even given the chance.

That can’t be right, can it?

He’s quoting from the Book of Isaiah here, Chapter 6, and in Isaiah, God does say that some of the people of Judah—most of them, more than 90%—won’t be given the chance to repent.

And Jesus is repeating that. He’s speaking in parables purposefully so that ‘those outside’ may not fully comprehend. He seems to be saying that there’s an in-group and an out-group, and the out-group won’t get in. So how does this square with our all-loving, all-welcoming, inclusive God?

I struggled with this. A lot.

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It’s Lent right now, and we should be struggling. It would be a whole lot easier to just gloss over this part and go on to the parable, so we can applaud ourselves for our exceptional soil quality—but sometimes, scripture isn’t easy. In fact, sometimes, scripture is hard.

There are parts of scripture that are problematic, that might not fit into our worldview, that we might not like or agree with… or that may not agree with us.

I wonder, though, when scripture is ‘problematic’, does scripture have the problem, or do we? If we find something in scripture that we don’t like, does it have to change, or do we?

And, yes, we know, that the best-selling book we call the Bible isn’t inerrant, and what we read all bound up in our nice Oxford Annotated NRSVs isn’t a perfect facsimile of what came out of Jesus’ mouth, or Paul’s mouth, or God’s mouth. We know that there’s historical context to consider, and all sorts of lenses to be looked through… but are we ever tempted to use all that as an excuse? So that we don’t have to struggle?

Maybe, especially in Lent, instead of discarding or massaging or glossing over scripture that troubles us, we could take some time with it… to listen to what it has to say to us.

We can read it. Carefully. In different interpretations. See what scholars have had to say about it, talk about it with others. And pray. For some reason, for me, that’s the method I tend to forget about, or put off till last… but that’s the reason Jesus explained this parable in the first place: ‘those who were around him, along with the twelve, asked him’. We can ask, too.

When I had my little mini-crisis of faith about these verses, I did all the things I just mentioned—I read, I talked it through with my husband, and I asked, and I listened… and I’d love to say that I now perceive and understand those verses perfectly…. but I can’t.

What I can say is that the time I spent was worth it, and I have a deeper sense of comfort and clarity than I would have if I had just skipped over it and started thinking about soil metaphors. That comfort and clarity came from the struggle.

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Lent is a season to struggle, to ask hard questions, to take what we hold to be true and to loosen our grip just a little bit, to see if scripture, along with our reason and tradition, is leading us to a slightly different—and deeper, and more mature—understanding of our faith.

Because scripture is always inviting us into conversation. Sometimes it speaks to us in uncomfortable ways—in ways we don’t like—in ways we may struggle with—but scripture is always speaking.

Let anyone with ears to hear listen.

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