Truth IX

Jay told us the tragic news that Harry had suffered a stroke and was in an induced coma at the University of Michigan Hospital. As of the time of this transcript, he was declared nearly brain-dead and was being taken off life support. May God’s grace speed a good man to the better place he deserves.

Jay: Seed is mentioned over 250 times in the bible. Most of the references are metaphors; they are not about botanical or agricultural seed per se. Perhaps as much as 90 percent of the references are talking about human seed—”the seed (progeny) of David,” and so on.

As well as the parables of the sower and the soil, and of the wheat and the tares (which we have discussed), Matthew 13:31-2 recites the parable of the mustard seed:

He presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”

Other parts of the New Testament also have things to say about seed. For instance, 2 Corinthians 9:6-7:

Now this I say, he who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do just as he has purposed in his heart, not grudgingly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

Mark 4 offers a slightly different version of the parable of the sower and the seed. Take verses 26-29:

And He was saying, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows—how, he himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself; first the blade, then the head, then the mature grain in the head. But when the crop permits, he immediately puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Next, 1 Peter 1:22-23:

Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.

Finally, in Genesis 8:22, in describing the order within the world, the concept of seed is raised:

“While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
And cold and heat,
And summer and winter,
And day and night
Shall not cease.”

The “seedtime”, the sowing of seeds, and the harvest, are part of the natural order of things.

Do these scriptures help to broaden one’s understanding of the truth about god? If so, how?

Nick: Whenever we witness, whenever we tell the word of god to another human being, whenever we try to help them spiritually, we are sowing seed.

David: The additional examples from scripture broaden the seed as a metaphor not only for “the word of god” but also for “people” and for “the kingdom of heaven.” I am not sure that these additional metaphorical applications bring us (me, anyway) any closer to the truth about god. Seed as “the word of god” seems straightforwardly applicable to the question of truth, but (to me) the other metaphors do not.

I’m afraid that, for me, this is another example of the problem of scripture: It obfuscates, for no good reason, and is often in apparent error. Within the parable of the wheat and the tares, the notion that god did not want the field weeded because of the risk of accidentally uprooting a wheat plant here and there would not make sense to a farmer, then or now. The weeds will suffocate many more wheat plants than the weeders would accidentally destroy. That is why god’s audience (in the parable) asked him if they should start weeding! But god’s answer makes no sense, agriculturally.

Robin: Maybe Jesus was trying to show his audience, of whom many would have been farmers, that god’s crop is governed by different laws than earthly crops, by insisting that there should be no weeding. Perhaps he was saying “It’s not for you to judge what is a weed and what is a wheat plant.”

David: “Maybe”! “Perhaps”! That’s my point. If that was what he meant, why not just say it? Why sow confusion and resulting misunderstanding? The verse in the Sower parable about giving the whole truth to people who have some arbitrarily “right” level of understanding while taking it completely away from those who have not seems, frankly, un-Christian! What on earth are we supposed to make of this?

Why does Jesus even bother telling an incomprehensible story to the multitude while just giving it straight to the disciples? He might as well tell the multitude nothing, since they are not going to benefit from it anyway, according to the parable! And even the disciples (not to mention ourselves!) clearly don’t get much of it either!

Nick: You can’t put god in a box.

David: Absolutely right! But that’s what scripture tries to do!

Nick: To me, the same scripture has meant different things at different times in my life. That’s the beauty of scripture: That it can help us at all times. It can means something different tomorrow from what it meant yesterday. That’s why I say one cannot put god in a box. There is no absolute, because god is so broad.

Charles: Similes are used commonly in many religions. They are just a way of making the truth about god accessible and understandable to humankind in our individual spiritual journeys. They do so by putting that truth into the context of our human senses, experience, and thinking. Some of the similes of course had to be relevant to the particular time and place of the scripture’s origin, and must be interpreted in that context.

The seed could be an example of the revelation of the truth about god through nature. God is everywhere in nature, at once, and a seed contains the essence of everything it is destined to become. Seed goes through a cycle of birth and death involving evolution and transformation. There are obvious parallels, whether one is talking about physical form, life forms, galaxies, or planets, to the botanical seed and its cycle.

The seed is a simile for the revelation of god’s truth through nature. Human beings are a part of nature. We are subject to its laws, but we have faculties—the senses and a reasoning mind—to understand it. Beyond that, however, when we have exhausted our human faculties or exhausted our understanding of the natural world, we are still left with the realization, or perhaps it is the revelation, that god somehow transcends what we can perceive, know, and understand and that our only option is to accept this as the will of god and to surrender to that unfathomable higher power.

Scripture, as well as our own experience, tells us as much. The biblical similes seem to me to be a way of using the natural world we know to explain the supernatural world we cannot know, and ultimately of making that truth—that god and his kingdom exist and transcend our natural world and its physical laws—accessible to human beings.

From its sublime simplicity and beauty to its cataclysmic outbursts, nature has an humbling effect on us. Scripture too brings out this theme of humility.

In sum, the seed simile is just one way to make the truth about god accessible to humankind through nature.

Jason: Perhaps we should investigate the mystery of the seed—the fact that out of so little springs so much. A farmer plants a seed one day, and the next day a shoot appears out of the ground. How that happens, he does not know. The mustard seed parable, about one of the tiniest seeds turning into the biggest plant in the garden, makes this point. Is such mystery a help or a hindrance to understanding the truth about god? David seems to think it is a hindrance.

David: It depends on the mystery! Today, there is no mystery about about how a seed becomes a plant. Science has answered that question. It was a mystery of nature, not of god, not of the supernatural; therefore it was amenable to the human faculties and reasoning powers Chuck talked about.

The danger of using natural mysteries to represent the mystery of the supernatural is that natural mysteries demonstrably have been, can be, and will be resolved over time through the application of the scientific method and our faculties. So if the mystery of god is contained within the process by which a seed becomes a plant, then god is no longer a mystery, because we have worked out that process!

We all seem to agree that god must remain a mystery to mere mortals and that the best we can hope for is the occasional glimpse through a glass darkly. All I am saying is that we need those glimpses to be as sharp and clear as we can make them, but scripture and its metaphors and similes seem to me to obfuscate and confuse, rather than clarify and enlighten. It drives me nuts! 🙂

Nick: We need the mystery. Without it, we could not have faith.

Charles: I see mystery as not just helpful but even essential to the process of revelation and discovery. Even as a scientist I have a little different perspective. I think the more we understand scientifically, even about life processes, the more we realize we do NOT understand about it. The closer we come to the perfect hypothesis or well-framed construct for understanding life, the more we realize what we don’t understand about it.

One can take the same sort of attitude with regard to the cosmos: The more we learn about how energies interacted to form the cosmos, the more we realize there is something beyond that, that we don’t fully understand. But it is precisely that ever-remaining mystery that keeps us seeking, keeps us discovering, and keeps us open to a higher power, to something beyond the natural, physical, world.

I think this is part of the plan. I think it is necessary fro continued spiritual growth and development.

David: I am not arguing about the existence or indeed the need for mystery. I am saying that we need to choose our scientific and our spiritual mysteries carefully, and we must distinguish between them, because  some seemingly spiritual mysteries turn out to have a rational scientific explanation. They are only temporarily metaphysical (and therefore mysterious) but will be rendered physical by science tomorrow.

The important and real and lasting spiritual mysteries have to do with the truth about god. To be frank, I see only one eternal mystery, and that is about the ultimate origin of life, the universe, and everything. It’s the question: What was before the Big Bang? If science finds an answer to that—let’s call the answer “X”—then the same question will remain: What was before “X”?

If you bank your spirituality on the shifting sands of physical mystery, then you risk having your spirituality shattered in an instant.

Chuck: In purely scientific terms, the workings of the seed were perhaps the ultimate mystery in prehistoric times. Today, that mystery could be (say) the working of prions in the brain. Maybe we cannot put ourselves in the shoes of prehistoric people, but just the fact of a tiny seed growing into a miraculous large plant was to the people of that time what dark matter is to people today. My point is that it is the mystery behind the greater plan and our inability to fully understand it that is necessary for our continued spiritual evolution. Beyond the physical transformation of understanding, it remains necessary for us to continue our spiritual journey.

Robin: At the time, Jesus was talking to a specific group. While he must have known the physics of the seed, it was a mystery to them. So, just like Jesus, in ministering to others we have to make them understand what we are talking about using language they can understand.

Even with all the explanations that science gives us, I see no explanation for how there came to be just this one place in the solar system where life exists, especially when we know that the odds against it were billions to one. To me, this has to be the work of an intelligent planner, and part of a nice mystery!

Jay: The verse I found most thought provoking in the passages I read earlier was the one that alluded to the mystery of the seed. It seems to suggest there is something that we should be seeking to understand, and something that can not be understood, and a gray area that we can understand partially. I hope we can continue to explore this question.

David: The passages mentioned seed as representing, among other things, the kingdom of heaven. We know (and even primitive man would have known) that seed needs soil. Scripture uses “soil” as a metaphor for “people.” This being so, can the kingdom of heaven exist without people? Can seed grow without soil? It may have the DNA of the tree in it, but without soil, its DNA would seem to be helpless and useless.

Jason: The seed—the Word–still exists; there is just no fruit. God still exists, but is his existence meaningful without people?

Veronika: God existed before he created man, so he must have had meaning. He did not suddenly appear just for the purpose of creating humans.

Robin: Scripture tells us that god created other beings such as angels, so he had a kingdom even without people.

Veronika: We think everything revolves around us, including god! Yet we are nothing in comparison. When we leave our humanness behind—when we pass on—then surely we can no longer feel (if we feel anything) that we are the center of the universe. Like angels, we become something (like the angel) that exists in the supernatural space between humanity and god. I believe I may have existed in such a formless form before I came to Earth, and that I will return to it when I leave this Earth.

Robin: Genesis says that Adam became a living soul when god breathed into him. So life came from god—it already existed in god.

Jason ended the meeting with a prayer for Harry.

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