Truth VII

Don: Jack Nicholson’s character Colonel Jessep had the following heated exchange with defense attorney Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) in the movie “A Few Good Men.” It marked the climax, the denouement, of the entire move:

Kaffee: *Colonel Jessep, did you order the Code Red?*
Judge Randolph: You don’t have to answer that question!
Col. Jessep: [contemptuously, to the judge] I’ll answer the question!
Col. Jessep: [belligerently, to Kaffee] You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I’m entitled to…
Col. Jessep: [interrupts, shouts] You want answers?
Kaffee: [shouts back] I want the truth!
Col. Jessep: [roars] YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

The colonel then tells Lt. Kaffee that from the comfort of his (Kaffee’s) civilized, untroubled life, he cannot see the truth from the perspective of a person who, like the colonel, is engaged with an enemy in the trenches of war.

So far, we have examined the concept of truth (specifically, the truth about god) itself. But what about truth from the perspective of a person hearing or otherwise receiving it, as in Lt. Kaffee’s case? The Parable of the Sower, which can be found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, might offer some insight into this question. I think it might more appropriately be called the Parable of the Soil, for reasons I will state momentarily.

In the parable, the soil is the recipient, the hearer, of the truth about god, or the word of god as it is called in Luke. The parable talks about what the hearer brings to the concept of the truth about god. Here is the version in Matthew 13:1-23:

That day Jesus went out of the house and was sitting by the sea. And large crowds gathered to Him, so He got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach.

And He spoke many things to them in parables, saying, “Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and *yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.”

And the disciples came and said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted. For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,

‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand;
You will keep on seeing, but will not perceive;
For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they would see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
And understand with their heart and return,
And I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.

“Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road. The one on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, this is the man who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no firm root in himself, but is only temporary, and when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he falls away. And the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. And the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty.”

To what extent is the soil responsible for itself, as the recipient of the seed—the truth? It’s easy for us to say that our hearts are open to god and to his word, his truth; but what is our responsibility with regard to opening our hearts?

Presumably the sower would hope that all the seeds fall in good soil, yet makes no apparent effort to see that it does. The sowing is quite random; the sower takes no responsibility for the outcome. Does the soil then have any responsibility for being the type of soil that it is? Notice that the yield from the good soil is not uniform, but rather quite variable: Some soil produces a 100-fold harvest, some, 60, some only 30. Is this significant?

Must the truth about god always bear fruit? What insight does this parable contain concerning the hearer’s side of the truth about god? Why does persecution (verse 21) cause the human equivalent of rocky soil to “fall away” from god, especially in light of Jesus’ statement in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:10): “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It seems that persecution because of belief in the word can distance people from  their belief, yet the kingdom of heaven is still accessible to them.

In the first kind of soil, the birds quickly eat up the sown seed. But those seeds usually emerge not only unscathed after passing through the alimentary tract and being excreted, but fertilized to boot!

What are we to make of all this? Does it mean that the truth about god is expected to be uniformly believed?—clearly not, in my opinion. If I am right, then what are we to make of differences in our belief about the truth of god? What does it imply for our understanding that from the perspective of truth itself, it is eternally immutable and uniform? Must belief in the truth about god necessarily bear fruit? Why, or why not?

Harry: It’s difficult to fit this parable to the concept of truth that we have arrived at in our discussion. Truth evolves. Nature changes. But church does offer nuggets of truth.

Soil changes, as the wind blows nutrients onto it (or blows them away). The truth we receive is dependent upon our perception of its source. [sound cut out] … in all three synoptic gospels. Jesus probably did say something to that effect. His point, to his contemporary audience, was about what it meant to belong to god.

Robin: I wonder if the same seed is the same message, and if the different types of soil might represent the choices that we make about what to do with the message. The verse (21-2) about tribulation and persecution and stumbling and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choking the word so that he becomes unfruitful makes me wonder if the soil is linked to a personality. If you hear the word but don’t apply it, it is just going to rot. We—the soil—receive the seed; it’s a matter then of what we do woth it.

Kiran: Soil becomes good or bad depending on the farmer—if he fertilizes, weeds, and so on. But the farmer is missing from this parable. The actions of the farmer determine how god the soil will be, not the soil itself. Therefore, we should not judge people—the soil—because their shortcomings are not their fault.

On the other hand, it is beyond speculation as to why one soil is fertile while another is barren. This is where grace comes in.

Jay: To me, the sower is indiscriminate in his sowing. This is the same as god and his grace. The seed is sown on every possible type of soil, as god’s grace and love are bestowed on every possible type of human being. It begs the question: What then is left for me to do? What is my responsibility?

Perhaps the point of the parable is that god’s grace is everywhere, but how are you going to prepare yourself to receive it? Will you choose to be the soil by the side of the road? Or the rocky soil? Or the thorny soil? Or the good soil? God’s grace is sown indiscriminately, like the seeds; it is up to the soil to choose whether to be the kind of soil in which that grace can flourish. That is the soil’s responsibility.

Each type of soil has its biases, its individuality. The soil at the side of the road is packed down hard and has little interest in things it perceives as being mere surface material, as superficial, as something not to be absorbed or to develop a relationship with. The rocky soil has some—but not much—depth, so it is prepared to work with the seed up to a point but beyond that, especially if things get tough, then the rocky soil will reject its seed for not delivering anything worthwhile and maybe even accusing it of being responsible for things getting tough. The thorny soil tolerates external influences (the thorns) that may interfere with the growth of the seed. The good soil is receptive to the seed, willing to develop a relationship with it, and as a result the seed eventually brings forth fruit. The good soil did not do anything to produce the fruit except be receptive to the seed.

Could it then be that it is our personal responsibility to prepare ourselves to become good soil? By that I do not mean that we follow some checklist of preparatory steps; perhaps all we need to do is to share our love.

Harry: Let me play devil’s advocate and say that the parable is ridiculous, if is saying that soil can choose its nature. The average churchgoing Christian, hearing this parable, would instead assume it means that s/he, the Christian, is the good soil. That is perhaps a judgmental statement, yet I personally perceive it as true. Either way, the parable makes no sense.

There may be events in our lives—a diagnosis of cancer, for example—that turn us rather rapidly into good soil.

Michael: I used to feel, when I was in church, that I must be good soil. But if I am honest, I recognize that I have been all types of soil at different times in my life.

I find especially intriguing Jesus’ enigmatic statement at the end of the parable proper (before he began to explain it to his disciples): “He who has ears, let him hear.” Could this be a condition of being good soil?

Chris: Who is the soil, and who is the sower meant to be in this parable? Could the nature of the soil change in a cyclical way? Could the sower and the soil change places? I could be the sower, sharing god’s love and grace with all of mankind—with every type of soil. As I do so, maybe I turn the good soil myself. bearing more fruit and thereby creating even more abundant seed, which I then proceed to sow.

But at any point in time, the sower might die and be returned to the earth, to become any of the types of soil again.

Jay: With regard to what Harry said about soil having no choice in its nature: I think the point of the parable is that the seed is grace, it is love; and that we have choices as to how to receive and act upon it. Everybody has the free will to exercise that choice. The parable is telling us what our choices are. It may be, as both Harry and Chris says, that there will be events or times in our lives when we change our minds about the choice we made before.

Harry: The problem for me is that none of the three gospels define what is meant by “the seed” in the parable. As devil’s advocate, I called the parable “ridiculous,” but as Harry, I have no problem with ridiculous stories. If they help you to develop something that is precious to you—love and grace—and share it with everyone then good! But someone else might define the seed as meaning to accept Jesus Christ as one’s lord and savior and say that failure to accept the seed dooms one to eternal darkness. So the parable is ridiculous in the sense that it can be made to mean pretty much anything the hearer wants.

Robin: In the parables preceding and following this one, Jesus identifies himself as the good seed, the sower, the messiah. In the parable following (the wheat and the tares) 13:37-9 he says:

“…. The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, and the field is the world; and as for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels.”

This seems to sum up the three parables. Jesus is the sower and the seed and the harvester.

Kiran: Jesus’ contemporary audience were largely agrarian. What would have concerned them most? The soil? The work to be done to get a good crop?

David: I agree with Harry the Devil’s Advocate in finding this parable ridiculous. I disagree with Harry’s own view that this is OK. Ridiculous scripture is open to ridicule and susceptible to disrepute. It gives other religions and atheists a peg to hang their hat on in pointing out that the bible is full of nonsense.

Worse, it obfuscates god’s real and simple core messages, god’s word, the truth of god’s existence, love, and grace. Some parts of the bible, such as the Beatitudes, are crystal clear in these regards—we instinctively understand and empathize with them—so why throw spanners in such otherwise beautiful works? Here, we are trying to twist our intellects around such nonsense as soil having a choice of what type of soil to be. Soil is a terrible metaphor to use to represent a human being.

I do not believe that scripture needs to be or ought to be so unclear. Sure, enigmatic storytelling may sometimes encourage us to examine a concept in greater depth than we might otherwise do. But beyond a certain level of enigma and unclearness, it may do more harm than good in turning people away from the truth and (perhaps worse) in leading to different interpretations of the truth that then lead to schism and sectarianism and violence—the very things love surely does not want.

Robin: Don’t you think god tried that before? How much clearer can the 10 Commandments be? But look what’s been added on and added on until the whole message of what the commandments represented and what the sacrificial system represented was all lost in the add-ons, in the judging of your neighbor to make yourself look better than him. So when god tries to speak specifically and clearly, still human beings will pervert that message.

Also, we have to consider what was going on at this time. Jesus’ message and lifestyle was not being received exactly well by the religious hierarchy, so had he just said bluntly what was wrong (which he did sometimes, for example in calling the religious leaders vipers and so on) they would have gotten angry and might have wanted to kill him before the time appointed for him to be sacrificed.

We also should consider that this was like a covert operation, an underground movement, allowing people to think and discuss and understand without sudden dramatic opposition to the already hostile system that was in place.

Kiran: The parable is prefaced by the statement that the multitudes thronged the beach expecting to hear from Jesus. So he probably thought that only a few of them would understand what he had to say and be changed, while some would reject it. Perhaps he was judging the impact of his words on the crowd, and wanted to let them know that only a few of them would “get it”.

Don: What if the parable means what it says: That the truth about god (that is, the seed) falls in a variety of places and times, with various effects; and that the perspective of the hearer influences what the truth becomes. The different kinds of soil is not a judgment but a reflection of the fact that god has people of all types in his kingdom. The power of truth is that it does not have to bear fruit uniformly each and every time and place it is broadcast.

One of the most interesting, perplexing, and perhaps enlightening parts of the parable is the statement that the yield from even the good soil is not uniform (some yielded 100-fold, other 60- or 30-fold,” etc.) You might expect it to be uniformly the best yield. That it is not so suggests something about the concept of truth-bearing that might lead us to change our thinking. The idea that one must always bear fruit and always bear fruit maximally seems to be challenged here, with the lesson that god’s grace extends even when we cannot understand it. Verse 19: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it,…” suggests that not everyone is responsible for bearing maximal fruit; that there is a recognition that the kingdom of heaven is filled with people who have wildly differing understanding and views about the truth about god.

It does not mean that the truth does not reach out to people who don’t understand it or who may not be able to perceive it. Seed that gets eaten by a bird lives to bear fruit on another day in another location.

So to me the parable is not ridiculous if taken at face value.

Kiran: It is humbling to know that even the rocky soil has access to god; that nobody is “lost”.

Robin: These are not people who are making the judgment. Maybe that’s why he talks about some will produce 100 fold, some 60, some 30. We can’t tell how much another person—a plot of soil— is going to produce, so we cannot judge them. In the Wheat and the Tares, the sower doesn’t know how the harvest is going to end. The harvester knows. We cannot judge the fruit of popular pastors with megachurches against that of remote village churches with a plodding pastor and a tiny flock. That judgment is up to the harvester.

Don: Isaiah 55:6-13 has a similar reference to sower and seed and harvest:

“Seek the Lord while He may be found;
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
And let him return to the Lord,
And He will have compassion on him,
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

[Here is where the references coincide:]

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
“For you will go out with joy
And be led forth with peace;
The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you,
And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
“Instead of the thorn bush the cypress will come up,
And instead of the nettle the myrtle will come up,
And it will be a memorial to the Lord,
For an everlasting sign which will not be cut off.”

Harry: Even reading the parable at face value, you still need to define its components and meaning. The genius of it is that you can define them any way you want! I disagree with David, however, that the parable is ridiculous. I have had changes of heart as a result of life experiences, and the further I search for god, the more I see that he uses whatever tools might help to get his word across.

It’s a good parable, but it does not say what the word of god is.

David: Accepting the parable at face value seems to me a commendably Daoist approach! 🙂 It says essentially that nobody—neither sower nor seed nor soil—has any control over what happens to the truth. At the end of the day, only god has that control.

So it says to me: Go with what you are given, and don’t try to understand it. That is practically the essence of Daoism.

I’m not sure where it says in the parable the truth that the dao—the way—god exists.

Don: It might be implicit. In any case, Isaiah certainly reinforces that message that we cannot hope to understand the truth.

We wanted to explore how the truth about god perceived from the hearer’s side, and in this parable we have learned that the hearers will be all over the map, geographically and in terms of their understanding of the truth about god. I think it is indeed part of the message of the parable that we have no control, that what we want as human beings—to control god so that he puts the seed where we want it put and to produce a predictable uniform harvest—is not going to happen. The parable teaches that it’s not up to us to control the spread and absorption of the truth about god.

In the one specific place where the parable talks about persecution being an uprooter, a disruptor of the germination process, the very same word is used in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:10) to show that the persecuted are saved:

“Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The parable is not about salvation or membership in the kingdom of heaven. It is about the transcendent, immutable ways of god, that differ radically from our ways. It is about god’s plan being the only plan, though rooted in a reality we cannot perceive. Perhaps it shares a common theme with Daoism. I find it a reassuring, enabling lesson rather than a discouraging, disabling one.

Harry: God determines how much is revealed to each of us. Why?

David: If we were in control, we would prepare and implement a plan to pull out the weeds, till the hard ground, and take away the rocks. Isn’t that what religion tries to do to spread and cultivate the word of god?

Don: This is why I find the parable so insightful. We will discuss this some more.

* * *