Learning our lessons

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 4:26-34) invites us to reflect not only on what the Lord wishes to teach us but also on how He wishes to teach it. We hear two key parables of Jesus in this passage, one of which comes from farming and the other of which – the mustard seed - comes from the natural world. In the first parable, we see a farmer who scatters seed and finds that, with the passage of time, nature plays its part too. Before long, his crop has grown, and it is time for the harvest. In the second parable, we hear a story from the natural world which operates under the hand of the Divine Farmer. Here, even without the intervention of human hand, the small seed grows in the ground and from it sprouts a plant under which the birds can make their home. Lastly, we learn that while Jesus used these parables to teach the people, in private to the disciples He explained his meaning. This passage of course raises many questions, not only about how God fosters the supernatural life in our souls, but also how the divine teacher, Jesus, wishes to enlighten His listeners. These two outcomes are of course intimately linked.

Let's just focus, however, on the second. Why did Jesus use parables? Perhaps we can identify two functions of the parables which together form a paradox.

In His incarnation, Jesus fulfils three roles: priest, prophet, and king. As priest, He is our redeemer whose actions purify us from sin. As king, He is our ruler who reigns over us and indeed over the whole universe. But as prophet, He is our teacher, for contrary to the usual meaning of prophet - one who sees the future - the prophet tells us about the ways of God. O Oriens declared the fifth great O Antiphon before Christmas: Jesus is the rising sun who illumines those who sit in the shadow of darkness.

And yet this illumination is not mere information. The teachings of Jesus are not like an instruction leaflet from IKEA. They are not even merely a Highway Code for the royal path of the Cross. Rather, to be heard and received, the parables must strike home. The heart must become open, the soul must pay attention in such a way that the message is taken to heart. Nobody takes to heart an IKEA instruction leaflet. To take something to heart is to be changed by it; it is to want to change one's life because of it; and to do such a thing may require us to grapple with it, even time after time. And so, as the great Canadian theorist of communication, Marshall McLuhan, a devout Catholic, said, The medium is the message. The medium here is the parable, but the parable, as we have noted, is not just information. The parable calls us to grapple with ourselves; the parable calls us to grapple with God, as we surrender to Him.

The parable, in other words, requires of us to be contemplatives of truth rather than consumers of information. And here we come to the other function of the parable which is paradoxically a contradiction of the first function. For while the parable is an open invitation, it is also a kind of locked door or barrier. We may not just listen to the parable like we might read a road sign. That is not good enough. Its lessons are not just for the mind. Anyone who is not prepared at least to take its message to heart can gain access to its real meaning. Here, the parable does not illumine by its depths but disappointments by its shallowness. Those who contemplate sincerely the parables and are prepared to take them to heart find that, rather like the Tardis of Doctor Who, they are larger on the inside than on the outside. Those who merely listen, as if they were flicking through the pages of a free newspaper, can expect to make little progress with them. It is as the prophet Isaiah, quoted by St Matthew, says: By hearing ye shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.

The drama for us today as we have said is that, all too often, we behave as consumers of information. Indeed, we can behave as consumers towards religion, seeking not a relationship with God but a buyer’s guarantee of his or her own justification. We need to leave these habits in order to become what God intends us to be: no longer the puppets of our unregulated needs but the willing disciples of divine truth, who are ready to part with everything, not least our self-deceptions, so that His light might flood our minds, change our hearts, soothe our wounds with His joy, and wrap us in His embrace of eternal love.