Monday 11th May - A BIG mistake

DAILY BYTE

Mere weeks after I first got married, I made my first big mistake. My wife and I were living in a small granny cottage, and early one morning I went off to gym. I arrived back, still a little sweaty but after having picked up a newspaper on the way home. I walked in just as my wife was finishing her breakfast, looked around and announced: “Gosh, this place is in a mess.”

She looked around, shrugged her shoulders in that gracious way she has, and got up to start what she thought would be helping me to clean up. But as she bent down to pick something up, I chose that exact moment to sit down at the breakfast paper and flick open my newspaper.

Even as I did so, I realised immediately that I had just made a huge mistake. It was as if time itself slowed down around me, my life literally flashing before my eyes. My wife gradually straightened with a glint in her eyes. It was one of those chilling moments – a moment where a woman looks at a man, and the man thinks, “This is NOT good.”

Believe me when I tell you that I spent the rest of that day doing punishment details as a result of my misdemeanour. I was forced to spring clean all day, carrying a mop and wearing a doek.

I only tell you this story because it is an example of how easily familiarity breeds contempt. I had been married for only a few weeks, and I reckoned I already had everything figured out.

Yet, this is exactly the kind of attitude we have with the Parables. This is especially true with the Parable we will be focusing on all this week – the Parable of the Sower (see below). This parable is probably one of the best known and most well loved of all the parables, but our extreme familiarity can cause us to lose sense of what this parable is actually all about. Our long comfortable association with this story, perhaps from as far back as Sunday School, causes us to think that we have the answers to it all nailed – like playing Trivial Pursuit when you have pre-read all the answer cards.

Except that parables don’t work that way at all. If we think we have them easily figured out, then it is quite possible that we are missing the point entirely. Here’s a general rule of thumb that I use for reading Jesus’ parables: if I interpret them in such a way that there is nothing surprising or even shocking, then it’s time to go back and read it again.

This is because we aren’t meant to interpret parables as much as they are meant to interpret us. We don’t read them, they read us. Perhaps, this is why Jesus begins and ends this particular parable with a very firm ‘LISTEN’!

Jesus wants us to pay careful attention here – that command to LISTEN cuts across our over familiarities and comfortable complacencies. This parable speaks in numerous ways concerning Kingdom growth in this world, and in our hearts and lives. And this is where we need to put aside our over-familiarities and to listen with careful openness, because this parable undoes and challenges almost everything we normally learn about growth.

Read through this parable carefully today, because we will spend the rest of this week attempting to allow its message to seep deeper into our hearts and lives.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Gracious God, we ask that throughout this week you will open our hearts to the message of this parable, and shape and form us around its truths. Grow us, we pray O God, through the truth of this parable – may it read and interpret us. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Mark 4:1-9 NRSV

Jesus began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them:

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”