One of the Sisters of the Hermitage said, "But why?! Why should the intention of the parables be to keep the meaning of the Kingdom of Heaven away from people?" It is remarkable .... but noneless true. And in this much is revealed about our Christian life.

How is the Bible to be read (as one example)? We know from the Apostles, their coworkers, and the earliest Church Fathers that the Holy Scripture must be understood on at least four levels of meaning: the historical, or literal, level; the allegorical, or spiritual, level; the tropological, or moral, level; and finally the eschatological level, that is, "on the scales of Judgment" concerning our lives after we die.

Yet, there is something still more basic that remains. We must also understand the habits of mind and frames of reference that made up the culture of the period. For how else could we understand even the literal level meaning its idioms, metaphors, and other figures of speech? Fortunately, that first-century culture — composed of Jews, Romans, and Greeks — was homogeneous in many ways. You see, it was not just a dusty corner of Palestine with an obcure people gathered in secrecy speaking ancient Hebrew and writing nothing down. How in the world could you begin to master such a culture?! No. It was a Hellenized culture with everyone speaking the same language thanks to Alexander's conquest of the world. And then this culture was disseminated by way of the excellent roads and trade routes and deep harbors established by the Roman Empire.

To engage the culture, its language, and its world of (so-called) surface meanings makes a good start. For if we do not bother even to do this — if we retroject modern categories of mind back on to Antiquity — then we will end up in a complete muddle, understanding nothing and standing convicted of faint-hearted Christianity. It will not do to rely on English translations, made nearly two thousand years later, with their famous misreadings of the true New Testament.

Consider an archaeologist in the year 4067. She is studying artifacts of an ancient civilization called the United States of America, whose history and culture had mostly evaporated because so much of its written, audio, and visual information had been committed to to digital formats and media. It seems a great burst of electro-magnetic energy had wiped out all solid-state memory and hard drives. Among the artifacts that survived were thin, flat, black, vinyl disks about a foot in diameter. She sits in a booth at a research library listening to one: "If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair." She asks a colleague, "What could this mean?" San Francisco, they knew to be a ruined city on the western shore of this continent. But why should one wear flowers in her hair before entering the city?

You and I would say, "Wait! You mean you've never heard of 'flower children'? If you don't know about the so-called 'peace and love' culture, which in fact was a culture of drugs, indiscriminate sex, and a general collapse of morals, then you will not "get" the American twentieth century at all.

Studying what few vinyl disks survived, she gathers that the Jazz Age music of the late 1920s and 1930s did not last long. The big band music .... well that lasted even less long. But the music that began in the late 1950s, Americans and then the rest of the world continued to listen to for the next century .... over and over and over again. Any researcher would instantly see that this music was central to the vanished American culture, but so much of it is inscrutable. What is meant by "The Wind Cries Mary" or "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"? And perhaps these archaeologists had never heard of marijuana or LSD, distancing them even further from their mysterious subject matter.

When we read the New Testament, we also must draw upon a scant, few artifacts that have survived from a lost civilization. The Jewish lifeworld was reduced to rubble in 70 A.D. Like our digital data, their most important information existed only in a most fragile form: human memory. Yes, its many schools of thought, had produced a vast body of learning, but it was transmitted only orally, not committed to ink and scrolls. Indeed, the collapse of the culture had caused a general scramble to encode their most sacred teachings in a written form giving rise to what we now call "Rabbinic Judaism."

As Christians, we must understand that our own most sacred teachings, the Four Gospels, were not books but rather oral traditions encoded upon the living media of human hearts and minds. Why this Jewish and then Christian aversion to ink and scrolls? Because

Nonetheless, twenty-first century Christians continue to retroject their own categories of mind and frames of reference back on to the first century. We must remember that our language (and all language) is culture-bound and time-bound, embedded with the artifacts of its unique (and often untranslatable) place and time. Naturally, our radio airwaves, television programming, and myriad websites overflow with it. For these are the springs of a self-bounding, self-replenishing, and self-validating closed system.

Our Gospel lesson this morning will receive precisely this treatment nearly everywhere it is discussed. After all, the little tale of the sower of seed seems simple enough. But be ware: half-hearted seekers will encounter a flinty Jesus who says in this very passage,

Jesus underlines this all-important point when He summarizes the parable's meaning:

As St. John would write, Jesus was the creating Logos (Jn 1:1):

The image is striking. First we have the Logos, called Wisdom in the Book of Wisdom, depicted as the Creative Agency of the Universe, existing before all created things. Within each of us is the pneuma zwtikon, a phrase we find in Wisdom 15 (LXX). The Logos is the source and sower of the Divine seed, known as the the Logos spermatikos, placed within each of us.

As Justin Martyr was born around the time or just after the Gospel of St. John was written down in scroll form, his thought (only his First Apology and Second Apology have survived) reflects both traditions of Greek thought as well as Hebrew theology current during Jesus' earthly lifetime.

We may hear these words and principles as being quaint. But for this place and time, many held them to be bedrock like the laws of physics or theories of biology of our time. Through Justin Martyr we have a little window into the mind of the first century clarifying our parable.

First, as the source for the Divine seed, Jesus reveals His identity as the figure of Wisdom, the pre-Existing Logos. He sows the Logos spermatikos within each one of us enabling us to participate in the Divine life.

At the literal level, He is the seed sower, and we are the chosen vessels or soil for the seed.

At the allegorical level, He provides us with an anthropology and "anatomy of the world." The world is a place of Divine possibility. God walks through it bearing Divine fire, we might say. He generously endows His human creatures with Divine sparks. The purpose of the world is participation in the Divine life.

At the tropological level, the story has a moral .... actually a four-fold moral:

1. Some received Divine life but recklessly permitted it fall away from them as they wandered from the chosen path and consented to toxic life.
   
   
2. Some experienced the joy of Divine life, but their life of faith was mere emotionalism, and soon they cooled, turning their emotions to new excitements.
   
   
3. Some were invited into Divine life but dissipated the promise of life with God in favor of pleasure-seeking.
   
   
4. Finally some were granted the gift of Divine life, discerned the world around them as a path toward God, fastened their prayers and meditations upon only this, and advanced in theosis, in the daily practice of their mind and manner of life as true sons and daughters of God.

The eschatological level is obvious. The ones who cherished and cultivated the seed entered the Kingdom of Heaven. The others withered like the grass and were no more (Ps 103:15) or were pruned and burned in the fire (Jn 15:6) or were bundled with weeds and thrown into the furnace (Mt 13:42).

This morning's parable is a cautionary tale. It is a cautionary tale that we go about the solemn business of guarding the Divine life within us. But it cautions us not to pluck a parable from an ancient and distant lifeworld and apply it to our own lives willy-nilly.

Many Christians will equate the "Word of God" to their Bible. But the concept of the New Testament would not be invented for another three hundred years .... and the study Bible they know for another nineteen centuries. There were no Christian disciples with marked up pages of the Gospels or the Letters of St. Paul.

If we say that we love Jesus, then we must speak His language. Once we have done this, then we will see that the parable of the sower concerns theosis — participation in the Divine Life and what that means in the dimensions of our own lives.

It is not enough to claim that Jesus is the Master of our life, but then not know who He really is or what to do next. As Jesus Himself warns, emotionalism is not enough. Far worse, this sort of instant-gratification faith is more likely than not to attach us to a Jesus invented by an industry that profits from their invention .... in the billions of dollars. But the Jesus we seek is found only in the depths of the ancient Gospels costing us nothing ..... except real and true devotion .... diligence, digging, learning more.

May I turn to another kind of caution? I fear the modern, skeptical reader who will say, "All this is nonsense! How could God have such an antiquated view of physics and biology .... if He's the Creator the universe?"

First, we must answer, how might we expect the God-Man to comport Himself in the first century? Shall He strut about as a twenty-first century faculty member at MIT? What a bizarre curiosity that would have been! And by the way, any twenty-first century scientist will most certainly be held up to derision and mocked in the twenty-second century as new advances in science go forward.

Second, "How do we know that theories concerning Logos spermatikos and zwtikon pneuma are not 'correct'?" In our time, the favored method for explicating the world is scientific. Science is one method for sorting through and appraising data. It surveys the material world .... that is, matter. Participation in the Life-Spirit of God is a spiritual subject. Sadly, our own culture, so rich in technology, knows much less about spiritual phenomena than did our predecessors two thousand years ago. Even more sadly, what they knew has survived partially and in fragments. Can we say that humans of the past five hundred years have wandered away from spiritual things? Have cooled toward them? And have become too fascinated by the material world (with its pleasure-seeking)? I would say so.

The Sower sows His seed everywhere and within each and every human life. It is not reserved for the few. What we do with it is up to us. It is not enough to say, Jesus the Sower is Lord. That is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a very long road.

A Sower of seed went to sow His seed. Each seed is a Most Holy part of His Own Divine Life. Each of us has received it; it is ours: our only true treasure. It is our Life source, our Guide, and our only path to Eternal Life with God — a long and winding road of digging and diligence and learning and contemplation and maturation. These are the traits of a child of God, and these are the marks of the Christian life.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.