"The Seed Is the Word of God"

Whatever else they may be, the Holy Scriptures assuredly are Holy .... at least at their source. The original writings are of God:

The authentic Scriptures are the chosen instrument through which God communicates to us — perhaps a lesson heard in Church, which uncannily recapitulates your situation, maybe during a crisis; perhaps a verse that "speaks into" your life, opening a problem to you, even a Divine appointment, which you did not recognize; or perhaps you open the Bible, and your eyes fall on a significant word or phrase on the page. The Scriptures are "the oracles of God" (Rom 3:2).

The meaning of true Scripture, therefore, can never be plain or obvious. The early Church Father, Origen, said that the primary meaning of Scripture is allegorical. Allegory is the primary level of meaning. The word literally means "other than what is said in the public square" (alle-agora). That is, the meaning of Scripture is coded and hidden.

For this reason, we approach Scripture with care and reverence. Prooftexting, cherry-picking, reading the Bible as if were a how-to manual or a cookbook or even a news story will not do. Indeed, such behavior is an affront to its sacred dignity.

In our Gospel lesson this morning Jesus says that He speaks in coded sentences that He might not be understood .... but not in the sense of cryptography. We should say, rather, that He speaks from a different stratosphere. But if we were in His stratosphere, their meaning would be plain to us.

At Mark 4:12, we read,

At Matthew 13:14, we read,

And, finally, at Luke 8:10, He says,

The meaning of His essential teachings, therefore, have to do with mysteries .... and with God's Kingdom. To repeat a proverb coined around the time of Galileo,

The Scriptures are about one thing: how to go Heaven. You will never hear better practical advice than this.

The Holy Scriptures do not have to do with earthly things. The Bible is not a self-help book nor a how-to book for succeeding in the world. Indeed, its advice is to give the world a wide berth. Christianity is about Heavenly life. The only beauty to be found on the earth points back to our Creator and to His Holy Heaven.

Jesus tells us that we must not fasten ourselves on earthly things:

And, shockingly for many, He declares before His Father,

Do you see the point here? The ones that belong to the Father, the ones who are in this stratosphere, Jesus prays for. As for the rest? Jesus does not pray for them.

So the domain of Christian life is the Kingdom of Heaven, which is always already coalescing on earth at all times. The fourth-century Father, St. John Chrysostom, wrote,

"But what of loving our enemies?" we may ask. The Second Giving of the Law, on which we reflected last week, constitutes a giving of Heavenly Law, not earthly law. The Beatitudes are a vision of Heavenly life, a foretaste of the Kingdom.

Jesus teaches in the stratosphere of Heavenly life. Those who represent Him as being a great teacher in the pattern of, say, Confucius (dispensing wisdom about living on earth), are by that fact secular humanists. C. S. Lewis' words are trenchant:

When the Disciples wander from a Heavenly focus, they longer see the events around them as a Heaven-ordained drama. And they hear the Master's flinty rebuke:

You see, the main question concerning all things could not be more basic: "What is the state of your heart?"

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We hear "the Word of God" and picture Jesus Himself, the Logos, or at least leather-bound Bibles with dog-eared pages and underlined verses. But the Hebrew Bible, the Scripture of Jesus' time, would not be written down as a settled thing until the seventh century A.D. or perhaps as late as the tenth century, a thousand years after Jesus time on earth. The Gospels would not be written for decades .... St. John's perhaps not until the end of the first century. No, "the Word of God" would have meant something entirely different to Jesus' first-century audience.

As we turn to our Gospel lesson today, Jesus teaches that the condition of our hearts is the master subject. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

His parable this morning is quite obviously "other-speaking." We must discern attentively. His theme is revealed right out of the gate:

One word, spóros or "seed," He repeats in multiple forms focusing our attention:

Get it? And we take His cue, for spóros opens a rich vein in the thought-world of first-century Israel and Judea. Matched to the word lógos which the Lord equates to it (He says, the seed is the word), the notion of a seminal word is broached, the λόγος σπερμάτικος / lógos spermátikos — a phrase on which St. Justin, one of the earliest Church Fathers, devoted considerable attention. The seminal word, he said, signifies the living spark, which separates the insensate stone from the living and breathing and holy motion we call life. It is that lógos, that holy seed, which our Creator God breathed as His Spiritus hovered over the void (Gen 1:2), giving rise to "all things made that were made." It is the holy life He breathed into Adam (Gen 2:7). It is the animating power He breathed upon the Apostles at the incarnation of His Church (Jn 20:22). You recall: "He breathed on them."

Even the casual reader of the Gospels recognizes the concept immediately:

The living spark.

At the conclusion of Jesus' Parable of the Sower and the Seed, He takes His Disciples to one side and reveals its meaning:

These would be shimmering, magical words to them.

Seed and Word are equated. They are identical, a seamless unity.

Another seamless unity comes to mind for us immediately (from St. John's Gospel):

In this, we are given an image of our God Who eternally is sowing His seed. It floats down from Heaven in superabundance. His graces surround us. We see them in the living beauty in His radiant Creation. This is the very stuff of the Kingdom of God. He broadcasts His seed to everyone everywhere and at all times. But will we receive it?

This is, can we say that our hearts are steady and true? Can we say that our minds do not drift from godly things? Can we say that our lives are Heaven-shaped and Heaven-focused? For only such as these can hear and see God. This is the high point of our lesson today:

That is, all will see and hear God .... all .... .... so long as their hearts are good and noble (Lu 8:15). But what exactly is a noble heart?

Jesus takes extreme care to define the ignoble heart for the Disciples. This is the heart that strays "by the wayside." It has wandered from the path that leads to Heaven and is lost in the "wood of error." These are the ones who have given themselves over to licentiousness, separating themselves from God. Small wonder the devil is table to "take away the word from [this] heart," for such people have given their hearts to him and his cheap thrills.

A second kind of ignoble heart has not quite rejected God. After all, their lives are built on rock. But when temptation comes, their minds drift. Daily cares block out Heaven. They become wholly absorbed in worldly occupations. Their days are spent pursuing wealth. They daydream about carnal pleasures. In the end they are no better off than the ones who gave themselves over to sin in the first place.

The Greek phrase underlying "noble heart" is καρδία καλη / kardía kale, which may be defined as "beautiful by reason of purity of heart and life." Have you met these people? They are beautiful by reason of purity of heart and life.

We understand this. For our own lives teach this lesson .... sometimes poignantly. A beautiful heart beats within our the breasts and guides us towards Heaven. Purity, it turns out, is the key to our parable this morning. And perhaps we do not overreach by saying that purity is the key to the Scriptures, for One along is Pure.

Each time the Lord Jesus declares His oft-repeated formula — that hearing they may not understand and that seeing they may not perceive — He invokes Isaiah, in particular as the Prophet ascends into the purest courts of High Heaven. And there He relates the words of God. God says,

For none may hear and see the Divine except those who are pure. Realizing this, Isaiah is terrified:

Alas, most of us are a people of unclean hearts. "Cleanse my heart!" (Ps 51:10), we cry out to God. We live among an unclean people. Standing before God, we are right to say, "Woe is me, for I am undone!" .... to stand before the Most Pure God.

In an allegory of God's making, we cannot receive light from the heavens nor clear signals from outer space midst the fever of this world. You see the correspondence between the contingent world and spiritual truth? Bell Laboratories, which invented radio astronomy, had to leave New York City fleeing its electro-magnetic noise. Astronomers seeking pure images from galaxies far away, have sought out remote islands with high mountain summits, such as ours.

In the spiritual realm, we also must seek God on remote mountain summits, such as the Mount of Transfiguration, or in deserts far from the world, such as the Sinai Wilderness. Wherever God's people meet with God, it is always in a desert or always in a high place. We go there to be cleansed, to be purified, fleeing world's toxic vapors. We go there to be leached of impure images and thoughts which fill our minds and memories. Over time, and through self-control, they fade. Otherwise, woe unto us! For we all must approach the King sooner or later.

The Sower is ever sowing His Seed. Its crystalline purity floats down from Heaven like gentle snowflakes sweeping the trackless snowfields of the Himalayas. Its warm mists nourish the parched and cracked ground of this world's thirst and spiritual hunger. Its unseen graces rain down bestowing God's blessing .... if only we would receive it.

Jesus says, it is the heart which matters. The heart's purity is sacrosanct, for the heart is the Divine organ which sees and hears God.

The true Light descends from Heaven, tragically deflected by the debris that fills our lives. Like the rebuked Disciples, our minds have drifted. We have wandered by the wayside. Our lives are choked with cares and carnal desires.

This is our lesson today: the seed and kernel of Christian life. It has been taught from the beginning, from Apostles such as St. John the Theologian and St. Paul to holy elders in our time such as St. Paisios. Its essence is ever the same:

So simple. The feat of a child. Surely within the reach of every man and woman.

The Sower is sowing His seed. Let us open our hands. Let us turn our clean palms upward towards Heaven. And let us be filled with graces and blessings and welcome into the Kingdom of God.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.