Jesus calls this teaching from Matthew 13 a parable. It isn’t, really. It’s a teaching for sure. But its not telling a story through allusion. He’s just comparing things.
And, let’s be honest, the teaching would be way more impactful if he didn’t follow it up with a key for understanding it. It was pretty clear on its own.
Nobody reads this passage and goes, I’m not sure what this has to do with us.
This passage is straight-forward. Extremely so. Which also may be how we can miss its potential depth.
It operates from scarcity
Jesus lists all the different kinds of soil that don’t work. Then he turns around and speaks to the one kind of soil that does. This intentionally communicates scarcity and preciousness. Regardless of how relative that response might be.
If I list all the different ways a 10 year-old basketball player will fail at his goal to making it in the NBA, we’d all go, Of course! Because we don’t even need to know what they are to know that, statistically, it isn’t going to happen.
Now if I list all the things that could go wrong with an airplane on a flight from Minneapolis to Memphis, we start to freak out a little, right? Even when we know just how safe air travel is.
An even better example of how distorted our common view can get is in dealing with violent crime. Hearing one story in the news can make us petrified. Even as we in the U.S. are experiencing historic lows.
We experience scarcity, not as relative to our literal experience, but to the nature of our rhetoric.
Our sense of scarcity is driven by story
A story about the impossibility of being a professional athlete is one of our most common stories.
Which is why I don’t need to give you any evidence. Even the statistic: that fewer than 1% of high school basketball players play in college and fewer than 1% of college players get drafted: merely confirms the impossibility we already know.
Similarly, the familiarity with the safety of air travel has made it so common. And we recognize our fear of it as being somewhat absurd. Even in light of listing potential problems.
And the story we tell each other about crime being high in spite of the counter evidence becomes even greater evidence for the power of story over objectivity. We can be easily pushed into fear by the way people communicate with us.
I doubt Jesus intends to make us afraid
But his rhetorical strategy does activate our fear mechanism. He doesn’t actually tell us that nobody’s the good soil. He doesn’t say its rare or that we’ve got to pinch our pennies to be able to afford it.
His rhetoric, however, leads our minds to think exactly that.
Perhaps it is another example of urgency, which is a major theme in Matthew’s gospel. Or perhaps Jesus hopes we’ll take him seriously if he lays out all the challenges. Though neither is a universally satisfying response.
We are taught to question our own thinking.
I’m not trying to get into the mind of Jesus on this one. And neither should you. Naming the impact of the form Jesus took in this teaching is not really an opportunity to critique Jesus’s teaching. It’s showing how our minds naturally respond to rhetoric like this.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, right.
In this, we get a solid sense of what not to do, which helps us get a better sense of what to do.
We may also inherit from it a sense that wrongdoing is more common. As if only 16-20% of people are suitable. Even when the text doesn’t say this. That distortion piggybacks into our minds like a contagion.
Jesus doesn’t say how abundant or scarce any soil is.
But knowing how many different ways we can screw up has a distorting effect on everyone’s sense of success.