Matthew 13 (part 2)

 I already did a blog post about Matthew 13, but this week we covered that chapter in Come Follow Me and I wanted to record a couple of additional insights I gained this week. 

One podcaster (I think Mike and Bryce on Talking Scripture) mentioned that the parable of the sower should be called the parable of the soils. The sower and the seed is the same in each instance.  The thing that is different is the quality of the soil.  I just wanted to point out here that "people as soil" is not a new idea.  It is an image that has been around since the very beginning of the Bible.  If you remember from my post about Genesis  Adam's name comes from the Hebrew word for tilled earth.  When Adam disobeys God and partakes of the forbidden fruit, God says to him, "for dust through art, and unto dust shalt thou return."  In other words, when Adam is not obedient, he is unproductive soil.  That is basically what Jesus is saying here, except in more detail.  I think contemporary listeners would have made the connection, even if Jesus was speaking Aramaic, because they would have been used to associating Adam with the earth. 

Another podcaster (I think it was the Follow Him podcast) mentioned how almost all the parables in this chapter portray the growth of the Kingdom of God in hyperbolic terms. For a seed to bring forth 30 fold is a good yield, and 100 fold is almost impossible. The mustard seed parable is about something small growing into something great. The merchant sells ALL he has to buy the pearl of great price, and the other man sells ALL he has to buy the field with the treasure. When I was reading the passage about the leaven hidden in three measures of flour (Matt 13:33) my dictionary said that the word that is translated "measure" σάτα equals about three gallons. At first I thought that was one gallon each, but it is three gallons each or about 9 gallons. That's a lot of loaves. 

So why such exaggeration?  Maybe it was just the style of storytelling that was common in that culture in that time period. Other parables have this kind of exaggeration, e.g. the mote and and the beam, the 1000 talents of debt. etc. Another possibility is that Jesus knew that from this small group of believers a religion would start that would spread to all the quarters of the earth, and last through millennia. How many Christians have lived on the earth? This was one conversation on one hillside in a small country in the middle east, and here we are blogging about 2000 years later. Whatever "exaggerations" he may of made about the growth of the "kingdom of heaven" they were gross underestimates.

I spent so much time listening to and thinking about parables about wheat, tares, leaven and bread this week that I got up early and made bread to take to my primary class.