Mark 4: 1-34
Growing up, school was certainly not my favorite thing.
It could have been due to test anxiety, a lack of effort on my part, a poor educational system, who knows?
But I did not like school.
My weakest areas of study were always areas that dealt with precise answers.
I didn’t mind doing arithmetic on scratch paper, but boy, did I hate coming up with the exact answer.
What I always enjoyed was questions, not answers.
I always tried to stretch the bounds of acceptable questioning.
One day one teacher asked me quite directly; “Mr Huffman, you know how they say there is no such thing as a dumb question?”
“Yes sir,” I replied.
“Well son,” he informed me, “that there is a prime example of a dumb question and you have just disproven that statement. Don’t ask anymore questions”
It wasn’t until my own promotion to Sergeant in the Marine Corps that I realized the frustration of those who ask questions.
There is even a mantra in the military meant to address those who ask questions, “Ours is not to question why, ours is to do or die!”
Today we pass judgment on answers, almost exclusively.
In fact there is no longer any time to mull over a question.
Today we just “Google it” so to speak.
Our endless quest for answers has become so convenient, readily available at a moments notice, right at our fingertips, in our pockets wherever we go,
that the noun Google has now become a verb.
What is most disturbing about this trend is that we are so dead set on having the answers that we don’t even seem to care about the validity of the answer we receive anymore.
It doesn’t necessarily matter if the answer is valid, as long as an answer is given.
This is the dilemma that Jesus is facing in our reading from Mark today.
Jesus presents a parable, a parable with a little farming advice which prompts the less than ideal response,
"What is that supposed to mean?"
At this point in Jesus’ ministry he has shown his authority, and his reputation as a great teacher and leader is preceding him.
It is why he is preaching to a full house -a packed hillside.
This hill in Galilee looks like a natural amphitheater to this day.
A great location to carry out a sermon or a lecture.
And Jesus finds himself preaching from a fishing boat due to the tremendous size of the crowd that has gathered.
Everyone knows that he has all these teachings to share and the people want answers;
answers to questions about faith, life, the future, death, hope.
But instead they get a teacher that reads more like a fortune cookie.
Jesus turns out less like the “how to be successful” lecturer everyone is anticipating from this new teacher, and more like one of those Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercials that constantly leave us scratching our heads wondering out loud, “What was THAT!”
And that is the exact reaction I imagine the disciples have when they finally get him alone in verse 10.
Just imagine, you have dropped EVERYTHING to follow and assist a teacher who is supposed to change everything, and all he can do is speak to those who seek him out through stories that lead to nothing but more questions?
Let us be honest, speaking in riddles is a great parlor trick, but outside a few stand up comedy bits, academia, and “that guy” hanging out in the corner at a party, who wants a teacher that only causes us to ask more questions?
To make it even more frustrating, Jesus is pretty candid about what he has done, and he is very intentional about it.
“To you has been given the secret -the mystery- of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables”
Imagine the looks on the faces of the disciples when he basically asks them “What, you guys get it, don’t you?”
AWKWARD!
The disciples are the insiders, they are supposed to be the ones who get it, they are supposed to understand exactly what it is.
It is a mystery, it is abstract, it is subjective, it is complete uncertainty.
~
In one of Matt Damon’s earliest performances, he plays Will Hunting, a brilliant savant who is working as a janitor at Harvard.
In one of my favorite scenes he takes his friend Chuckie, played by Ben Affleck, to a “Hahvahd Bah.”
Chuckie decides to talk to a girl at the bar, and a student named Clark attempts to humiliate him by proving he is definitely not a student at Harvard and that he is stupid.
Chuckie, after being confronted by Clark asks,
“All right, are we gonna have a problem?” hoping that it will digress into a physical altercation.
Clark responds, “There’s no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities, especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capitalist and…"
Then Will steps in interrupting Clark claiming,
“Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished with some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, then you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization."
Clark shocked by Will but unwilling to back down responds,
“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of-"
but Will cuts Clark off again finishing his sentence for him,
..."Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers. "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us or you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing? You come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend- you pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some girls? Embarrass my friend?”
“See, the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin' some thinkin' on your own, and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda' gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.”
To which Clark retorts,
“Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.”
And the final rebuttal from Will sums it all up for us,
“Yeah, maybe. But at least I won't be unoriginal.”
~
Right there, sisters and brothers is the Word we are grounded in.
Jesus the Christ, the Word made flesh is not just some textbook of answers to be regurgitated.
These parables, these stories, they are not the solutions, the answers to some arithmetic, or riddle of life.
They are the seeds that the Christ scatters far and wide in the world, in the lives of all people.
Interestingly, this parable should strike us as wasteful.
I’m not sure how many of you garden, but you certainly don’t need to make sure that the Home and Gardening network is in your cable package to know that throwing seeds randomly across the ground is not a modern farming technique.
But in Jesus’ time, and in the Palestinian culture of his day, it was.
One would scatter the seed, while another would follow behind the sower tilling the seed into the soil.
Herein lies the beauty of the word.
We are called to mull the word over and over in our heads, in our hearts, tilling the Word deeper and deeper into the soil of our lives.
Not only will this process cause more questions to arise but it will still leave others unanswered or perhaps even multiply those questions of our own lives.
Jesus assures the crowd that if they till that seed deeply into good soil it will yield, thirty, sixty, and even a hundredfold yield.
Sisters and brothers, the yield we harvest is not a harvest of answers but deeper questions that draw us closer to God and closer to one another in faith and love.
Jesus’ intention is to spark debate, thoughtful consideration, a deeper understanding of something that no human being can fully know - God.
The goal of a question is reflection, and the reflections we find in the parables make us less certain about the certainty we place in ourselves and more certain about the certainty that is God.
In a sermon, Paul Tillich once described this uncertainty claiming that in it, “We realize that in our uncertainty there is one fixed point of certainty.”
The parables unlock the doors in our own lives that would otherwise remain locked, they hold the certainty of the key that unlocks the uncertainty that we otherwise would never have the courage to explore.
~
Last Sunday, I was invited by a good friend of mine -Imad Damaj- to take part in a gathering called “Standing Together” in Richmond, organized by the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities.
Over six hundred people attended the event to discuss varying faith traditions and religions, seeking a way to better understand how we can relate to one another, accept each other, and live peaceably as a community here in Virginia.
This is an issue that I have inadvertently stumbled on over the past four years, because of my time in the Middle-East and my experiences.
It is an issue that has only become more heated over the past few months.
And while I have my own opinions on these political hot button topics, the issue at hand in our Gospel reading today is not who is right and who is wrong.
Any faith that claims to have clearly defined answers to all our questions digresses towards a dangerous sense of fanaticism.
Because faith is not a matter of answers; faith is a matter of questions.
It is the seeds of those questions that Jesus seeks to plant, the seeds that the Christ invites us to till into our hearts and minds.
Any faith, at its best, is not a matter of answers.
Faith, at its best, guides us to ask ourselves the right questions, the ones that lead us down an endless maze that will eventually lead us back to who we are truly called to be.
The question of faith is not a comfortable place to be. It wasn’t for the crowd listening to Jesus in the Gospel for today. It wasn’t for the disciples, and it certainly wasn’t for those on the outside, as Jesus called them.
Because those on the outside,
those whose seed is eaten up by the birds,
those whose seed fell on shallow and rocky soil,
and those whose seed fell among the thorns,
they were meant to hear these parables and they too had a role to play.
Because they would be the first to lead the charge against Christ.
They would be the first to seek his crucifixion, and he knew this very well.
They would seek his death because he dared to tell the parables, ask the questions, and send them on the journey that none of us wants to take.
But that is why Jesus the Christ, the Word among us, came, and dared to lead us to the questions that no one else would ever dare ask.
That sisters and brothers, is why he dared, and that is how our curiosity killed the Christ.
Praise be to God for the Christ who dared to make us ask.
Amen
Sources
Amazon. "Watch Good Will Hunting () Online - Amazon Video." March 30, 2000. Accessed January 17, 2016. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Will-Hunting-Ben-Affleck/dp/B006RXQA5I/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1453039011&sr=1-1&keywords=good+will+hunting.
Tillich, Paul and Mary Ann Stenger. The New Being. United States: University of nebraska press, 2005.
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