Listening to Jesus
I find these two verses a little perplexing. The parable Jesus has just told is clear enough, the Sower and the Seed, but his comments following raise some questions about what Jesus meant.
The first comment raises a small question. Jesus says to his disciples that the secret to the kingdom of God has been given to them. What's the secret? The answer must be to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the promised Messiah. It's one thing to believe that statement, but the challenge for the original followers of Jesus and for us, is to understand the implications of that truth. If Jesus is who he said he was, how should that affect my life?
The second statement raises a big question. The point of Jesus' quote from Isaiah seems to be that he speaks in parables so that "those on the outside" won't be able to understand and be forgiven. The best spin I can put on this is that Jesus is being descriptive; some people keep on hearing but are never willing to accept and understand the message. If they would, they'd be forgiven. But it could also be read that Jesus spoke in parables "so that" some wouldn't understand, and as we'll see in the rest of the chapter, even the disciples struggled with this.
But the hard sayings of Jesus don't make me doubt his message or the Bible. Rather, they make me wish I could have been there to hear Jesus for myself so he could give me the whole sermon he preached from the boat that day. After all, the text says "he taught them many things in parables...". What we have here is just a small portion of the full message.
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