Friday July 28, 2017
Scholars agree that this explanation (of the parable of the sower) comes mainly from the primitive Church rather than from Jesus himself. Jesus’s parables needed no explanation; sometimes the Pharisees seethed with rage as they listened to him, because they knew too well what he was talking about! But as situations changed and the gospel was taken further abroad, explanations began to be needed. Much of our preaching and practice today is explanation. It is well to remember that the word means ‘flattening out’; it comes from the Latin planus, flat. But life itself is at least three-dimensional! Explanation is always a second-hand thing. It reduces the original in some drastic way. Quite often, in our attempts to make the Faith more comprehensible, we use a language that has nothing to do with the original experience of faith. We use the language of politics (“O God, who rule over all...”) or economics (building up a spiritual bank account), or insurance policies...or even mechanics. We need to recover the language of religious experience. But first (or concomitantly) we need to recover religious experience itself.