“Then the disciples came up and asked him, ‘Why are you speaking to them in parables?’ He answered, ‘Because the secrets of the kingdom of heaven have been given for you to know, but it has not been given to them. For whoever has, more will be given to him, and he will have more than enough; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. That is why I speak to them in parables, because looking they do not see, and hearing they do not listen or understand.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the arguments of the original postmodernists was that a literary text had no fixed meaning. Rather, the meaning of a certain text was whatever the reader wanted it to mean. In other words, everything was interpretation and no interpretation was incorrect. Everything was dependent on the perspective and experience of the individual. Of course, none of those guys seemed to have appreciated the irony of arguing that nothing could really be understood in one way while wanting to be understood a certain way, but we’ll leave that alone for now. Today, I want to look at something Jesus said about how and whether people were understanding Him. He acknowledged many folks might not, but His reasons were not postmodern. Let’s talk about it.

This post will be a little different than our normal Friday fare. I’m not doing any kind of a media review today. Instead, I want to spend just a few minutes thinking through something Jesus said that has been on my mind lately. In Matthew 13, the apostle groups several different parables from Jesus into one setting because of their thematic relevance to one another. The first part of the chapter flows fairly smoothly from the events of chapter 12, but after about v. 23, the rest of the chapter doesn’t flow so chronologically consistently as the first part.

The chapter opens with Jesus’ getting out of a little town along the shores of the Sea of Galilee because things were getting pretty tense there. He was likely hoping for a bit of a respite, but the crowds, ever eager for more miracles and intriguing teachings, followed Him like they always did. And, because Jesus had such a soft spot for the crowds, He obliged them and started teaching them about the kingdom of God.

The first thing Matthew includes in this teaching block is a parable about sharing the Gospel, and how it might be received by various audiences. After Jesus finishes the parable, when they had Him to themselves, the disciples asked not only about the parable which even they hadn’t understood very well, but also about why Jesus used parables as one of His primary teaching vehicles in the first place. Why use a method of teaching that most people seemed not to understand instead of speaking plainly?

Jesus’ answer is really interesting…and really hard. He basically says that He uses parables so that the people who really aren’t interested in what He has to say won’t understand Him. Their very lack of understanding turns out to be a judgment from God for their hard-heartedness. They don’t really want to understand, and so God lets them run off down that path where their lack of understanding grows even deeper. For those who do genuinely want to understand what Jesus has to say and to follow Him, they will be given the ability not only to do so themselves, but also to help others understand as well.

I’ll be honest: I struggled a bit with this idea when I encountered it fresh recently while studying through this chapter. Why would Jesus not want everyone to understand everything He had to say? Wasn’t the whole purpose of His coming to open the doors to a relationship with God to everyone? Yes and no. Let me see if I can explain.

Several years ago I saw the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt. It’s a great movie about how former Oakland A’s manager, Billy Bean, took a unique and revolutionary approach to baseball and took a team that was a perennial failure on one of the most magical rides any team has ever experienced. Earlier this year I tried reading the book on which the movie was based. Maybe it gets better after the point I stopped reading, but up to that point it was not nearly as exciting as the movie. It was a whole lot of insider baseball. I like baseball, but it was going into numbers and strategies that were making even my eyes go cross. Basically, it was giving the long form version of the background information the movie conveyed over the course of a 3-4 minute voiceover sequence.

When you go to a baseball game, it’s fairly easy to get a sense of what’s going on. A careful observer won’t even take very long to figure it out. One team hits while the other team fields. If the ball gets to the base before you do, you’re out. If someone hits it over the outfield wall, that’s a good thing for the hitting team. If you make it to the seventh inning, everybody gets up and sings God Bless America and Take Me Out to the Ballgame while sloshing around their beers. Oh, and if you happen to get caught on the kiss cam on the jumbotron, make sure you’re sitting next to someone you don’t mind smooching. If the weather’s good (and if the home team wins) the whole experience can be delightfully pleasant.

If you were to go down into the dugout, though, there’s a whole other game taking place. Especially nowadays. This is even more true if you were to go up into the press boxes and find the office where the stat guys are holed up keeping track of who’s doing what and conveying that information to one of the coaches so they can make the best, most well-informed game time decisions. They keep track of all the stats today. All of them. If you can dream up a stat that could possibly be recorded, they are already tracking it carefully. They know that if the pitcher throws a certain type of pitch to a certain part of the plate, he’s all but guaranteed to strike out any individual batter. They know which guys are the most likely to get on base against which pitcher from the other team. They know which runners need to be on base in a given situation and how far off a lead they need to take. They know what count with which catcher will be the best time to try to steal second.

They don’t just know all of this, they understand it. Those guys have committed their lives to understanding it. They know the answers to questions the average fan doesn’t even know to ask. They have debates that would seem like so much nonsense to someone sitting with their school group in the upper deck. They are staking out firm positions on things that seem totally irrelevant to a person sitting at home on the couch and watching while piddling on his phone. They process the whole game at a level the casual observer really can’t even imagine…and probably doesn’t want to. In fact, if one of these guys were to start trying to tell you about what baseball is really like once you have broken into the inside, it might lead you to consider throwing up your hands and giving up on the game altogether. But you can’t see what they can see. You can’t see just how much fun it really can be once you do the work to put yourself on that side of the line.

Make the connection here with me. The basic Gospel message is something anybody can understand. You are a sinner just like everyone else in the world. This keeps you separated from God. The good news, though, is that God loved you so much that He was willing to send His Son to pay the price your sins demanded in your place such that if you are willing to put your trust in Him, a gift demonstrated by your willingness to pursue doing life His way instead of yours, you can enjoy eternal life in God’s kingdom. Now, you may not agree with any of that, but the idea that someone screwed up, someone else paid the price for their screw up on their behalf, and now the first person can live as if the screw up never happened is at least an understandable message. Even a young child can grasp that.

But once you get into the Gospel and start to explore the teachings of Jesus, there’s more. A lot more. And there are disagreements. Vigorous ones in fact. But for the most part all of these disagreements take place within the framework of the basic Gospel message. Occasionally someone who has staked out a really firm position on one matter or another will forget that, but for the most part and in spite of a few high profile counter examples, most of these debates happen within that larger framework. These are debates, though, that someone on the outside looking in won’t really be able to understand. How could they? They haven’t spent their life studying these things such that they don’t have the knowledge base to make sense out of them. And, if they haven’t accepted the basic message, debates about the best way to live in light of that message and of how to get it exactly right will seem like so much nonsense to them anyway. How could they not. As Paul said, “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.” A big part of the Christian worldview is insider baseball. If you’re not on the inside, you won’t understand it.

That brings us back to what Jesus was saying here and the reason He spoke in parables. Jesus’ parables functioned as a kind of entrance exam for those who were genuinely interested in following Him. Jesus had plenty of folks who were listening to Him, but who weren’t in the least bit interested in following Him. They were listening to be able to find reasons to reject Him. They were trying to take His words and twist them around to present them in the worst possible light so that they could justify doing whatever they could to shut Him down. Because of this, Jesus spoke in parables.

Parables are open to interpretation. And if you spend much time looking, you’ll find lots of them. For folks who aren’t really interested in following Jesus, they’ll probably find reasons to reject Him in His parables. These reasons might be connected to something actually in a parable, or they might just come from the fact that the parables are sometimes hard to understand. They take work to be able to grasp fully as they were intended. And not everybody wants to do this kind of work. But kind of like if you stop using a particular skill for a while it gets rusty to the point that you can lose it almost entirely, if you stop (or never start) engaging from the standpoint of genuine interest and faith, eventually the whole thing will start to seem like nonsense. The more you lean into that feeling, the stronger it will become. Ultimately, this lack of understanding takes the form of a kind of judgment. It is a judgment for the sin of unbelief.

For those who are interested, though, the parables will help them see what really is true about the kingdom of God. They’ll help them see why life in the kingdom of God just may actually be better than life in this world. They’ll learn the character of God and why He is so worthy of their time and attention. They’ll learn all of this for themselves, but it won’t be just for themselves. They’ll soon find they have more than enough such that they can share some of what they’ve learned with others who are a little ways behind them in their own journeys of faith. They’ll be able to share things that helped them move forward in such a way that these other folks will be able to move forward some as well. The whole kingdom starts to grow like this in incredible ways.

Okay, but what about the folks who are stuck in a cycle of unbelief? Is there no hope for them? Not at all! Or, as Paul might have said, mey gnoito, which is translated in all sorts of ways to avoid acknowledging that a more literal translation is no prefixed by your favorite and strongest explicative. So, in Paul’s words, *#@$ no! There’s always hope. Remember what Jesus said here. For those who have, more will be given. When someone reaches the point where they decide they really do want to understand what Jesus was talking about and who He was, they’ll get the help they need. How do we know when someone really and sincerely reaches this point? We don’t, but God does. Not a few folks, especially those who have grown up in a Christian environment but who never actually embraced the Gospel, have struggled with the thought of drifting away from the only community they had ever known for another that was more in line with their more honest worldview framework. They’ve expressed a desire to know and understand the Scriptures more fully so their faith didn’t waver, but they didn’t really mean it. Their fear was not misunderstanding Jesus, but of losing their community. They feared transition, not judgment. What they really wanted was to keep on in the worldview direction they were heading without giving up their community. If you adopt a different worldview than your community for some reason, you’re probably not going to be a part of that community for long. That could be their fault, it could be your fault, or it could be nobody’s fault, but it’ll still happen more likely than not. We tend to group ourselves with people who think like us.

But when someone reaches a point at which they do want to know more, God will meet them there and help them understand it. That help may come in the form of direct, supernatural revelation in a way they really can’t explain to anyone else. But it is more likely to come by giving them some inroads in a good community of faith – a church community – where they can find help from the believers who are already on the inside and who can help explain things in such a way that they can grasp them first at an elementary level, and then on upward from there.

So, if you are someone who is struggling to understand what Jesus said and why He said it, ask the hard question: Do you really want to understand? Do you want to understand so you can adjust your life accordingly and follow Him faithfully, or do you just want some information out of curiosity? Is your motivation to follow or reject? Be honest. Now be really honest. After all, we can deceive ourselves more easily than we can deceive anyone else. If you want to understand, help will come your way. You just have to be willing to receive it when it does. God will absolutely receive gladly all those who want to follow Him. But He won’t force anybody to that place. And for those who consciously reject it, He’ll let them and will let that rejection become its own judgment. Make your choice. The time available for choosing won’t last forever.