And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?— St. LUKE viii. 9.
This chapter contains the first parable which St. Luke has reported. That parable may be called in one sense the parable of parables. St. Matthew and St. Mark both put it before the others; both connect it with a special explanation, and with the reason which our Lord gives for teaching by parables generally. Our thoughts are therefore naturally drawn to this subject, and I shall keep it before me throughout this lecture.
It would be a great mistake, however, to overlook the words with which this chapter opens if we wish to understand this method of instruction. ‘And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.’
We have found this message, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand,’ to be the message of the Gospels. It came to the Jews as a message which they expected. It came as a perplexing overthrow of their expectations. They wanted a kingdom in which a Jewish emperor should crush the nations as a Latin emperor did crush them. They were told of a Son of David who was in the midst of them—that Son of David spoke of God as His Father. It was His Father’s kingdom which He said was at hand. Into that the poor in goods and the poor in spirit might enter. It was, no doubt, a kingdom that was to come. The glad tidings pointed to a future for those who were on earth, to a future for those who should leave the earth. But the kingdom was over those to whom our Lord and His disciples preached. They might feel the powers of it. Those powers had come forth to do them good.
The message of such a kingdom, I said, contradicted some expectation which the people of Palestine were cherishing. But it fulfilled a number of expectations. The 107th Psalm, for instance, which must have been continually heard in their synagogues, sets forth the character and acts of the Lord God of Israel. You will remember how it sets forth that character and those acts. ‘The dangers of the man who goes down to the sea in ships, the blight and mildew of the land, the commonest calamities which men bring on themselves by their folly and wilfulness, are recorded as occasions which shew forth the goodness of the Lord, and His wonderful works to the children of men.’ That is the Psalmist’s phrase, children of men. They are human pursuits, human troubles, human wrongdoings, on which he dwells. The purpose and the dominion of the Lord God who had brought their fathers out of the house of bondage is shewn from generation to generation, in breaking asunder the bonds of men generally, of those especially who had transgressed His laws, and so had reduced themselves into misery.
The acts of Christ were manifestations to all who read and understood this Psalm and their other Scriptures, of Him in whom they had believed. If He were revealing Himself as the King of kings and Lord of lords, these ought to be the signs of His kingdom. The more humble the people were who felt the plagues—the more the plagues were the ordinary visitations of the children of men in all countries—the more these plagues were the effects of their own moral evils—the more would they be discoveries of such a kingdom, of such a Heavenly Father, as Christ was proclaiming. I do not care to inquire what the seven demons were which are said to have gone out of Mary Magdalene. Any one who has leisure for such speculations may amuse himself with them. I am content to believe that she was fast bound in misery and iron of some kind; I do not doubt that she had become, in some way, the slave in body and spirit of oppressors whom she could not shake off. I think that those who have felt their own spirits or bodies mastered and enchained by evil inclinations, tempers, habits which they could not overcome, have been right to look upon her as the type of their condition, whether or not they could tell exactly the nature of her tormentors. They have not been deceived in turning to the same Lord whom she and the Galilean women recognised as their friend and helper, to whom they ministered of their substance; not deceived in supposing that the virtue which went forth from Him to deliver Mary Magdalene was only a specimen of what is going forth from Him every day and hour for the relief of human woes.
I have no wish, therefore, to divide those acts which we call miracles, from those words which we call parables. They are as distinct as words must always be from acts. They are illustrations of the same divine dominion. They are parts of the glad tidings of the Kingdom of Heaven.
A writer, to whom I have several times alluded in these Lectures, as the enemy of everything which assumes to be supernatural in our Lord’s history, dwells with much earnestness and beauty on the natural character of His illustrations, upon the contrast between the life in them and the hard dogmatism or the artificial rhetoric of those who call themselves preachers of His Gospel. Such observations are of great worth and should be laid earnestly to heart by us. If the supernatural means that which is unnatural—if it has any the least affinity with school notions and formulas—I am satisfied that it will never retain its hold on living men; elaborate reasonings are not needed to expel it; let in the fresh air upon it and it will drop to pieces like any other corpse. What I believe is, that Nature itself becomes such a corpse, a mere collection of dry bones or atoms, if there is not a breath from heaven, a higher spirit to quicken it. That spirit I find in our Lord’s parables. They are, indeed, most natural. That which is apt to become utterly flat and unmeaning in Nature they renovate by connecting it with the life of man, with the relations of God to man. The familiar things of earth which we have passed over in our search for the strange and rare start into significance, because they are associated with the Kingdom of Heaven. We understand how much we have to do with the world around us, because a light falls upon it from the world above us, and because we are assured of our relation to that. Every fact in nature becomes a fact of humanity, a fact of divinity. We have the solemnest protest from Him whom we believe to be the Creator of both worlds, against any disparagement of either and against any attempt to sunder them. There is a discovery to us of an unfathomable meaning and mystery in their union, a meaning and mystery to which the peasant has as much access as the doctor. The Kingdom of Heaven is shewn to be at hand—to be presenting itself to the spirit of a man as the trees which his fathers planted as the firmament under which he walks present themselves to his eye.
Nowhere is there more of this revelation than in the parable of the sower. ‘What might this be?’ asked the disciples with some impatience. To what does it point? What does it tell us of the heavenly kingdom which Thou art making known to us? Before they had the answer, they surely had learnt something which it much concerned them to know. There might be a mystery beneath the sowing of the seed. But there was a mystery in that. They were dwelling amidst mysteries. Look what the sower in that field is about. What a simple business he is engaged in! Only scattering a few tiny seeds over the ground. How often you have watched him vacantly—how often you have been drawn away from the sight of him by any passing trifle, which seemed worthier of observation because it was extraordinary. But might not you think a little of those seeds; why they are cast there, what is likely to become of them?
What, for instance, will happen to those which have dropped by the wayside? The birds already have got sight of them, in a few moments they will be gone. Will it fare the same with those which have fallen on the soil that is so near the rock? No, there will be a promise in them, the blade will come up quickly. But do not expect anything from it. When the sun is strong it will wither. And what of that which is fallen among briars or weeds? Both will grow up together; the wheat will be choked; there will be no produce. But think again of the process which the seed will have to go through that does spring up and bear fruit. How long will it remain underground. When it appears, how unlike it will be that which was put in. Yet it will be the same. And it will come at the regular season, according to a fixed order. And it will give bread to the eater, fresh seed to the sower for the next year.
Here you have, assuredly, the very reverse of dogmatic teaching. It is emphatically teaching about facts, about common facts, about the facts of the outward world. It awakens the mind of the hearer to observation and reflection. ‘Is this so indeed? Have all these wonders been surrounding me and I knew them not? He has taught me to think of them. To think of them? And what are these thoughts? They have more to do with me than these seeds, though they have so much to do with me, though my whole existence would be so different if there was not this sowing, this growing, this reaping, this turning the corn into bread. Is there any one to command these thoughts? Can I know what the source of them is? Can I know whence I came? who is Lord over me? Can any one tell me that?’ One who has begun to ask these questions has passed from the mysteries of the kingdom of earth to the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. He is puzzled about them. He wants an interpreter of them. This the disciples did. And to them came the answer. ‘To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.’ You, who want to learn what there is in you that answers to these processes in the ground; who is directing these processes: what there is that answers to the seed which is sown in the ground; who is the sower: you can learn, poor men, ignorant fishermen, as you are. But to others who do not care to know this, who are not feeling their need of one to sow and plough the soil which is in them, all these things are in parables. They see the images. They do not see that which the images represent. They hear all the messages which nature is bringing to them, all the thousand voices which are sounding through the world, but they do not understand.
I do not derive this explanation of our Lord’s sentence from the commentators, to whom it has caused extreme perplexity, but from His own answer to the disciples respecting the Parable of the Sower. It was a likeness of the Kingdom of Heaven. Where, then, is this kingdom? ‘The seed is the word of God. Those by the wayside are they that hear; then cometh the devil and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.’ The heart of man then is the kingdom with which we are now occupied. The living powers and influences which act upon that; who is directing the processes which go on in it; these are the facts we require to be instructed in. We are not for a moment left in doubt what are the powers and influences, and who is exercising them. Words are to the man what seeds are to the ground. He whose word bade the earth appear, and bear seed and bring forth fruit, He whose word has been sustaining the life in the earth and in the seed, and has made it fruitful ever since, He by that word is speaking to us. By it He is cultivating the mind and heart of the creatures whom He has formed in His image. And this creature—being formed in His image, having the divine faculty of Will—can reject, can receive that which is sown in it. The word may fall on the unretentive ear, from which the spirit of vanity will catch it quickly away; may be welcomed as mere pleasant or exciting news, not as a reforming principle and power—may soon therefore be thrown off through weariness, or cowardice, or disgust; may mix with the myriad cares which distract or with the pleasures which enervate the spirit, and be stifled by them; may penetrate into a will which has been prepared and purified for its entertainment, and so may appear at the appointed season in noble thoughts and deeds.
These verses have given occasion to a multitude of discourses. Preachers have delighted to dwell on the wayside hearers, and the hearers who listen for awhile and then fall away, and the hearers who are bewildered by the troubles and delights of earth, and the hearers who shew tokens of a heavenly culture. So they explain their own ill or good success. Often, no doubt, their explanations call forth a witness and response in those to whom they are offered. Yet I wish we had adhered more closely to our Lord’s explanation. I wish we had supposed the seed to be the Word of God, not the words which fall from our lips. There may be other causes besides the neglect, or shallowness, or occupation of our hearers which make them unproductive. We need to ask ourselves carefully what causes; whether there are no waysides, no stones, no thorns in our hearts which have destroyed their force in their passage through us to other men. The warning which our Lord gives applies at least as much to us as to you. His seeds may fall into your hearts through our ministry. But the Word who gives us power to hear, to think, to speak, is never far from any of us. If we darken His counsel, He will speak to you, and to us also, out of the whirlwind, or by that still small voice which makes its way to the heart when He is not felt to be in the whirlwind. It is of this Sower, of the Son of Man, of the eternal Word of God, that the parable bears witness. Woe to us if we contract and enfeeble it by our self-conceit. The message may come through any human voice; through the parent, the wife, the child. It may rise out of the tombs from those who loved us, or from those whom we have wronged. It may reach us through the letters of a book, or through music, or through a picture. It may be brought to us by the glory of a sunset, or the darkness of a night. It may come by fervent expectations or by bitter disappointments, by calm joy or by intense anguish of body or soul. But the source is ever the same living Word of God. Every word that enters any man’s heart is from Him. Every word that does not lie dead in a man’s heart derives its quickening energy from Him.
And what if it does lie in vain? That question is suggested by the parable. Perhaps it is the one which comes most home to us. Often we stammer in answering it. We say, and say truly, that the grace of God is directed to the will of man; that it comes with no force like that which might move a stone; that it can, therefore, be resisted. Such assertions are confirmed by our own experience, and the experience of all men. The parable obliges us to consider them. It obliges us to say, ‘The fault is not in the sower, or in the seed, but in the soil.’ If that were all, would not the conclusion be a despairing one? Who is to rectify the soil? The soil; what soil? Do we not find in our own hearts all the obstructions which we denounce in the most indifferent, the most unbelieving? If so, we must ask, for our own sakes, ‘Was it not promised of the Son of Man, that He should baptise with the Spirit? Does He merely sow the seed? Does He not also fit the ground to receive it, to entertain it, to return it, not as it was taken in, but in the richness and pregnancy which it owes to the divine rain and sunshine?’ Are we then to despair because Christ’s word has been ever so much checked by that which it has met with in us? Is it not part of the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven, that the word shall accomplish at last that for which it is sent; that if our wills be ever so untractable, there are resources in the divine Will by which it can subdue them to itself?
That lesson I derive from the words which follow in obvious connection with the parable. ‘No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.’ I give these sentences the most awful meaning that has ever been given them. I believe them to say, that thoughts of good or evil will not lie for ever in the recesses of the heart; that they will come forth in acts which men will bless or curse. And therefore the admonition in the next verse is a searching one. ‘Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have. But we do not weaken this warning if we suppose our Lord to say, ’God Himself has kindled a light within you. He wishes it to shine forth upon your fellows. His light can overcome the darkness which is opposed to it. Whilst, therefore, you are most careful to cherish all seeds of good—most afraid lest you should lose all that have been planted in you if you do not cultivate them—have confidence that His purpose will not be frustrated. Ask that, by the means which may seem to Him best, it may be brought to effect in you and in all men.’
It is, therefore, the might of the Divine Word as a living and a life-giving power which is the subject of the parable. The sense of that might in the Evangelist’s mind led him, I conceive, to introduce in this place the story of Christ’s answer to His mother and brethren. ‘And it was told him by certain which said, Thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to see thee. And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.’ This is a striking, even a startling, sentence. Like that spoken by our Lord in the Temple in His twelfth year, it appears as if it were inserted to warn the ages to come against any theories or any acts of devotion which should put the earthly mother between the Son of God and the Eternal Father, between the Son of Man and those whose nature He had taken. ’We cannot explain the harshness of the language till we discover the permanent necessity of it. If we would assert the incarnation—not as a tenet merely, but as a fact and as a principle, Christ must teach us how to think of His mother and of those who do His word.
I have spoken so recently of the signs of the Kingdom of Heaven, that I have no excuse for dwelling on the passage which follows. Still, I would have you read it carefully, and meditate upon it, as a living illustration of the calm dominion of the Son of Man over nature, and of His appeal to the faith of those who are in peril by sea or land. It commends itself to every sailor now, as much as to the disciples on the lake of Gennesareth. ‘Now it came to pass on a certain day, that he went into a ship with his disciples; and he said unto them, Let us go over unto the other side of the lake. And they launched forth. But as they sailed he fell asleep: and there came down a storm of wind on the lake; and they were filled with water, and were in jeopardy. And they came to him, and awoke him, saying, Master, master, we perish. Then he arose, and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water: and they ceased, and there was a calm. And he said unto them, Where is your faith? And they being afraid wondered, saying one to another, What manner of man is this! for he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him.’
The story of the demoniac and his exorcism bears similar witness to the King and Deliverer of the human spirit. On that subject, also, I have said all that I need to say. You will see how poorly and deeply I said it, and what the simplicity and grandeur of the testimony of the Evangelist is, if you will study the verses from the 26th to the 41st. Do they not tell of Him who preserves the sanity of the sane, no less than of Him who rescues those who have fallen into madness and despair?
The stories of the daughter of Jairus, and of the woman who had spent all her living on the physicians, neither could be healed of any, are intertwined. You cannot feel either to be a repetition of any you have heard before; each has its own incidents, its own scenery. For they are not artificial proofs of a mission; they are manifestations of a life, they are the acts of a Life-giver. Each sick woman finds herself in the poor creature who sought to touch the hem of Christ’s garment. Every parent enters into the impatience of the ruler of the synagogue as the crowd stops the way to the bed on which the child is dying, hears the noise and the scoffs of the minstrels, wonders at the words, ‘Maid, I say unto thee, arise.’ That effect proceeds from no art in the writer. It is the witness of the human spirit that sickness and death cannot be the lords of us or of our children. There must be a mightier than they.
I do not think that these stories tempt us to forget our main subject. They rather lead us to feel how all events are parables of the Kingdom of Heaven. When we one day give thanks for a birth, when another day we are present at a marriage feast, when on the third we stand beside a grave, the thought arises in our minds, ‘What a parable is this human existence; what can it mean?’ He who was born, and went to the marriage feast, and died and rose again, has interpreted it. Birth is sacred, for the child has come into His world; marriage is sacred, for He unites hands and hearts; death is sacred, for them that sleep in Jesus shall God bring with Him.