TRANSLATION MATTHEW 13: 10

Then his pupils came to him and said, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”

He answered, “You have been given knowledge of the secrets of the Rule of Heaven, but they have not. For whoever has something will be given more, and it will be super-abundant. But whoever has nothing, even what he does have will be snatched away.

This is why I speak to them in parables, that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may neither hear nor understand, so that in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled:

With your ears you will listen but you will not understand

With your eyes you will see but you will not discern

For the heart of this people is bloated

and they listen with dull ears

They have shut their eyes

so that they may not perceive with their eyes

nor hear with their ears

nor understand with their hearts

and turn, and I would heal them.

But your eyes are blessed so that they see, and your ears are blessed so that they hear. Amen, I tell you, that many prophets and just people yearned to see what you see, but they did not, and hear what you hear, but they did not hear it.

So listen to the parable of the sower:

The one who hears the message of the Rule and does not understand it and the Evil One comes and grabs what was sown in his heart, this is the seed sown along the path.

The seed sown in stony ground is the one who hears the message and immediately receives it with joy; but he does not keep a root within himself, for it is temporary. So when affliction or persecution comes upon him because of the message, immediately he is tripped up.

The seed that is sown amongst briers is the one who hears the message; and the anxieties of this world and the deceptions of wealth throttle the message, so that its life is fruitless.

But the seed sown on good ground, these are people who hear the message and understand it, and bear fruit, this one yielding a hundredfold, this one sixty and this one thirty.

This passage is not easy.

1. Matthew thinks that the parables were hard to understand and endeavours to explain why Jesus used them for the crowd. If, as seems likely to us, Jesus told the parables as a popular mode of preaching which would suit his audience, then Matthew’s view may seem simply wrong to us. Maybe however, he has caught a feature of the parables which we can miss: understanding them involves a readiness to trust Jesus and his ministry.

2. Matthew identifies misunderstanding of parables with a more general refusal of the message of God’s Rule, which in turn he identifies with the refusal of people in the past to listen to Isaiah. He quotes Isaiah’s ironical words which say that his preaching is done SO THAT people will refuse to understand it. The truth of the message shuts peoples’ ears. In a post -truth world, we can understand this bitter fact.

3. Matthew then quotes an interpretation of the parable of the sower, which turns it into a parable of the soils. This explanation however makes it a parable about the refusal to receive Jesus’ message. preaching the truth means that of course some will fail to understand or hold the message. But some will do so, and they are the ones who count. The pupils who have been given the secret (the truth only available to insiders) of the Rule of Heaven) they are the fortunate possessors of the reality that the prophets hoped for.

Matthew in his gospel struggles with the question: “If, as you say, Jesus is the true Messiah, why did his people reject him?”