The Seed Is His Teaching

I don’t know that I can answer Bo’s question from Sunday, regarding which of Jesus’ parables most fits my life, but I can say that I consistently struggle with the imagery he uses in the stories.  I don’t understand the context.  But I accept the challenge to be invested enough in the story to try and figure it out.  This is helping me today.

Devotion, service, and contemplation remain viable ways to transform yourself, yet even the most devout Christians fall into the trap of believing that they don’t have to transform themselves inwardly, that performing enough acts of devotion (attending church, praying, giving to the poor, and the like) will suffice or that doing charitable work among the poor and sick, or thinking about God as often as possible, will be sufficient.  Jesus warns us against this trap when he speaks, in parable form, about seed that falls on waste ground and doesn’t sprout.  The seed is his teaching; the waste ground is a mind unprepared to receive the truth.

What Jesus doesn’t elaborate upon is how waste ground can be made fertile.  He says only that some people receive a bit of the truth, some a great deal, and some none at all.  Let’s assume that you and I can absorb some of the truth, rather than all, or none.  In this regard, we fit into the category of Jesus’s disciples.  We are neither hopeless nor fully realized in God.  We turn to Jesus because he understands the territory of the unknown, the source not only of a messiah but of the soul itself.

- Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, p. 45-46.