NOTES for Luk 8:16-18

We can have quite varied relationships with the Word of God, but in today's Gospel reading the Lord singles out only two main points. First, there is attention, the readiness to listen to the Word. God speaks quietly, and in order to hear Him, one needs outward and inward silence and the desire to hear Him. And second, Christ speaks about putting the Word into practice. "Take care how you hear," and in explaining this, the Lord calls the one who hears and acts on it the one who "has." Such a person understands God's Word, and it fills him with life; it itself becomes his life. But the one who does not hear, and especially does not put the Word into practice, that is, listens in vain, loses even the very ability to hear.

In essence, the only One who truly hears the Heavenly Father and fulfills His will is the Lord Jesus Himself. Therefore those people who follow Him on the path of hearing and fulfilling the Word of God become close to Him; they become His family. And this kinship of ours with the Lord Jesus is no less strong than the bonds of blood kinship that connect people. That is why the Lord says that those who hear and fulfill the Word are honored with the name of His brothers and His Mother. And for all of us it is exceptionally important that Jesus' family, His Church, is gathered by Him not according to signs of bodily kinship, but according to obedience to the Father. That is why His Mother became the Virgin of Nazareth, who said: "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord." This is precisely how all of us enter His Church, though we are so far from His people.

More precisely, "even what he thinks he has." Jesus by no means has in mind something like the saying "money goes to money." He is speaking of relations with God to which we are not accustomed: relations of trust and respect (in the end, of love). God offers His relationship to everyone, but He forces it on no one. A person who freely accepts this gift enters an unending process of developing this relationship, whose goal is the deification of the person, the fullness of that person's entry into the life of God. But a person who thinks that everything is fine with him, that the relationship with God he thinks he has is enough for him, by that very fact closes himself off from God and does not accept from Him what God gives; and that means he breaks even the weak threads that had still kept him afloat in this life. "Take care, then, how you hear"; tune your "receivers" to the wavelength of God's grace.

"He answered them, My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it." Today we read the Lord's words, which speak of the love between mother and child as something that leads beyond earthly feelings and becomes for us a kind of bridge to the knowledge of God's love. The parallels are close, even to the point that these words, like the words from the book of Sirach, cut and grate on the ear if they are read not prayerfully, but in the ordinary way.

But in order to try to understand, let us turn to the book of Psalms. "Have I not calmed and quieted my soul, like a child weaned from its mother? my soul is within me like a weaned child" (Ps 130:2). A great deal of what the Lord says is a direct answer to the questioning of the book of Psalms. This is understandable, for that book is a kind of sum of all prayerful sighing, of everything we want to say to God, while Christ is the center of what the Lord wants to say to us.

So let us look closely at this image of a child weaned from its mother's breast. This is how a person feels in the world: every person seeking the meaning of his life and the lives of those he loves, seeking a love that is not afraid of decay, seeking the sources of that inexpressible feeling of holiness that he senses in his chest. It is a brilliant image... The Lord gave birth to the human being into the world, nourished him, and released him from Himself, while the human being so longs to press his little nose to His breast again. Without Him it is so frightening, sad, lonely, cold, and hungry. These are human feelings.

But then Christ says... My mother and My brothers are those who hear the word of God... The reunion of mother and child, and of sisters and brothers with one another, has taken place; harmony has been restored with His coming into this world. Only it is strange: everything is reversed, and the images of mother and child appear to change places. Is this accidental? Was it just said because the occasion presented itself, because His mother came and His brothers came?

But nothing is accidental. Nothing is meaningless. As the great physicist Einstein said, "The Lord God does not play dice." Therefore in everything, in everything, we can look for meaning. So why did the images change places compared with the book of Psalms? Perhaps because pure love is a relationship between two who are fundamentally equal, or more precisely, commensurable. We cannot love an ant; it is too small. But we can love a kitten. Yet God is far more perfect than we are than we are more perfect than an ant; we are far less commensurable. And when this logic is broken through, one can no longer simply take the relationship of mother and child and place it directly on the relationship of God and His child. It is only a bridge. One can cross it in order to begin to know the love of God. And that means that the change of order alters nothing. The main thing is that the logic of incommensurability has been broken through; the main thing is that wholeness has been restored.

But there is also a simpler meaning. Perhaps Jesus is telling us that we are no longer little, that we are no longer infants; God has weaned us from His breast by bringing us into this world. Yet no longer, for all His love for us, can He put us to the breast again. Five-year-old children are not put to the breast.

Jesus' parables are something halfway between amusing stories from everyday life and riddles: in them He explains the inexpressible, the Message of His Kingdom, in simple human language. Many of them begin just this way: "The Kingdom of God is like someone who..." - and then He sketches a situation familiar to His listeners, revealing to them the essence of His Gospel.

So, the most famous parable is about how the Word of God, like a seed, must fall into fertile soil in order to bear fruit and not be lost in vain. The evangelist wonderfully completes the parable by giving, immediately after it, the account of Jesus' family, where He speaks to the disciples a new riddle that expresses the same Message in other words: "Whoever hears the Word and does it has entered My family".

The listeners only have to compare these parable-riddles to understand what the Kingdom consists in that their Teacher brought to earth. Through his book, the evangelist offers this task not just to the small circle of disciples, but to all readers of the Gospel.

The word, the seed sown by the sower, contains within itself the germ of the Kingdom of Heaven. Falling into our hearts, it begins to sprout into an ear of new life. But in this parable the sower does not act alone. Without soil—that is, without us—the seed cannot sprout. As Jesus observes, the more we participate in this process, the more fruit we bear. This produces an apparent injustice: the richer we are, the richer we become. Yet the issue here is probably not spiritual wealth, but how much of our capital—our time, attention, strength, and finally our whole life—we are willing to invest in this shared process of cultivating the Kingdom.