NOTES for Luk 8:1-15

Today's reading ends with the words "and many others, who provided for Him out of their means." Thus before us passes a line of people unknown to anyone except God, people who brought to His feet everything they had, gave Him their whole life, and demanded nothing in return. Because the only and greatest reward for them was the possibility of being near Jesus.

Again and again the Gospel tells us that there is room for everyone in the Church, that everyone can follow Christ "preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God!" Everyone, regardless of one's past. Even after being Christians for a long time, we often think that the past cannot be changed. It is not so hard to believe that God holds our present and our future in His hands. We know that He knows everything about our past. But it is very hard to believe that He can change the past too: He can so change our attitude toward a painful past that it ceases to affect our life; He can heal wounds received by us in deep childhood, wounds we may not even remember, though they distort our life, our perception of reality, our understanding of ourselves, and our relationships with other people.

We see what kind of people follow Christ through the cities and villages. They are different; they are wounded, uneducated, formerly demon-possessed, sick, sinful women and sinners, and all of them can carry the Good, Joyful News, the news that the Kingdom of God is coming to earth, the news that for God time does not exist and He is able to change everything if we allow Him to enter our heart. But we can serve God not only by preaching. Others have a quieter, more silent ministry. This is not necessarily solitary reclusive prayer in a cell, or the work of a doctor or nurse. Service to God can also be something we very rarely perceive this way: "many others ... served Him with their possessions." That is, they helped materially. They fed, gave drink, clothed, and gave a place to spend the night. They may have performed no great deeds and never preached. They simply shared generously what they had.

Yes, of course, in the Gospel Christ says that "it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." But the rich man in this sense is not the one who simply has much; it is the one who does not understand that his possessions were given to him by God, that they do not belong to him. Only by beginning to give can he enter the Kingdom. By beginning to give, he will become rich in another way. After all, one can give only what is one's own; one cannot give what belongs to another, and by deciding to tear something away from oneself, one acquires the Kingdom.

We are called to serve God with the gifts He Himself has given us: for one person this is the gift of speech; for another, the gift of understanding other people; for another, the gift of helping with one's possessions, which God also gives.

Why does Christ set the apostles apart so sharply from "the others," to whom it is given to know only in parables? These words often surprise us deeply. After all, we read this interpretation, given only to the apostles, but are we really better than those who heard only the parable? No, we are not better. But Scripture was given to the Church. The "mysteries of the Kingdom of God" can be known only by those who are already together, who follow Christ not alone, who are ready to share life, joys, and sorrows with the neighbors given to them by God. The 12 apostles were not sinless, but they were gathered together around Christ, just as we are gathered in the Church, the Body of Christ. And together we can receive the Word; in the Church the Holy Spirit grants us the ability to hear and understand the Word of God.

And God has also given us freedom. This may be why He spoke in parables to those who had not yet decided, as the apostles had, to follow Him. The interpretation of the parable of the Sower is so simple and clear that the choice becomes painfully sharp; not everyone can bring himself to make it. The interpretation of this parable is so categorical that it can frighten an "outsider." In fact, it frightens us too, because we cannot fail to see how unlike fertile soil we are. But God protects our freedom, and therefore, by speaking in parables, He leaves us the freedom to choose: "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" We can decide to hear, ask God for "hearing ears," and then we will hear, understand, and a very frightening and very simple choice will stand before us: with God, or without God.

This parable presents the history of Christian preaching over the past twenty centuries remarkably well. When we hear Christians reproached for unworthy conduct, we can and even must humbly agree with many of the examples cited, though not all of them, but that is not the point now, and admit that in some cases the seed fell on rock, while in others it was choked by weeds. Thus, in many places no good harvest can be seen, although the seed was of the highest quality.

But it is much more important to measure ourselves against this parable: what condition is my own soil in? Have I grown hard? Have I stopped pulling up my weeds? If we answer ourselves honestly about these and similar questions, we may encounter a trick of the evil one: you are what you are and will not become any better, so do not even try to receive the seed and bear fruit. But this is not so, and we must not give ourselves a final diagnosis dictated by the enemy who is intent on stealing the seed that has been sown. The soul of each of us is capable of changing and can be different kinds of soil at different times. With God’s help, stony ground can become fertile black earth.

Like many other parables of the Savior, the parable of the sower is a parable about the Kingdom and about spiritual life. Or, more precisely, it is a parable about what hinders a person on the way to the Kingdom. Of course, if the field into which the sower goes is understood as the whole world (and in that case the sower should, of course, be understood as the Savior Himself), then the parable could also be interpreted as a parable about different people, each of whom has his own problems in spiritual life.

And yet, on closer examination, it is hard not to notice that the parable speaks of the most typical problems, and it often turns out that all of them appear in the spiritual life of one and the same person at different stages. Of course, if a person cannot resolve the next problem that has arisen before him, he will have to forget about any further spiritual path. If he does succeed, a new stage will begin in his spiritual life. But in order to speak at all about any kind of spiritual life, a person must learn to listen to and hear God and God's witnesses.

To hear not superficially, not the way we usually listen today out of the corner of our ear to the sounds and words that reach us on the street, but to listen by entering into what is heard, allowing it to penetrate the heart and touch that deep "I" which is the spiritual center of our personality. But hearing is not everything. Resolve is needed in order to fulfill what has been heard. The decision accepted, the choice made, inevitably changes the whole life of the one who has made that choice; and if the choice is made in favor of Christ and the Kingdom, the opposition of the world is inevitable.

Of course, it does not always take the form of open persecution, but opposition in one degree or another and in one form or another takes place in every case. This is where spiritual wholeness is important, enabling a person to remain firm in regard to the choice he has made. But there is something in the world more dangerous for spiritual life than persecution: everyday bustle. Indeed, any external pressure, and all the more persecution, under normal circumstances contributes to the inner psychological mobilization of those being persecuted, and psychological mobilization almost always contributes to a more intense spiritual life as well.

Everyday worldly bustle, however, does not contribute to any psychological mobilization; on the contrary, it only relaxes a person psychologically. And preserving the necessary intensity of spiritual life in such a situation is more difficult than during trials; for this, special attention must be paid to the problem. But if the seeker of the Kingdom overcomes this obstacle as well, he will find himself at the threshold he was seeking. Of course, coming to the threshold of the Kingdom is not yet the end of the road; ahead of the seeker lies the life of the Kingdom and the path of a witness. But that is already a spiritually different, new life.

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.

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.