NOTES for Luk 8:1-21

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.

Among the Savior's parables about the Kingdom, the parable of the sower, the parable of the word that God sows in the human heart, occupies a special place. The Kingdom and the word: how are they connected? How is the word entering the human heart connected with the Word? The Word with a capital letter is incarnate in Christ. But what about the word of God with a lowercase letter? How does it enter a person's heart? What is this word like? The word by which God creates the world. The word that the prophets hear. The word that, as the hymn writer says, does not return to God unfulfilled. It turns out to be given to everyone. It is sown like seed in a field, with a generous hand. Only it is far from always received as seed is received by well-prepared soil.

This is understandable: the word is not simply a revelation given once. It is the instrument of God's action, which God uses in order to change a person. To prepare him for the fullness of communion with God. For life in the Kingdom. And a person does not always want this. For all sorts of reasons. Sometimes simply because he has no time. If God's word is not the main thing for a person, if God for him is somewhere beside the road along which the person is walking, the word of God will never become in his heart the instrument of God's action. But even if it does become that, this is still not everything.

After all, spiritual life is not for a day, not for a month, not for a year. It is forever. And if a person has time for "spirituality" today but not tomorrow, then his "spirituality" really does belong in quotation marks. And, of course, there is steadfastness during trials. A person who desires a righteous life, life with God, has always been an enemy of the evil in which the fallen world lies. And a Christian is doubly its enemy: he not only does not accept this evil himself, he also brings into the world the Kingdom that destroys evil without mercy, leaving it no place in creation.

It is not surprising that if this world generally hates the righteous, it hates Christian righteous people twice as much. And yet persecutions themselves are not as frightening as the everyday, organic rejection of spiritual life that marks the fallen world. Persecutions spiritually mobilize; their absence relaxes. And only after overcoming both can one begin a normal spiritual life. With the word in the heart, reflecting that very Word that became incarnate in Christ, and which, if one allows it to change one's heart, will make it capable of containing the life of the Kingdom in all the fullness available to a human being.

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.

"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 is often called Teacher, and for us this is true as well. But each of us also has to take on that role from time to time, so it is worth learning from the Teacher. These three verses from the Gospel of Luke let us glimpse Jesus' teaching method.

After telling an extended parable, the parable of the sower, and giving its explanation for the disciples, He continues in the traditional manner of Jewish teachers, aphoristically. The classic example of this method is the book of Proverbs, which is composed almost entirely of aphorisms. An aphorism in itself is already an image, acting on the listeners' imagination and provoking them to reflection. The parallel passage in the Gospel of Mark, perhaps the earliest of the Gospels, Mark 4:21, shows more clearly the lack of connection among these sayings of Jesus, while the Gospel of Matthew even places them in different chapters.

Luke is writing for Hellenized readers who were not used to this style, and he inserts logical connectors such as "for" and "therefore," so that these sayings acquire the quality of a unified text that lets us trace the logic of the development of Jesus' preaching. The first image, the lamp, says that the new message heard by the disciples is not for "internal use," but for passing on to others. The second saying suggests the uselessness of playing hide-and-seek: everything comes out into the open. And then comes the unexpected "take care how you hear," calling for special attentiveness, and the paradox Jesus states many times about cooperation and inaction.

All this, gathered together, gives rise in the listeners to a new idea of the way of life before them: serious, interested, active, and fearless interaction with other people.

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.

To be very precise "even the little he thinks that he possesses". Jesus doesn’t mean at all something such as the saying "money begets money". He speaks about such relations with God that we aren’t used to, relations of trust and respect (and eventually of love). God proposes to all His relations, and imposes them to nobody. The person, accepting freely this gift gets into the endless process of development of these relations, the purpose of which is to deify the man, the plenitude of his entry into God's life. But the person who believes that everything is well for him, who thinks that the relations with God (which seems to him that he has) are sufficient for him, closes by these very facts himself from God, doesn’t accept what God gives - and this means tears even the weak threads that were still sustaining him on the top of this life. "Take heed how ye hear", tune your "receivers" on the waves of God’s Grace.

The situation described by the evangelist Luke in this passage can cause surprise and even indignation. Jesus' relatives come to Him, and they do not interrupt His conversation but wait patiently outside, yet He does not go out to see them. A natural question arises: is it possible to treat one's loved ones this way, and is this Christian?

But if we read these lines attentively, we will understand that the Lord is addressing not His mother and brothers, but those who surround Him; it is precisely for them that He says this. In contrast to the Old Testament understanding of kinship, which presupposed blood ties, Christ proceeds from an entirely new understanding of relationships. It turns out that the Lord becomes neighbor to the one who hears His Word. Every person receives the privilege of being the Lord's brother or sister. And no national, geographical, or temporal boundaries can limit these relationships.

For many people these words are a stumbling block; it seems to them that Jesus is cruel here toward relatives. But Jesus does not reject kinship according to the flesh; He exalts kinship according to the spirit. Just as bodily kinship is determined by a certain unity, genetic unity, with a parent, so spiritual kinship has as its source the one Father. But if the first was never chosen by us, the second is our free agreement with the Father's will. That is why there is no spiritual feat in bodily kinship, while there is a spiritual feat in spiritual kinship, and Jesus offers us such a feat.