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Date: 2022-05-29
Audience: Grass Valley Corps ONLINE
Title: Jesus Storyteller
Text: Matthew 13:1-52
Proposition: Jesus told stories to grow those in his circle
Purpose: Open your eyes and ears to his teaching so you can be in his circle
Grace and peace
Working through Matthew’s bio of Jesus
Hard to properly teach next section in time we have without getting all technical – BUT WE WILL! Matthew used an advanced chiastic structure – kind of a sandwich of ideas pointing to a main central point.
But even for Bible geeks, digging into chaisms is a slog.
What’s really happening here is that Jesus told a lot of stories and Matthew has lined some of them up for us to hear and learn from.
To start, I’m going to tell you the first story, which you’ll find in Matthew 13, starting at verse 1.
Because I want to capture the feel of hearing these stories as stories, I’ll be using the Message translation for most of what we read today.
Got Matthew 13 open?
At about that same time Jesus left the house and sat on the beach.
In no time at all a crowd gathered along the shoreline, forcing him to get into a boat.
Using the boat as a pulpit, he addressed his congregation, telling stories.
3–8 [Jesus said] “What do you make of this?
A farmer planted seed.
As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road, and birds ate it.
Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn’t put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly.
Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled by the weeds.
Some fell on good earth, and produced a harvest beyond his wildest dreams.[1]
And then he said:
“Are you listening to this? Really listening?”[2]
Nowadays we call this kind of story a parable.
In Hebrew it was called a mashal.
These are stories that are comparisons – they use a shared experience to make a point.
In telling a story like this, Jesus was using commonplace images and situations to explain what it meant to live in God’s Kingdom.
The disciples following him, though?
They weren’t really sold on this.
They liked when he just told them things instead of making them think so hard.
Verse 10.
The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?”
11–15 He replied, “You’ve been given insight into God’s kingdom.
You know how it works.
Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn’t been given to them.
Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely.
But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears.
That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.
In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they’re blue in the face and not get it.[3]
Then he tells them two things to draw them into his teaching in a new way.
First, something from their history.
I don’t want Isaiah’s forecast repeated all over again:
Your ears are open but you don’t hear a thing.
Your eyes are awake but you don’t see a thing.
The people are blockheads!
They stick their fingers in their ears
so they won’t have to listen;
They screw their eyes shut
so they won’t have to look,
so they won’t have to deal with me face-to-face
and let me heal them.[4]
This is from Isaiah 6, when the LORD sent the prophet to warn the people that they had gone so far away from him that judgment was coming.
All he wanted was for them to come back, but he said they were behaving like children throwing a tantrum, refusing to listen, refusing to even look away from their sin to be healed.
Jesus said that he didn’t want that to happen again – he’s telling them stories to sneak Kingdom knowledge into them!
He wants them to hear and see and think until the truth explodes in their brains and they find themselves heading back to God as they rejoin the Kingdom they have rebelled against.
Second, Jesus tells his disciples something about themselves.
Verse 16:
“But you have God-blessed eyes—eyes that see!
And God-blessed ears—ears that hear!
A lot of people, prophets and humble believers among them, would have given anything to see what you are seeing, to hear what you are hearing, but never had the chance.[5]
He’s telling them, “Hey, I have to use stories to get to the crowd, because otherwise they won’t listen.
You, though, you’ve already opened yourselves to God’s Kingdom truth!”
And he rewards them for being open to what he has to say by explaining it to make sure that everyone really understands what he was teaching.
Starting at verse 18, Jesus says
“Study this story of the farmer planting seed.
When anyone hears news of the kingdom and doesn’t take it in, it just remains on the surface, and so the Evil One comes along and plucks it right out of that person’s heart.
This is the seed the farmer scatters on the road.[6]
I can see the guys with him looking at each other and saying, “Oh, yeah, I get it!
That makes sense!
So then they next part…” And Jesus goes on.
“The seed cast in the gravel—this is the person who hears and instantly responds with enthusiasm.
But there is no soil of character, and so when the emotions wear off and some difficulty arrives, there is nothing to show for it.
22 “The seed cast in the weeds is the person who hears the kingdom news, but weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it.
23 “The seed cast on good earth is the person who hears and takes in the News, and then produces a harvest beyond his wildest dreams.”[7]
Do you get it?
See how all the pieces fit together?
It’s easy when Jesus explains it, right?
But only those who sought to understand more had more to understand.
Did you follow that?
It was the people who were open to learning who got more to learn.
For those who didn’t bother, they just got a nice little story about the challenges of farming.
Sit with that for a moment while Jesus tells us another story.
He told another story.
“God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field.
That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn.
When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up, too.
27 “The farmhands came to the farmer and said, ‘Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn’t it?
Where did these thistles come from?’
28 “He answered, ‘Some enemy did this.’
“The farmhands asked, ‘Should we weed out the thistles?’
29–30 “He said, ‘No, if you weed the thistles, you’ll pull up the wheat, too.
Let them grow together until harvest time.
Then I’ll instruct the harvesters to pull up the thistles and tie them in bundles for the fire, then gather the wheat and put it in the barn.’
”[8]
Ooh – Good story, eh?
Want to know what’s going on there?
Me too!
So how do we get the answer?
Well, we can think through it and try to figure it out.
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