Matthew: A Commentary, Volume 2

By Frederick Dale Bruner

Recognized as a masterly commentary when it first appeared, Frederick Dale Bruner's study of Matthew is now available as a greatly revised and expanded two-volume work -- the result of seven years of careful refinement, enrichment, and updating.

Through this commentary, crafted especially for teachers, pastors, and Bible students, Bruner aims "to help God's people love what Matthew's Gospel says." Bruner's work is at once broadly historical and deeply theological. It is historical in drawing extensively on great church teachers through the centuries and on the classical Christian creeds and confessions. It is theological in that it unpacks the doctrines in each passage, chapter, and section of the Gospel. Consciously attempting to bridge past and present, Bruner asks both what Matthew's Gospel said to its first hearers and what it says to readers today. As a result, his commentary is profoundly relevant to contemporary congregations and to those who guide them.

Bruner's commentary is replete with lively, verse-by-verse discussion of Matthew's text. While each chapter expounds a specific topic or doctrine, the book's format consists of a vivid, original translation of the text followed by faithful exegesis and critical analysis, a survey of historical commentary on the text, and current applications of the text or theme under study. In this revision Bruner continues to draw on the best in modern scholarship -- including recent work by W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., by Ulrich Luz, and by many others -- adding new voices to the reading of Matthew. At the same time he cites the classic commentaries of Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Bengel, and the rest, who, like Bruner himself, were not simply doctrinal teachers but also careful exegetes of Scripture. Such breadth and depth of learning assure that Bruner's Matthew will remain, as a reviewer for Interpretation wrote, "the most dog-eared commentary on the shelf."

Volume 2 of Bruner's commentary is called The Churchbook because Bruner sees Matthew 13–28 as concerned primarily with the life of the church and discipleship. Continuing his Volume 1 Christbook exposition, Bruner shows here how the focus of Matthew shifts, from Jesus teaching about who he is to teaching mainly about what his church is. Bruner's Churchbook commentary divides the second half of Matthew according to its major ecclesiological themes: the church's faith (chapters 13–17), the church's love (18–20), the church's history (21–23), the church's hope (24–25), and the church's passion (26–28).

Eminently readable, rich in biblical insight, and ecumenical in tone, Bruner's two-volume commentary on Matthew now stands among the best in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 25, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467424028

Frederick Dale Bruner

  Frederick Dale Bruner is the George and Lyda Wasson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Whitworth University. His other books include A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness and commentaries on the Gospels of Matthew and John.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Sermon of Parables

THE DOCTRINE OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we often wonder what we mean when we pray, Thy kingdom come. Matt 13’s string of seven parables, six of which begin with The kingdom of heaven is like, teaches us what Matthew’s Jesus means by kingdom.

According to Jesus’ original preaching, the kingdom of God is mainly God’s great future coming with the messianic Son of Man to gather, judge, and rule in the new world (palingenesia, 19:28; cf. esp. chaps. 24–25). And this future coming is tantalizingly near in Jesus’ own ministry. Despite a recent tendency to interpret Jesus’ parables more kerygmatically than eschatologically (i.e., in terms of the power of the Word of Jesus in history more than in terms of a great coming at the end of history), nothing is more assured in NT scholarship than Jesus’ originally eschatological or adventist mind and message. We still pray, "Thy kingdom come."

But Matthew now wants Jesus’ parable collection to honor especially the Word of Jesus that proclaims this kingdom. That is to say, Jesus’ Sermon of Parables is not only doctrine about the kingdom; it is teaching bringing membership in it—Jesus’ parables are Speech Events mediating the kingdom’s nearness; they are not merely lectures concerning it (cf. Schnackenburg, 1:116). "Through Jesus’ Word the kingdom happens" (Schlatter, Der Evangelist, 426, emphasis added; cf. Gnilka, 1:498). When the kingdom comes near through Jesus’ teaching, it not only brings new information, but it also makes new creatures. The main interim answer to the church’s Thy kingdom come, and the main gift of the parables, again and again, is simply and wonderfully this faith in Jesus. In the final analysis, Jesus’ parables make God’s nearness to the world an event (Weder, 275).

The interpreter of Jesus’ parables wonders how much weight to give Jesus’ original end-time emphasis—to the kingdom of God in its pristine future sense—and how much weight to give Matthew’s transmutation of the historically mainly adventist Jesus into Matthew’s more adventist-ethical Jesus—in short, how much weight to give to Jesus’ ethical teaching as the in-time way to God’s end-time world (cf. Gnilka, 1:488). Since this is a commentary on Matthew’s Gospel and not a general book on a Jesus, I will interpret these parables in Matthew’s preferred moral way, even when we may everywhere detect the originally end-time Jesus behind Matthew’s ethical brush.

What outline best displays the contents of Matt 13? There is the popular outline of three threes: (1) The Threefold Parable of the Sower: The Parable Itself, The Purpose of the Parables, and The Interpretation of the Parable (vv. 1–23); (2) The Three Parables of Things: the Weeds, the Mustard Seed, and the Leaven (vv. 24–35); and then, separated by the buffer of The Interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds (where a new focus on the disciples begins), (3) The Three Parables of the End: The Hid Treasure, The Pearl of Great Price, and The Net (vv. 36–52; for this outline cf. Allen, 150; Green, 129–31; for others see especially Gnilka, 1:437–38; Luz, 2:291–94; Davies and Allison, 2:371; and Boring, 301).

I am attracted by an outline that sees seven parables forming three sets of twos completed by a solemn seventh:

I. The Two Big Field Parables of Sower and Weeds;

II. The Two Little Seed Parables of Mustard Seed and Leaven;

III. The Two Gem Parables of Hid Treasure and Pearl;

IV. The Concluding Warning Parable of the Net.

On Matthew’s liking paired parables see Gnilka, 1:414, 490. Early on, Bengel, 1:183, noticed the main differences between the seven: the first four are directed to the people (though the disciples get special instruction en route) and are connected by the formula another parable; the last three are directed particularly to the disciples and are connected by the phrase again the kingdom of heaven is like. Bengel unfortunately interpreted the seven parables as chronological predictions of successive periods in church history, to the embarrassment of his later reputation. But have a heart, Sometimes even Homer nods.

The combined message of the seven parables summarizes Matthew’s Gospel: the theological Parable of the Sower teaches the church to stand under the gospel with good faith; the ethical Parable of the Weeds teaches the church to stand under the gospel eschatologically and, so, nonviolently with love; the twin Little Seed Parables teach the mystery of the form of the gospel as both little and yet incredibly powerful; the twin Gem Parables teach the church the nature of the gospel itself as a message of both joy and demand—in that order!; and finally the Warning Parable of the Net ends the Sermon of Parables in the way most of Matthew’s Jesus’ teachings end—with a warning, as the fruit of all that Jesus has taught, to change one’s life.

Thus when the central lesson of each parable is told end to end we come up with a saying that can briefly both summarize and emphasize the message of all seven parables together and of Matthew’s Gospel as a whole: Under-stand gently the powerful little gospel—and change!

I. THE BIG FIELD PARABLES

A. The Parable of the Sower, 13:1–9

"On that day Jesus came out of the house and sat down by the lake. And so many people gathered around him that he got a little boat and sat in it while all the people stood on the beach. And he taught them many things in parables, saying, ‘Look! The sower went out to sow. And while he was sowing, some seed fell along the footpath, and the birds came and gobbled them up. Other seed fell on top of the rocky soil where there was not much earth, and immediately they sprang up because they did not have deep earth. And when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they did not have any roots, they withered away. Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up with them and choked them. But other seed fell right on top of the earth, the good earth, and they were regularly bearing fruit—some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Let the person who has ears to hear—listen!’ "

This parable has been interpreted in four main ways: (1) as a parable of victory at the great harvest coming of the Son of Man at the end of the world despite all opposition and seeming failure now (e.g., Dodd, Jeremias, Taylor, Fitzmyer); (2) as a parable of patience, teaching disciples not to get discouraged with Jesus’ ministry or with their own when three out of four soils fail to bear fruit—one soil will be very fruitful (e.g., Chrysostom, Jerome, Luther, Bonnard); (3) as a parable of responsibility, teaching people to be eager hearers and faithful doers of the Word of God (e.g., Matthew’s own Interpretation of the Parable, 13:18–23; the majority interpretation of the early and of the post-Reformation churches); and (4) as a parable of power, teaching the church the intrinsic power of the Word of God and of the Word’s own ability to bring the kingdom into the world (e.g., Schlatter, Schniewind, Weder). See now Luz’s History of Interpretation, 2:298–305, for a review of interpretations.

Critique. (1) The weakness of the eschatological victory interpretation is that for all future hearers (beyond the original disciples who had Jesus with them) Jesus has so postponed his final coming that the parable cannot always be heard with its original encouragement—where is his kingdom then? The strength of the victory interpretation is its capturing the historical Jesus’ own adventist spirit of imminent, urgent, and confident expectation of God’s final great triumph, a spirit we always need. (2) The patience interpretation lacks this eschatological edge, and that is its main weakness, but it compensates with its helpful mission mathematics: Don’t be discouraged when three out of four of your hearers seem unfruitful; one out of four will be so fruitful that your work will be worthwhile. (3) The responsibility interpretation can so focus on the several human responses of the four soils that the teaching becomes moralistic and banal, saying nothing distinctively Christian. But the structure of the parable and Matthew’s own later ethicizing interpretation of it (13:18–23) encourage a judicious use of the responsibility theme (cf. Gundry, 261; Luz, 2:310, also comes to this conclusion). (4) The power interpretation of the parable is the most congenial of all to me because in it the seed power that is the Word of Jesus receives its due. The real theme not only of this chapter’s keynote Parable of the Sower but of the entire Parable Chapter itself is this: Jesus’ Word brings into this world the otherworldly power of the coming kingdom of God. So, as a consequence of that Word’s powerful coming, everything else that the parables want to teach naturally follows: namely, that it is our responsibility to understand this Word, that it is our mission to bring this Word with a patient urgency into the church and the world, and that it is our privilege to wait expectantly, confidently, and joyfully for the final victory of this Word’s promises.

The key words for understanding this parable as responsibility are its last words: "Let the person who has ears to hear—listen! (13:9). This sentence is not just a rhetorical flourish meaning Get the point!" Rather, it is the code for deciphering the parable’s vocabulary. Listening to Jesus’ words is the key to life; our ears are the soil of our lives. Ears attentively devoted to the Word of Jesus are good soil; ears distracted, inattentive, casual, or diffused in concentration are the several unfruitful soils of the parable. The key attitude in life—spiritually and socially—is the attitude of active listening.

Right listening is the catalyst for right doing. Just as soil is primarily passive and its task mainly receptive, so disciples are to be first of all receivers (for the classic discussion of this priority of faith—of passive righteousness—see Luther’s prefatory The Argument of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians in his Lectures on Galatians, LW, 26:4–12). Then faithful listeners to God’s Word become fruitful servants of God’s world. Truly passive reception becomes truly active righteousness. In Paul’s language, faith becomes works. In the final sentence of Jesus’ Interpretation of the Parable (13:23), see the vital connection between understanding (standing under), which is Matthew’s word for faith in the Parables, and fruitbearing and doing, which are Matthew’s ethical words for love in the Parables and throughout the Gospel.

13:1–2 "On that day Jesus came out of the house and sat down by the lake. And so many people gathered around him that he got a little boat and sat in it while all the people stood on the beach. Jesus didn’t coerce people to hear him; they came to him. He must have been attractive. One can hear in the phrase Jesus came out of the house and sat down by the sea" the missional truth that the church (following Jesus) should and will come out of her house of teaching (12:46–50) and go out into a world at sea (13:1–2). Neither Jesus nor his church is housebound.

The early church enjoyed seeing a fuller allegory here: When Jesus came out of the house and sat down by the sea he was coming out of Israel, the house of the Lord, and going out to Gentiles (Rabanus); and (according to Hilary) the ship from which Jesus spoke is the church, in which the Word of God is placed, while the crowds standing on the beach represent the Gentile world (in the C.A., 480–8). This interpretation is probably too imaginative, for historically the crowds by this sea were mainly Jewish. In the eighteenth century, Henry, 180, made a slightly more homey application of Jesus’ curious preaching post here: His pulpit was a ship; therefore, let not those who preach Christ be ashamed, though they have mean and inconvenient places to preach in! Jesus sits here in his Sermon on Parables as he does in two of his other great sermons (the Sermon on the Mount, 5:1, and the Sermon on the End of the World, 24:3; Davies and Allison, 2:377). The huge crowds eagerly listening to Jesus’ Word here at the parable’s head (13:2) contrast drastically with the great majority in the parable’s body (vv. 3–7, 19–22) who subtly but decisively reject the Word.

13:3ab "And he taught them many things in parables, saying, ‘Look!…’ " The disciples will ask Jesus in the next paragraph why he taught the crowds in riddling parables at all, and Jesus will go into some detail in reply. But for now we may be impressed that when Jesus spoke to the common people he used earthy, pictorial speech and took them seriously by talking their language.

Dodd’s definition of parable, 5, has found wide favor: a parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt of its precise application to tease it into active thought. The older Matthew Henry, 183, himself a master of pictorial speech, appreciated Jesus’ teaching method: Christ’s parables are borrowed from common, ordinary things, not from any philosophical notions or speculations, or [from] the unusual phenomena of nature, … but from the most obvious things, that are of every day’s observation, and come within the reach of the meanest capacity. Divine teaching without human words misses both Jesus and people. Hence Calvin, for example, in 2:63, taught preachers that it is important to consider not only what they say but how they say it. Much preaching needs old-fashioned humanization, parablization, earth. Jesus saves the world (and the church!) in this sense, too.

The opening word of Jesus’ actual parable, an exclamatory "Look! fits Jesus’ final word at the end of the parable exactly: Listen!" (13:9c). The deep point of the entire parable is in these two framing words: "Look at what Jesus is saying and listen to what he means! Your life depends on this! As we will learn, the problem of all three failed soils is exactly this: Though they all did indeed listen" to Jesus (vv. 19, 20, 22), they did not really pay attention to what he was saying; the fourth soil, however, is made up of precisely those persons who stop, look, and listen to the imperial Word of the teaching Jesus.

13:3c "The sower went out to sow. It is curious, as Lohmeyer, 195, pointed out, that the actor of this parable is not called the farmer or the laborer, for there is actually no such thing as the sower" on a farm; sowing is only one of the many functions of farm workers. But this worker’s almost entire function seems to be sowing. God has many other things to do in history, of course, such as rule the nations and keep the natural world in order. But the main thing Jesus wants disciples to know that God does in history is sowing his Word—all other activities are secondary.

See Karl Barth’s introduction to his theological position for a convincing modern case for the priority of preaching over all other church activities, CD, I/1, para. 3, 47–87. Boring, 303, makes a strong case for Matthew’s understanding the Sower in our story as Jesus himself, because of Matthew’s teaching in the rest of the Gospel: "The man who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man (13:37); Jesus identifies himself with his missionary workers (whoever welcomes you welcomes me," 10:40); uses disciples’ witness to himself to build up the church by himself ("on this rock I will build my church," 16:18); accompanies his church’s discipline with his own presence ("wherever even two or three of you are gathered in my name, I myself am right there in the middle of you, 18:20); and promises to accompany his apostolic church wherever she goes (and look! I myself am with you all the days, right into the consummation of history," the final words of the Gospel, 28:20).

13:4 The first batch of seed fell along the footpath. With the interpretive key of listening in hand we find that in contrast to a field, a footpath—a place where people walk—is soil whose main task is not receiving seed but receiving feet. This soil is unfruitful because its orientation is wrong: it receives the activity of people and not the activity of the Sower as its main occupation.

The ears of this soil are attuned to current impressions, to listening to the footfalls of the great events of the time as the Last Word, rather than to the footfalls of the little story of Jesus of Nazareth and to what God wonderfully did, is wonderfully doing, and shall finally and wonderfully still do in him. (The biblical stories, familiar from childhood, seem so minor and irrelevant next to the newspapers! Newspapers are so fresh—till tomorrow! Today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s fish wrappers.) In short, people are more important to footpaths than seeds. If enough people are doing or saying something, then that must be what God is doing and saying. Opus populi, opus Dei; vox populi, vox Dei.

Has my interpretation of the first soil been too influenced by Matthew’s later Interpretation in 13:19? Yes, but modern parable scholarship justifies this, for from the very beginning Matthew has understood the parable from the point of view of the Interpretation (Weder, 115; similarly, Gnilka, 1:477; Matthew wants the parable understood from the point of view of Jesus’ nearby Interpretation).

13:5–6 The second soil, the rocky soil, takes up two whole verses and three times repeats an identical negative fact (not … not … not): the seed fell where "there was not much earth … because they did not have deep earth …, since they did not have any roots. In terms of space given, one can get the impression that this is the central text in the parable. Some soil in Palestine was thinly laid across limestone immediately beneath. A rainlike dew, characteristic in the area, made this topsoil damp and therefore nutritious. Seed falling in it would immediately come to life. But when the sun rose and cooked the dampness away, the seed and its life were just as immediately scorched and withered away. Perhaps this dewed soil represents something like gifted personalities, persons with charisma and vitality, who are impressionable and especially responsive to their environments. The Word impresses and they respond; but later the world sweeps these same persons away by its usually more obvious impressive" things. These hearers lack the deep hearing that the Word seeks, the lectio divina that gives the little Word priority over the big world, hearing that clears space and time for devotion to the Word in public and private worship in order that the world not overwhelm it.

13:7 "Other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up with them and choked them. Choked listening," a third type, is listening distracted by other interests and concerns—perhaps often by quite legitimate interests and concerns. Great and serious issues take center; the little Word gradually takes what is left; and the result is choked seed. Again disciples are warned lest anything other than the Word of Jesus take center in their lives.

Issue-centered Christianity is the bane of modern mainline Christendom. When Unitarianism lost its emphasis on the deity of Christ (an emphasis still wanted by its founder, Sozini), it very quickly became a mainly social, political, and spiritual faith, as it is today. Unless mainline Christianity recovers the divine-human NT Christ, she goes the way of Unitarianism. In the United States I think especially of Methodism and The United Church of Christ, the two most endangered species. Presbyterianism, Episcopalianism, and Lutheranisn, however, are not far behind in danger. But all politicized Christianities are endangered. Loyal christocentricity, which only God the Holy Spirit can create and which therefore can only be prayed for, is the antidote to fatal issueism.

13:8 "But other seed fell right on top of the earth, the good earth, and they were regularly bearing fruit—some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold." There is nothing complicated about this soil. The story deliberately leaves out everything that might have been said about the prerequisites of fruitful soil: irrigation, fertilizers, weeding, and a number of other practices that go into good farming. Everything is focused on the essential: that the seed enter the soil—that the Word be heard for what it is, the Word of God. Nothing else matters as much.

There are no complex devotional minutiae in the story. There is no developed technology of the spiritual life. The Word and attention to it are central. The Word, in Matthew’s context, is the story of Jesus: his Coming (chaps. 1–4), Ministry (chaps. 5–12), Church (chaps. 13–25), and Death-Resurrection-Mission (chaps. 26–28). It will be the purpose of this whole thirteenth chapter to teach how right faith in this Word (how under-standing) arises and so, with this faith, how the kingdom provisionally comes.

The Word of Jesus, don’t worry, will politicize its faithful hearers in the sense that it will make them care deeply for people in their communities, nations, and all over the world and thus move them to put this care into local, national, and world politics.

The verb used here for bearing fruit—edidou—is an imperfect verb stressing continuing, regular, normal action (the imperfect verb is the living form, the form that stresses normal life). The soil that regularly lets seed in, regularly gets fruit out; it is that simple. Seed in, fruit out. The soil’s whole task can be summarized in one mandate: give the seed room!

The Word does this fruitbearing in different ways in different persons—this is one of the meanings of the differentiating hundredfold, sixtyfold, thirtyfold.

Joyful Mark’s three numbers go up (Mark 4:8); sober Matthew’s go down. But both evangelists mean—Wow! The numbers themselves are not unrealistic or hyperbolic, as already Jülicher saw (2:522). The average yield of an individual grain in Palestine was thirty-five seeds, but one sometimes encountered as many as sixty, and in exceptional cases even a hundred (cf. Linnemann, 117). When the evangelist Mark described the four seeds of Jesus’ original parable, he made the first three batches of seed singular (ho, allo, allo), but he made the fourth batch plural (alla), suggesting that the fourth soil bore more fruit than all the others combined—the grammar reflects Mark’s characteristic joy. But Matthew put all four batches in the plural (ha, alla, alla, alla), suggesting less enthusiasm than Mark (Gnilka, 1:476) and so reflecting Matthew’s characteristic sobriety. The fourth soil’s three yields, however, nicely balance the three wasted soils (Davies and Allison, 2:385).

Gnilka, 1:478, is struck by how much more room is given to failure than to success in the parable, but believes the great success painted at the end in the amazingly fruitful yields of the fourth soil makes one forget the failures in the first three soils—the Sower’s work will win! Davies and Allison, 2:374–75, consider this parable the most important of all Jesus’ parables and see as its intention the answering of this burning question: Why did Israel in particular and why does the world in general put up so much resistance to the good news of Jesus? And the parable’s answer, they argue, is this: The kingdom of God that Jesus brings is—surprise!—present in our midst in weakness (in seeds!), in the simple Word of Jesus. Thus the parable serves as a kind of apologetic or theodicy: human beings do not like Jesus’ low-profile and nonviolent way of representing God in the world; they want a more spectacular, macho, realistic, and effective Savior. And that is why the great majority of the human race will always (if even subtly) reject Jesus.

Jesus’ emphasis on the Word in this parable and in this whole chapter takes the thrill of Israel in her Torah to the highest point. Had anyone ever really believed before that God in this one way and in no other way united people with Himself, namely, through His Word, and that this Word was really God’s greatest and most perfect gift—this defenseless Word that was so easily neglected? (Schlatter, Das Evangelium, 209).

13:9 "Let the person who has ears to hear—listen!" As we have seen, this sentence is not just decoration but declaration; it gives the moral of the parable: the key responsibility in life is to listen with one’s life to the Seed of the Word of God. Everything else in Christian life, as the parable shows, flows from the soil’s relation to the seed. Henry, 186, saw this and exclaimed, The sense of hearing cannot be better employed than in hearing the word of God! The sounds of music are beautiful to the ear, he continued, but the truth of the gospel is even more exquisite; news, too, fascinates the ear, but the Good News inebriates the heart.

Hans Weder’s Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern, 1978, makes the strongest case of all for the power-of-the-Word-of-God interpretation. Weder believes that we can find Jesus’ original meaning behind the evangelists’ records (in contrast to Linnemann’s skepticism, 116–18), and that in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus’ original meaning is this: "Everything depends on listening; where the Word is heard everything has been done that a human being can do. The fruitbearing is then an affair of the Word itself" (110). Trust the seminal power (die Selbstwirksamkeit) of the Word itself! This interpretation is not any modern person’s but goes back in history at least to the exciting reapprehension by the Protestant Reformation of the gospel, which originated with the apostolic writers’ own inspired listenings to Jesus himself, the Original Seed. We now have these listenings in the treasury of the canonical Gospels.

B. The Great Aside: The Paragraph of Privilege, 13:10–17

"And the disciples came up and said to him, ‘Why in the world are you talking to them in parables?’ And he replied to them, ‘To you the privilege of knowing the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been given, but to them it has not been given. You see, whoever has will be given still more, and given abundantly; but whoever does not have, even what little that person has will be taken away. And that’s why I talk to them in parables, because while they are looking on they aren’t really looking in, and while they are listening to they aren’t really standing under, and so the prophecy of Isaiah comes to perfect fulfillment in them, where it says, Oh, you will listen a lot, but you will never stand under what you hear; and you will do a lot of looking at, but you will never look into. Because the heart of this people has become fat, and they have listened with thick ears, and they have squinted their eyes lest they just might see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and so turn their lives around, and I would heal them. But your eyes, how blessed they are because they really see, and your ears, too, because they really hear. Because amen I tell you, many prophets and upright people longed to see the things you are seeing and didn’t get to see them, and to hear the things you are hearing and didn’t get to hear them.’ "

13:10 Parables are riddle-like sayings, covering as much as conveying truth. They require looking into in order to be understood. They have the virtue of pricking the mind to attention or they have the vice, some think, of obscuring truth obscure enough already. The disciples apparently thought the latter because there is a tone of recrimination in their question, ‘Why are you talking to them in parables [or riddles]?’ To the disciples, Jesus’ riddles work obfuscatingly, opaquely, unclearly, and they wonder why he talks clearly to them but with such roundaboutness to the common people.

13:11 Jesus begins his response, curiously, by praising his blaming disciples. "To you, he says with emphasis, the privilege of knowing the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been given, but to them it has not been given. You have me, the mystery in person, he is suggesting, but they haven’t made that decision for me yet and that takes time—and stories. Your having me is a gift given to you, not an acquisition earned by you. Remember, I called you; you didn’t call me." (Cf. John 15:16.)

This tendency to trace what at first glance seems to be a human act (namely, responding to God’s Word) to a prior divine enabling is noticeable in almost all the apostolic writings. For example, after John in his Prologue told the church that all "who receive [the incarnate Word] are given the privilege of becoming the children of God, to all who believe in his name (John 1:12), the evangelist immediately placed this privilege-of-human-receiving in a sovereignty-of-divine-giving context: Who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (1:13). The apostle Paul does the same thing on a larger scale by backing up his Rom 1–8 (gospel) with chaps. 9–11 (election) in order to teach those who have come to faith in Christ that this saving coming is therefore, then, not of the person who wills nor of the person who runs, but of the compassionate God" (Rom 9:16). (The question my wife and I find ourselves asking in this predestinarian milieu is, Why, then, to all appearances, are not more people given this gift? No doubt the question is presumptuous, but it will not go away.)

Our verse in Matthew means that saving knowledge is a gift. The Reformer also returned faith to its rightful owner—the electing grace of God: The best preparation for grace is the predestination of God (Luther, Disputation against Scholastic Theology [1517], thesis 29, adapted; LW, 31:11). Luther wrote this against the human preparations for faith taught by the scholastics. The church’s greatest teachers after Jesus, from Paul to Barth, have unanimously taught that all our decisions of faith rest on a prior, prompting, and enabling work of God’s sovereign grace. They received this sense of the priority of grace not only from Paul but also from Jesus’ own teaching, first handed down to us in this Paragraph of Privilege in Mark 4:10–12, and then evangelically modified for other churches by Matthew here, by Luke at Luke 8:9–10, and by John at John 12:36b–43. Davies and Allison, 2:389, are insistent that the emphasis of our text is not privation but gift. Boring, 304, sees that this highlighting of the gift character of the knowledge of God is not at all unique to this paragraph; it is very Matthean: "no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him, 11:27; Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this [knowledge of me] to you, but my Father in heaven," 16:17.

13:11c "But to them it has not been given." This is hard. But the sentence cannot be explained away. And we will accept it as it stands only if we are prepared to let God be God. The God of Jesus and of the biblical writers is not a God caught by surprise by the response of people, or a Sower whose farming technique is bad. This sovereignty paragraph wants to correct unworthy notions of God.

The Church Fathers repeatedly sought to honor both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. For example, Chrysostom, C.A., 485 (emphases added): "they to whom [the revelation] is not given are the cause of their own miseries [as, he says, Jesus’ Explanation of the Parable of the Sower, in a moment, will show], and yet [it is true] that the knowledge of the Divine mysteries is a gift of God, and a grace given from above." Even the great predestinarian Augustine wanted to attribute the guilt of humanity’s spiritual blindness to human, not divine responsibility (C.A., 488). The problems with predestination come out most clearly, as we might expect, in Calvin’s interpretation of our passage, 2:64–67, where I will highlight the key expressions: "Christ [here] was magnifying the grace bestowed on the disciples, because [grace] was given especially to them and not indiscriminately to all. If anyone should ask why the apostles received this privilege of dignity the cause is certainly not to be found in them; for when Christ declares it was given to them He excludes all merit.… they are selected and chosen men … whereas the rest were deprived of this grace … [which] was not common to all alike. He does not give any reason apart from the secret counsel of God.… I agree it is always true that those whom God blinds deserve the punishment … [since] the guilt is theirs, for their blinding is voluntary. And from all this Calvin draws a surprisingly pastoral moral: from this [fact of electing grace] ministers of the Word should seek consolation if their work is often less successful than they could hope. The majority in even the Protestant churches, I think it fair to say, has found Calvin insufficiently sensitive to Matthew’s moral-responsibility theology and to the rest of the NT’s theology of the very widespread grace of God. We can wonder if this almost peerless interpreter of Holy Scripture gave sufficient weight to the much more frequent number of texts where Jesus’ expansive love for all, yes, seemingly indiscriminately," is in such rich evidence. Karl Barth, the major Calvinist-Reformed theologian of the last century, is Calvin’s most respectful yet incisive critic on this very point—the scope of God’s election.

13:12 "You see, whoever has will be given still more, and given abundantly; but whoever does not have, even what that person has will be taken away. Those who have are apparently those who (in the previous verse) have been given revelation (v. 11), and so at first this sentence is simply a second way of saying sovereignty of God" or of saying that it is a deep privilege to have been given Jesus and an understanding of him. To have Jesus is to have everything, and having him is a pledge of continual abundant future having; not to have Jesus is, somehow, God’s righteous judgment, based fairly, the Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower will in a moment teach, on the guilt of preoccupied listening. Thankfully, even bad listening does not frustrate God, for history is under the wise and just providence of God. But if we fail to see vv. 11 and 12 pointing at first in the predestinarian directions of Isaiah and Paul, Augustine and Thomas, Luther and Calvin, we fail to deal responsibly with the literal meaning of our text and so with the character of a God who is not at our mercy.

Jesus’ saying that to them who have will be given is a variation on the old saw that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, which is intended to shock those who hear it in the mouth of Jesus, the advocate of the poor. But Jesus, of course, intends that this cliché be interpreted spiritually. The first question to ask of Jesus’ enigmatic saying ("Whoever has will be given still more) is Has what? In context, the triple use of has" in vv. 5 and 6, and its use for a fourth time in the Parable Interpretation at v. 21, means has much soil, has deep soil, has a root system, or, in modern idiom, has depth, or, in Jesus’ idiom, has the obedience of listening. The listener is the deep person, the listener to the Word of God the fruitful person. So we should fill in the missing object in our verse like this: Whoever has listening will be given still more. The interpretation of this difficult text is a model case of the rule: context teaches meaning.

13:13 "And that’s why I talk to them in parables, because [hoti] while they are looking on they aren’t really looking into, and when they are listening to they aren’t really standing under. The little word because" (hoti) here in Matthew has replaced Mark’s much stronger in order that (hina) and turns the meaning of the sentence around.

When Mark said that Jesus taught in parables in order to (hina) harden, he was saying that hardening was Jesus’ purpose in parable teaching! But when Matthew says that Jesus taught in parables because (hoti) the people were already hardened, he is saying that hardened people were the reason Jesus taught in parables (cf. TDNT 7:727). Gundry, 256, believes with many, nevertheless, that Jesus’ parables in Matthew, no less than in Mark’s, are still meant as judgment on the hardened, not as attempts to penetrate their hardness. However, in the light of Jesus’ later citation of the prophetic purpose of parables ( ‘I will explain things that have been hidden,’ 13:34–35), I believe that Matthew understands parables as penetrators, too, and not just as punishments. It is the universal stratagem of speakers to use stories with unreceptive audiences in order to reach them (Tyler Easley). Taylor, 250, 257, is convinced that Matthew’s change of Mark is a theological improvement over Mark’s intolerable predestinarianism, for, Taylor argues (250), the purpose of parabolic teaching is clear; its aim is to elucidate truth, not to obscure it, still less to conceal an issue or to serve as a punishment.

A smooth reconciliation of divine sovereignty (or predestination) with human responsibility (sometimes called free will) is not easy to effect. The universal church has generally found Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings the most satisfactory attempt. See also Luther, Bondage of the Will, and Calvin, Inst., III.xxi–xxiv. Helpful, from a Roman Catholic writer, is Harry J. McSorley, Luther: Right or Wrong?: An Ecumenical-Theological Study of Luther’s Major Work, The Bondage of the Will (1969); one conclusion in this fascinating study is that the Reformer Luther was more catholic in his theology of grace than the Catholic Erasmus! Theophylact summarizes the church’s conviction: ‘Seeing’: this is of God; ‘they do not see’: this is of their evil (in Swete, 77). God is to be credited for the gift; we are to be blamed for the rejection. Luther’s Bondage of the Will can be consulted for the most radical church-historical emphasis on the sovereign gift (in my opinion as radical as that of Calvin), but cf. P. S. Watson’s citation of Luther in Watson’s Let God Be God, pp. 25–26, and see all of Luther’s other writings, especially his sermons, for emphases on human responsibility. Augustine somewhere told the story of two men in church: one stood and accepted the message; the other remained seated and rejected it. And Augustine concluded: Let him who stands give the glory to God; let him who remained seated blame himself. This asymmetrical theology, as Hagner calls it (1:375), is typical of biblical thought: whatever good there is comes from God; whatever evil there is comes from us. Davies and Allison, 2:403, believe that Matthew’s representation of Jesus’ argument here (in contrast to Mark’s) comes very close to being the free-will defence of the problem of evil, the argument that says rejection of God’s revelation is the fault of human free will.

Karl Barth’s christocentric theology asserts that Jesus and his apostles teach that in the end God’s grace—God’s Yes—will triumph over every human No. I would, of course, like to believe this. So far I know only Matthew well, and the warnings, at the end of each of Jesus’ Sermons in this Gospel, sober rather than soothe me (chaps. 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 24–25). I look forward, after this examination of Matthew, to study the Gospels of John and Paul (esp. the Epistle to the Romans)—which have historically been the church’s other major theological fonts—in order to learn the whole counsel of God on these great questions of salvation.

13:14 "Oh, you will listen a lot, but you will never stand under what you hear; and you will do a lot of looking at, but you will never look into. Now Matthew marshals Isa. 6 to his side. When Isaiah had his great inaugural vision in the temple and had volunteered to go and preach to the people, he was told to preach this strange message of hardness of heart. In the Hebrew text the message given to Isaiah is even tougher and runs, at the crucial points, Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see.…" Matthew has softened this originally hard Isaiah text just as a moment before he had softened the originally hard Jesus-saying in Mark. But the context, in both cases, is hard enough: apparently Jesus’ ministry is almost as much a ministry of judgment as it is of grace. No less than Isaiah, Jesus was given a strange ministry of baptizing with fire as well as with Spirit.

Luther’s interpretation of this Matthean-Isaian passage in his Bondage of the Will (LCC 17), 166, against Erasmus’s assertion of the free will, deserves hearing: Christ and the Evangelists so often quote from Isaiah: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall see but never perceive’ (Isa 6:9–10; Matt 13:14 …). What else does this mean, Luther pointedly asks, but that free choice or the human heart is so held down by the power of Satan that unless it is miraculously raised up by the Spirit of God it cannot of itself either see or hear things that strike the eyes and ears themselves so plainly as to be palpable? Luther’s theology is refreshing because it takes the doctrine of the devil with a NT seriousness. Only when we see that there is nothing we can do—that we are trapped—are we freed to call on the one who alone can do the impossible (Matt 19:26). That is the Badspell presupposition of the Godspell—the wonderful news of God’s emancipation of the truly desperate (cf. Alcoholics Anonymous and its famous first of the Twelve Steps).

We wince when we see how Isaiah’s verse has been used anti-Judaistically, as, for example, in Trollope, 170: so truly characteristic is this prophecy of the Jewish nation, that of all the passages in the OT it is most frequently quoted in the New … John 12:40; Acts 28:26; Rom 11:8; 2 Cor 3:14. Trollope wrote in the early nineteenth century. After the events of the twentieth century, whenever Christian interpreters turn a text written to Christians for their self-criticism into a text written against the Jews for Christians’ self-congratulation, something unspeakable has happened (just as surely as something evil occurs when contemporary Palestinian concerns are devalued because it is said that God is always on the side of Israel). Christian readers, not historical groups that we dislike, are the audience of both the canon and of all responsible preaching and teaching. Luz, 2:314, who is the modern European interpreter of Matthew who seems most sensitive to this problem, believes that it is nevertheless an objective interpretation of our text to say that Matthew wants to show with this Scripture citation (and others in Matthew; e.g., 4:15–16; 21:42) that the divine Word itself predicted the move of election from (just) Israel alone to all the other nations as well. Davies and Allison, 2:403, are convinced that the reason for Israel’s failure, and for the failure of most of the nations after Israel I think they would add, according to Matthew’s argument in 13:1–23, is simply the failure of human free will: Therefore, unless or until God override wills, the gospel will [always] meet a mixed reception. This apologetic, of course, raises as many questions as it answers. According to NT teaching, aren’t both the devil (the strong man of chap. 12) and God stronger than human free will? (My wife wrote in the margin here: "The great ‘override of God’ at Judgment is such a hope—for me as much as for any heathen!" I think she has a point.)

13:16–17 "But your eyes, how blessed they are, because they really see, and your ears, because they really hear. Because amen I tell you, many prophets and upright people longed to see the things you are seeing and didn’t get to see them, and to hear the things you are hearing and didn’t get to hear them. Again the emphasized word in the original text is your. Matthew is drilling into disciples a sense of privilege. Most readers of Matthew’s Gospel will be believers, and on reading this paragraph they are to be filled with a sense of amazing grace, of wonder, and of gratitude, for being given hearing ears and seeing eyes. The doctrine of the election of God exists to create grateful believers. (But the doctrine can also create great sadness and worry—in these same believers—for all unbelievers or at least unhearers." Blessed are those who mourn.)

The desired sense of privilege is heightened next by contrasting what Christian disciples have seen and heard with what even the prophets and righteous of the Hebrew Scriptures wanted to see and hear but didn’t. (And yet these ancient unhearers, we know, were redeemed people of God.) Later disciples have one advantage over Abraham and Sarah, over Deborah and David, over Amos and Esther: they have been able to hear the Messiah in his apostolic gospel, to touch him in the sacraments of his presence, and to feel him in the fellowship of the church, and, in these senses, to see him.

But it is not the ancients’ fault that they didn’t see the Messiah for whom they longed—and it is not our merit that we did—we were given this privilege. We should therefore have the good sense to be grateful.

13:16 In vv. 11 and 16 (here) the words "to you and your, respectively, are put at the very beginning of the Greek sentences for emphasis to say, in turn, to you it has been given to know (v. 11) and your eyes, how blessed! (v. 16), as if to assert in concert, You are deeply privileged to have Jesus." Cf. Gnilka, 1:480. Because of the richness of the NT witness, there are some respects in which we who read the NT have Jesus more fully than even those who followed him in Galilee.

13:17 Matthew’s Jesus can summarize OT longing by referring simply to the prophets and righteous, as if nobody else in ancient Israel quite counted (Lohmeyer, 205). The prophets were those who spoke the Word, and the righteous were those who obeyed it (Schlatter, Der Evangelist, 433; cf. Matt 10:40–42). Chrysostom, 45:2:286, liked this verse: Seest thou [here] how again He connects the old dispensation with the new, signifying that those of old not only knew the things to come, but also greatly desired them? The frequently encountered teachings of many ways of salvation in religious pluralism (e.g., The Hero with a Thousand Faces) must step aside for Holy Scriptures’ one way of salvation—the Christ of God. "The [OT] prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours [in the NT period] searched and inquired about this salvation" (1 Pet 1:10).

13:10–17 Summary. In all three synoptic Gospels the Parable of the Sower is followed immediately by this paragraph that can be called The Great Aside (Mark 4; Luke 8). It is put here, as we have seen, to forbid an interpretation of the parable that would give credit to the soil rather than to the Sower for the reception of the seed. If the responsibility to hear God’s Word is stressed excessively, meritoriously, or moralistically—all three are the same thing—then this Paragraph of Privilege will correct such teaching by saying, "It was not your doing that gave you hearing; it was the Lord’s. The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the LORD has made them both" (Prov 20:12).

The meaning of this paragraph of privilege, in summary, is put well by the words of the gospel hymn Come Thou Fount: O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be!

The great problem with the complex of ideas associated with predestination and the sovereignty of God, here and elsewhere, is this: Why would God create most of the world only (according to orthodox interpretation) to condemn it? What Good News is there in a message that says most of the world will be lost? In his Bondage of the Will Luther faced this problem head-on and admitted that his main theological problem was believing God to be a God of love when, according to Scripture, it seems that God will damn so many (e.g., the way is narrow, and few find it, Matt 7:14). Luther said that he overcame this temptation by believing that just as the cross seemed hateful of God until one had been transformed from a state of sin to a state of grace, so similarly now predestination, the sovereignty of God, the Last Judgment, and the wrath of God can seem cruel of God, too. But when we are translated from our state of grace to our future state of glory we will learn how God is perfect love and grace and truth. Luther’s faith has helped many in times of temptation. And, may I add, in the spirit of Matthew’s Gospel (many lasts will be first, 19:30; cf. 20:16), we may be surprised by what happens on judgment day. The Judge is the Crucified One, the One who was himself damned—for all. Cf. especially Rom 5:18 and 11:32.

Meanwhile, I must say that studying the great subject of salvation beckons like a magnet. I can see how thoughtful Christians could be driven by some of the problems in the traditional teaching to belief in purgatory (e.g., C. S. Lewis) or to (an almost) universal salvation in Christ (e.g., Karl Barth, Jacques Ellul). I cannot see a way from the strict exegesis of biblical texts to these extraordinary convictions. By continuing to write commentary on Holy Scripture historically and theologically I hope to come to understand the full biblical scope of divine salvation. In the meantime, I must make myself the servant of the great Matthean texts as they stand and try to interpret them—however difficult they may be—in the way Matthew seems to mean them.

C. The Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower, 13:18–23

" ‘You, therefore, must now listen carefully to the parable of the sower! When anyone is listening to the Word of the kingdom and does not under-stand it, the Evil One comes and snatches away what has been sown in that person’s heart; this is the seed sown along the footpath. But the seed sown on the rocky soil is the person listening to the Word, who immediately accepts it with joy; but this person has no interior roots and is a temporary type; when pressure or persecution arises because of the Word, this person immediately drops out. And the seed sown in the thorns is the person listening to the Word but in whom the anxiety of the age and the humbug of wealth choke the Word and the person is rendered fruitless. But the seed sown on the good earth is the person listening to the Word and under-standing it; this person, of course, bears fruit and does things—one a hundredfold, another sixtyfold, another thirtyfold!’ "

13:18 The emphasized "you with which this Interpretation begins (You, therefore, must now listen carefully!) reminds readers of the emphasized yous that began and ended the preceding paragraph (to you has been given, v. 11, and your eyes, how blessed! v. 16). The earlier yous taught us that it is a privilege to be Christians; the present you" teaches us that it is a responsibility to be Christians.

Matthew calls the preceding parable the parable of the sower (13:18). Against the frequent inclination to retitle this The Parable of the Soils, since the soils are the variable in the story, Matthew’s title reminds the church that the focus in the parable should be on the sower, not ourselves.

The present Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower focuses on the experience of the sower’s seed, the Word, in the various soils. This little history of the Word depicts the outside powers that act malevolently or benevolently on the seed—the devouring birds, the rock undercropping, the burning sun, the choking thornbushes, and finally the good soil itself. This is a parable, then, not of the sower in himself but of the sower’s seed in its varied encounters with soils. It is a parable of the Word.

13:18–23 The abundance of early missionary language in the Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower (cf. TDNT, 4:121–22) has led most critical commentaries to the conclusion that the Interpretation is the work of the early Christian church. But what isn’t? Isn’t every Gospel datum part Jesus, part church? (For example, The Gospel according to Matthew.)

Faith in the resurrection of Jesus and in his promise to his first disciples that "I shall be with you all the days" (28:20) enables Christians to believe that the earliest church was inspired by the Risen One to interpret the words and deeds of the historical Jesus more or less appropriately.

There is a direct line between faith in the resurrection of Jesus and faith in the inspiration of Scripture, a line that passes, as it should, through the acids of historical-critical research. Historical-critical study of Scripture is legitimate, for, among other reasons, the first messenger of the Risen One told the women at the empty tomb to "look at the place where they laid him (28:6), that is, check out the truth or falsity of the gospel’s claims with your sense and senses. The church’s doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is not uncritical, unlooking," or mindless. But the church’s doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection does tilt believers toward a sympathetic reception of biblical texts—the risen Lord probably protected them. (See the instructive Forewords to Barth’s successive Romans commentaries for the reasonableness of this perception.) While the Interpretation of the Parable of the Sower (13:18–23) is indeed a church construction—historical-critical investigation convinces one of that—it is a construction the risen Jesus wanted in front of his future church as a model interpretation of his parable. (In this spirit, cf. Bonnard, 196–97 and Luz, 2:342–43)

Whether Gospel words are authentic or secondary—that is, are from the historical Jesus or are church constructs—is not the main question; the main question at every text is whether the church was faithful or unfaithful in her construction (Kittel, TDNT, 4:122). Surprisingly, the critical Jülicher, 2:534–35, believes that the original Parable of the Sower came to the Markan church already accompanied by and suggestive of this spiritual and allegorical Interpretation as we roughly have it now—hence supporting the idea that the church was faithful to the tradition she received in giving us both the Parable and its Interpretation. Jülicher draws this conclusion from the reserve with which the church interpreted the Parable in the Interpretation; for example, there are no explicit references to Jesus’ person, no interpretation of the thirty-, sixty-, and hundredfold (on this cf. Linnemann, 119 note j), and the like.

13:19 First, the soil along the footpath is anyone who hears the Word of the kingdom and does not understand it, and so the Evil One comes along and snatches away what has been sown in the heart. Matthew alone calls the Word "the Word of the kingdom, for Matthew is especially interested in the kingdom. And Matthew alone adds and does not understand [the Word] because understanding is important in doctrinal Matthew’s vocabulary. Finally, Matthew alone uses the word snatches away" (harpazei) to describe the Evil One’s activity—the same word used in the passage at 11:12: "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven is attacked by violence, and violent people snatch it away (harpazousin autēn). The snatching away of the Word of the kingdom is the major work of the Evil One and of his agents in history, violent people (cf. Ps 2: They take counsel together against the LORD and against his Christ, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, let us cast their cords from us!’ ").

It is one of the mysteries of history that the Evil One has such power against God’s Word, apparently making the Word resistible, and that he seems to wield power over so many persons (cf. Schlatter, Der Evangelist, 435). This mystery in theology is called theodicy—the problem of justifying God (theos-dikaō) for the existence of evil. The mystery is not explained in the Parable of the Sower; it is simply expressed. (The next Field Parable, the Weeds, explicitly addresses the problem, vv. 27–30.)

"When anyone is listening to the Word.…" In Matthew (unlike Mark) this first soil and all three other soils are depicted as hearers of the Word (13:19, 20, 22, 23)! Are all four soils in the church? The fourth soil is not the only professing Christian one. Clearly, both soils three and four are in the church, but only soil four is fruitful. Even soil two may remain in the church, though inwardly it has dropped out. Most surprising of all is the fact that even soil one may still claim to be a believer. Soil one, too, "is listening [present tense!] to the Word of the kingdom, and this [present listening] is tantamount to saying that he becomes a Christian" (Kingsbury, Par., 55); indeed, it says that he may still think he is a Christian despite his not under-standing the Word in obedient faith.

Thus there are Christians who are not Christians, persons who keep on hearing but from whose hearts Satan removes the Word. When Calvin looked at this paragraph, he, too, was struck by the fact that all four soils describe professing Christians so that the parable becomes a warning to Christians: This warning will help us the more when we realize that there is no mention here of the despisers who openly repulse God’s Word; it is concerned only with those who seem to be teachable (Calvin, 2:70–71). Accordingly, Kingsbury, Par., 55 (emphases added), concludes, "the man of v. 19 [the first soil] does not represent a class of people who reject missionary preaching.… [Rather, he] is the archetype of a certain class of people who do become Church members.… The Interpretation [of the Parable of the Sower] is aimed at the members of Matthew’s Church," and so at us.

What the first soil hears is the Word of the kingdom, which is equivalent to the gospel of the kingdom (4:23; 9:35; 24:14; cf. 26:13), which may be Matthew’s way of summarizing his own book (Kingsbury, Struc., 131). Understanding is an important word in Matthew’s vocabulary and means making a message one’s own (Green, 133), loyalty to the message of the historical Jesus (Luz, Disciples, 103), and standing under Jesus’ teaching in obedience. The refusal to understand makes one a prey of the Evil One (we are responsible, with God’s available help, to resist, the devil); the decision to under-stand the Word frees one from the Evil One (Bengel, 1:186, where the editors have also noted Lange’s penetrating comment in Stier: ‘The fate of God’s seed in [a human] is [a human’s] own fate). The phrase do not understand the Word means disregarding it, not laying it to heart (Trollope, 170), or, in our paraphrase, not standing under it.

Bonnard, 197, believes that the accent in our text is on the demonic intervention of the Evil One, not on the irresponsibility of hearers; however Gundry, 259, shows that while in Mark and Luke the devil is given this ominous emphasis, Matthew’s insertions into this