Day 206: Matthew 13-16

When he became a traveling rabbi in Galilee, Jesus became famous for His parables – mostly because they helped people make sense of some extremely complicated truth. In Matthew, however, Jesus’ parables were just as likely to confuse as to enlighten.

The reading today includes some exceptionally vivid miracles (Jesus walking on water, feeding 4000 people with a handful of fish and bread, casting out a demon from a little girl, and again feeding 5000 people with a small lunch), and a few of Jesus’ more mystifying stories. It’s not surprising that they seem complicated to us. We are outsiders to the world Jesus inhabited. These stories were targeted to “insiders” – Jews that shared Jesus’ heritage and background. They knew all of the Old Testament stories and were already familiar with most of the terminology that Jesus was using. So when we find them hard to understand, it’s no wonder. But, oddly enough, we aren’t the only ones to have a tough time untangling these stories. Even the insiders found them a bit of a puzzle (15:15-16; 16:7-9).


One of the reasons for the confusion seems to be that Jesus chose to speak, at least in this section of Matthew, largely in parables. Although most of the time Jesus used parables to explain or shed light on what He was teaching, there were times that He used these stories to keep some people in the dark – to hide the truth from those who had been rejecting God’s messages for centuries. While the Parable of the Sower isn’t all that hard to understand (when we pursue God’s words with open ears and hearts and we embrace the word we hear, our lives will add up to something) – Jesus explains His dual purpose for using parables right in the middle of it.

13:10 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
 11 He replied, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables:
   “Though seeing, they do not see;
   though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

Yes, Jesus most often used parables to help clarify things – to help honest seekers understand the truth. But He also employed some of His stories to cover the truth – to hide it from those whose only interest was to critique His words and who never intended to submit to them (or Him) in the first place.

Yes, that is a bit of a head-scratcher. But then, Jesus was a fairly complicated person.

Enjoy today’s reading!