What Defines You?

Klyne Snodgrass's massive new volume, just released, called Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2008), represents not only a lifetime of scholarly work as Professor of New Testament at North Park Theological Seminary and beyond, but a wonderful and practical witness to his focus in scholarship on pastoral training and ministry.

In preparing, for example, to preach on the Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13 tomorrow, digging over days now into all the commentary he supplies on its background and various interpretations of it over time has been both thought provoking and useful. At their heart, Snodgrass claims, the parables are indeed Stories with Intent, i.e. stories intended to address life as we know it and seek our obedience in living it out according to God's will.

One sentence in particular sent me deeper into my own reflections on how to address this parable while addressing others tomorrow. "To be a disciple of the kingdom," he has written, "means hearing and remaining focused on the message of the kingdom in such a way that one is defined by it" (p 175). In other words, the seed of the word of God is not something we are to define in the soil of life belonging to us. Our role is no more than simply to receive and keep receiving it until it begins to define us. Seed and soil alike are God's, and only those who both prepare for and tend them by the power and energy of his Spirit can really call themselves his disciples. "The key to spiritual formation," Snodgrass further says, "is the willingness to listen, the practice of the discipline of listening, and responding appropriately to the received word."

Such living out of God's word is clearly a life-long process, and progress in that process demands openness on our part, depth of mind and heart, a focused discipline that tends daily to tender shoots that grow both down and up in us from the divine seed and its impulses within. But it is crucial that we do not think of what results from that process as our doing. We do not end up defining the seed. The seed, in the process of our receiving and caring for it shapes and defines us.

The sobering truth of this parable is that mathematically the chances are three to one against our truly hearing and receiving God's word. But the good news is that all who do receive and obey it soon find themselves bringing forth the fruit it promises--some a hundred fold, some sixty, and some thirty.

Perhaps if we spent less time and energy trying so hard to understand and define the word and more time just making room for and allowing it to define us we would find our daily walk more satisfying and fruitful. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. And she who has eyes to see, let her see.