Matthew’s parables remind us that we’re not the original audience

Introduction: Do You Know Any Farmers?

Do you know any farmers?

They’re a tough and resilient bunch. For example, this peer reviewed paper reports, “In general, this study found that farmers have a higher threshold of pain compared to nonfarmers.” That’s the idea behind medical satirist, Dr. Glaucomflecken’s, series of videos about “country medicine,” like this one:

Why is this video funny? The Wikipedia entry on satire helps us. The article describes militant irony: “This ‘militant’ irony or sarcasm often professes to approve of (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to question.”

What are the things accepted in the video that are the target of the criticism?

• The resiliency of farmers?

• Social norms in community settings?

• Underfunded and under-resourced healthcare in rural settings?

Clearly the effort here is not to offer a critical review of medical satire! But this is relevant to our project! Let’s say more about why. Last week we talked about parables—Hebrew mashalim, Greek parabolé, meaning a comparison or to be thrown alongside, respectively. In effect, a parable is an effort to talk about one thing by talking about something else.

Nonfarmers like me can get onto the joke that Dr. Glaucomflecken is making because we have a good enough general understanding that farmers are tough and country medicine is distinct from the practice of medicine in large, academic medical centers.

We’ll return to this point quickly, but first, I want to get directly into the text.

Matthew 13:24-30

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

²⁴ He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field, ²⁵ but while everybody was asleep an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. ²⁶ So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. ²⁷ And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ ²⁸ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹ But he replied, ‘No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. ³⁰ Let both of them grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

What struck you about today’s assigned gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary? More pointedly, do you know what this parable is about? Or do you think you know? Don’t answer yet!

Parables Rely on Insider Knowledge

Let me show you one more video from Dr. G’s series on country medicine.

This one is funny, too, because we share a cultural reference about July 4th as a holiday with explosives and drinking, but wait, why is “Emergency Medicine” wearing bicycle gear? What’s up with that? I’m not a doctor, so I’m not totally sure that I know! I can venture a guess that this is about their personalities as fit, energetic, competitive, and maybe Emergency Medicine physicians cycle into work, but these are pretty speculative interpretations.

Dr. Glaucomflecken (real name, Will Flanery) is an actual physician, and he created the character! And another physician, an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Bon Ku (an actual real life friend of mine), says that “Emergency Medicine” is one of his favorite characters!

See, for us non-physicians, we aren’t in on the joke to understand why Emergency Medicine is donning bicycle gear. And Jasper, I don’t fully understand that joke either. He tested the PH balance of his soil, and I understand the plain meaning of that, but not being a farmer, I lack the insider knowledge to know why, how often, or the significance of Jasper’s bragging about the PH level of his soil.

Do we know what the July 4th video is about? Sure, to an extant. Would the video make even more sense if we were physicians? Probably so. If we were farmers? Probably more so then, too.

This is the cautionary tale about parables! The synoptic gospels authors’ incorporation of parables tell us that these were important instructional tools in the first century Jesus movement, but we must remind ourselves that we are not the audience of the parables!

The gospel authors weren’t writing to us. Given the apocalyptic theology of both the mid-first-century Pauline epistles and the late-first century gospels—not to mention that general apocalyptic Jewish literature in this same period—I think it would be a tough case to make that the gospel authors even considered that a 21st century audience were to exist at all.

This is the caution and careful consideration we must carry into any contextual discussion of the biblical literature.

The Tradition of Israel is Agrarian

Appearing in The Atlantic in 1914, J. Russell Smith, a geographer, educator, conservationist, and contributor to modernizing the Quaker movement, writes:

The story of the Garden of Eden has been extensively used by those who would influence human action. But strange to say, one of its most evident lessons appears to have been overlooked. It is for the farmer that the well-known drama has the plainest teaching of all.

Let’s pause to celebrate the elegance of the line, “It is for the farmer that the well-known drama has the plainest teaching of all.” What a great line! Anyway…

The tradition of Israel is an agrarian tradition. Let’s say more about this.

This 2016 article by NPR summarizes the work of genetic researchers studying the genomes of ancient DNA (aDNA), combined with archeology, to trace the origin of diet, agriculture, and hunting practices. Citing a study in the peer reviewed publication Science, authors for NPR piece write:

The idea that farming began in a single population came from initial archaeological discoveries in one part of the Mideast — the Southern Levant, says Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t involved in the study. But more recent excavations have shown that there was an “explosion of people” tinkering with farming all over the Fertile Crescent.

Authors for the publication Nature, summarizing a study appearing on the preprint server bioRxiv1 report:

Some 11,000 years ago, humans living in the ancient Middle East region called the Fertile Crescent shifted from a nomadic existence, based on hunting game and gathering wild plants, to a more sedentary lifestyle that would later give rise to permanent settlements. Over thousands of years, these early farmers domesticated the first crops and transformed sheep, wild boars and other creatures into domestic animals.

The surprising conclusion in both studies is that farming developed independently in two geographical regions that challenged the prior view of more monolithic development, but for our purposes here, I want to highlight one more finding reported in the Nature article:

Two Middle Eastern populations independently developed farming and then spread the technology to Europe, Africa and Asia, according to the genomes of 44 people who lived thousands of years ago in present-day Armenia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Iran.

I began this section with a comment about the Garden of Eden as a sort of symbolic claim about the central nature of agriculture in the biblical literature, but it simply is the case that the Bible frequently centers agriculture. Shit, this essay lists a 100 verses on farming!

My claim is this: The ancient biblical communities developed agricultural practices more than 11,000 years ago, spread and refined these practices, and the social and economic context of these agrarian communities influenced the Bible.

This parable about wheat and weeds that we’re reading this week would make perfect sense to the original audience, and we’re not the audience! We can make ourselves the audience, as we’re doing here in this very newsletter post, but like the country doctor’s Emergency Medicine character or Jasper, our full understanding of Matthew’s parables is tenuous. We must be careful not to impose our limited understanding onto the text! 21st century context simply will not capture the meaning in Matthew’s first century and its oppressed, poor, agrarian audience.

On the Meaning of the Parable

In addition to discussing parables generally, last week we also mentioned how popular the parabolic form of instruction was to first century Judaism, and we gestured toward gospel parallels and extra-biblical sources of parables. This week’s parable is also told in the Gospel of Thomas, but in a truncated form. I think this is important to point out.

Here is Saying 57 from the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, “The kingdom of the father is like a man who had good seed. His enemy came by night and sowed weeds among the good seed. The man did not allow them to pull up the weeds; he said to them, ‘I am afraid that you will go intending to pull up the weeds and pull up the wheat along with them.’ For on the day of the harvest the weeds will be plainly visible, and they will be pulled up and burned.”

This commentary from The Five Gospels quoted in selected commentaries from the Gospel of Thomas concludes:

Funk and Hoover write: “Although the version in Thomas lacks the appended allegorical interpretation, there is a distant echo of the final apocalyptic judgment made explicit in Matthew. This note is alien to Thomas, so it must have been introduced into the Christian tradition at an early date, probably by the first followers of Jesus who had been disciples of John the Baptist. Thomas retained the parable because it suggested, for his readers, that there were two kinds of persons in the world, those ‘in the know’ (members of the sect) and those dull of hearing.” (The Five Gospels, p. 505)

I think this commentary is interesting because it suggests Thomas is later than Matthew, or that both Thomas and Matthew were drawing from a common source at different times. The sense of the eschaton seemingly mattered more to the Matthean author than to Thomas’s, in so far as we follow The Five Gospels account. Incorporating themes of righteousness and the coming end time (“until the time of harvest”) are consistent with Matthean themes. Would the ingathering of crops and discernment between wheat and weeds carry special relevance to the original audience?

The Working preacher, who offers commentary on the lectionary for use primarily by Christian clergy, writes:

Matthew uses the Greek term zizania, which in modern botanical terms refers to the genus of wild rice grasses. What Matthew most likely refers to, however, is darnel or cockle, a noxious weed that closely resembles wheat and is plentiful in Israel. The difference between darnel and real wheat is evident only when the plants mature and the ears appear. The ears of the real wheat are heavy and will droop, while the ears of the darnel stand up straight.

Here the agrarian context matters quite a lot! The original audience would have familiarity and likely a visual attachment to this parable. In effect, the first century audience would “see” in their mind’s eye exactly what the parable teller would be communicating: these weeds look exactly like the wheat we intend to harvest, and we can’t tell them apart until harvesting! Where we moderns have to work some to understand all the imagery, the ancients would immediately understand the context of the parable. I submit this should rightly inform our interpretation.

Harvest as Eschaton

From the familiarity of the agricultural context, the ancient audience likely understood the further references to harvesting as both judgment and the coming end time. Consider this expression of judgment articulated in agricultural terms from Hosea 6:11, some of the oldest material in the Hebrew Bible:

¹¹ For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed.

When I would restore the fortunes of my people

Also an ancient text, written in the exilic context, with material warning against destruction at the hands of surrounding empire, Jeremiah 51:33 cautions:

³³ For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel:
Daughter Babylon is like a threshing floor
    at the time when it is trodden;
yet a little while
    and the time of her harvest will come.

Consider Joel 3:13, a minor prophetic text that scholars have considerable difficulty dating, but for our interest here, preserved manuscripts of Joel were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Relevant to today’s post in particular, the book opens with a discussion of the agricultural damage following a plague of locusts, and from the chapter I quote here, the coming of judgment at the hands of Judah’s (Juadahite; Judean) enemies is expressed in agricultural terms.

¹³ Put in the sickle,
    for the harvest is ripe.
Go in, tread,
    for the winepress is full.
The vats overflow,
    for their wickedness is great.

Conclusion

In the end, what can be gleaned from this wide-ranging discussion of contemporary satire and ancient imagery? It is notable that the terms by which the biblical authors appeal draw from their own historical circumstances. For the parable of the wheat and weeds, we should be careful about imposing our 21st century ideas onto the text that was written (spoken?) to a particular first century audience who would be deeply familiar with wheat harvesting practices. Interpreting those familiar agricultural practices through the framework of judgment from the Scriptures of Israel would also be natural and familiar to the gospel’s audience.

Just like Thomas and Matthew retell the parable in somewhat different ways, our reading of this parable today may be shaped by our particular interests, and those interests are not the interests of the first century.

Remember that we’re not Jasper! And that should limit the confidence with which we draw conclusions from this mashal.