Posted on 09/18/2021 9:25:21 AM PDT by MurphsLaw
Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Luke 8:4–15
Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus explains the purpose of the parables: "Knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God has been granted to you; but to the rest, they are made known through parables so that they may look but not see, and hear but not understand."
The use of the word "para" in the New Testament signals the failures to see at various levels. The great metaphor here is blindness, a blindness which is identified with disobedience.
The parables of Christ are meant to highlight and point out this blindness, this willful refusal to see. They themselves, in their peculiar form, are judgments on those who cannot see in them signs of salvation.
The parables are often exercises whose purpose is to confuse and confound the hearer, overturning her expectations and upsetting her theological convictions. A parable does its work by turning our ordinary conception of the spiritual world upside-down. And we would be greatly remiss if we did not attend to the instruction that emerges from those startling, funny, off-putting, and strangely enlightening stories that Jesus loved to tell.
“This is the meaning of the parable.
The seed is the word of God.
Those on the path are the ones
who have heard,
but the Devil comes and takes away
the word from their hearts
that they may not believe and be
saved.+++
This is just an email with a link to a for-profit website that isn’t even associated with said email.
You’re deceitfully pimping the heretic’s website.
What makes you think I read the heretic’s blather?
I’m merely pointing out deception on your part.
Mind-reading again.
And you're wrong again.
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