Sayings of Jesus: “Whoever Has Ears to Hear, Let Them Hear”

In Luke 8, Matthew 13, and Mark 4, we come across the famous Parable of the Sower. Passages such as this one, which appear in all three of the so-called ‘Synoptic’ Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), are part of what's called the ‘triple tradition’. Commonality in content is a result of the writers’ shared sources, though scholars do not all agree on what those sources were (given that we have none of them) or who ‘borrowed’ what from whom.

Mark has the least material unique to his Gospel (under 10%), Luke has the most (close to half), with Matthew around 25%.  

In any event, the Sower is not our subject for today. Rather, it’s some curious, if not also troubling, statements from Jesus that surround it.   

In all three passages, Jesus tells the parable to a crowd, without explaining it, leaving them with the curious challenge: “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

The disciples then ask Jesus (we assume privately) what the Sower parable means. In Matthew, they’re asking a broader question: “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” (suggesting that it’s not just this one they were enquiring about, but parables generally).

More troubling than merely curious, however, is Jesus’ follow-up, citing Isaiah 6. Basically (my paraphrase) he says, “I’ve let you guys into the secrets of the kingdom of God”—what these ‘kingdom’ parables are ‘saying’—“but because I’ve used parables as the vehicle, it’s concealed from everyone else. I do that because, as Isaiah said a long time ago, most people listen with hard hearts, not soft hearts. They’re only ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ superficially. They don’t really want to ‘get’ it, because then they’d have to do something about it.”

What’s troubling in all three passages is the strong implication that Jesus is deliberately speaking in parables to make it harder for people to understand; his intention is for them not to understand!

Luke’s Jesus says, “I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.’”

It’s hard to imagine any preacher worth their salt seeing that as their goal on a Sunday morning.  Not many evangelical guest speakers would be invited back if that were the congregation’s feedback. Indeed, preachers are taught to go out of their way to make their talks as simple as possible for people so they will easily understand them.

Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong all along.    

Popularity with an audience—a simple message that’s encouraging, comforting, a teensy-weensy bit biblically-informative (while avoiding anything evangelically controversial), and above all, entertaining—is how evangelical preachers make a name for themselves and get invited back.

On those grounds, Jesus would rarely if ever have passed the test; certainly in his propensity for using parables.

You may say, but modern preachers also use pictures and illustrations—they do it all the time. Yes, but they’re doing that to help people get it. Not to conceal things so they don’t get it. And—the big difference—we invariably explain our pictures and illustrations to make sure people get it.

So by privileging the disciples—explaining to them privately (as he then did the Parable of the Sower in our passage)—but denying that to the crowd, was Jesus being a bit ‘Calvinist’? Predestining some to be saved, but not others? It certainly could look like that.

But let’s approach it from a different direction: what the listeners at the time were supposed to do with parables in the first place.

In church, today, we’re used to just listening to a sermon, thinking about it individually, applying it (or not) personally, and moving on. That wasn’t how it worked in Jesus’ day. Listeners were highly engaged.

Jesus’ parables belong to the broader Jewish literary tradition known as mashal, linked to the practice of midrash (deriving from ‘to seek’, or ‘to investigate’)—which was done communally, in groups, not individually.    

In the way we tell stories, there’s invariably a clear ‘moral’ to the story at the end. That wasn’t the case in Jesus’ day. The story in a parable was more of a riddle; the meaning was deliberately open-ended. To find the meaning, you had to do some seeking, which invariably involved debating (even arguing) together. The very nature of a parable always meant at least some element of concealment at the outset.

More than that, parables were often deliberately subversive, such that the ‘plain’ and ‘obvious’ face-value meaning (that we today might assume) is very likely to be a misreading. Just like in a whodunit, the least likely explanation during the story often transpires to be the outcome at the conclusion of the story.     

The kinds of questions being debated would include who the story's characters represent. Who is God in the story? (Is anyone God in the story?) Which character would we have been? What’s the relevance of a wedding setting? Why did the shepherd leave ninety-nine sheep all alone? Who was the most lost in the Lost Son parable—the father, the older son, or the younger brother (or were they all lost in different ways)? How does the ‘lostness’ of the son relate to the lostness of the sheep and the coin in the preceding parables? How do the characters who suffered the loss in those three parables relate (and why)? And so on, and so on.

Truths were not just delivered as propositional statements; they were enmeshed in stories, leaving ample room for different readings (in our language today, room for the Holy Spirit to speak to people in various ways—one story, but with more than one application).

The risk of slightly bizarre individualistic interpretations would be mitigated by the wider community involvement (unlike today, where we have the charismatic “God told me” phenomenon to live with).

This is all very different from our contemporary expectation of a preacher telling us “This is what this parable/text/verse is saying”—where we’re conditioned to expect one fixed meaning, about which we assume (or we’re told) the text is speaking authoritatively.        

So back to our headline: “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” How do we ensure we’re included in those who do have ‘ears to hear’?

With apologies to any Calvinists reading this, I don’t think we should worry about being excluded because God has predestined us not to hear. I suspect few Calvinists will be reading anything I write, so the concern is probably hypothetical, but the manifold anxieties Calvinist theology generates for people need to be acknowledged.

Three thoughts (yes, I’m a creature of modern sermon habits).

Number one, self-evidently, we must want to hear—meaning more than just ‘in one ear, out the other’.

Number two, we must be willing to invest in hearing. Devote time to it. Maybe re-watch the talk. Look at the scriptural passages again. Reflect on it. Pray about it!  

And number three, crucially, we must be willing to be changed as a result of truly hearing—not just God changing us in some remote way, but willing to change ourselves (how we think, what we do) as a consequence of what we’re hearing.

It’s this last feature that I think Jesus especially had in mind. Information on its own—without application leading to transformation—has negligible saving value.  

And—dare I say—we ought to be doing as Jesus’ first audiences did, hearing and debating a passage’s meaning together, in a communal setting. We need to break free from our modern individualistic ways.

Scripture speaks in three senses: one, in what it was saying at the time to its first audience; two, in what it says universally, to everyone, in all times; and three, what it says to us, personally or corporately, through the Holy Spirit, in our particular place and time.

We should want to be hearing in all of these senses—and where appropriate, responding.