November 3 - Mark 4:1-20

Sometimes it feels as if our modern, western Evangelicalism has no place in it for a Gospel as difficult as the one Christ announced during His ministry.  We have turned him into a far more ameliorative leader, intent on making people happy through a soft humanism.  Yet He quotes from Isaiah to remind His disciples that He does not intend all to hear; He does not heal all; He does not save everyone.  Sometimes it surprises us that the truths of God do not flex to the demands and needs of humanity, rather Christ forces us to bend around Him.  The parable of the seeds makes this point.  The sower does not tend the soil, he does not fertilize, or plow.  The sower casts that which brings life but the soil's condition determine's the seed's future.  We know theologically that God must save but that ought not dull the sharp edge of Jesus' teaching.  No matter how great the news, it will fail to bear fruit in the lives of people who allow it to be choked out, who pay it no heed, or whose intransigence renders their hearts too hard.
I believe that we, like Isaiah, should ache over this part of Christ's message.  We should weep with those who weep; Christ Himself cried for Jerusalem.  But the costs of sin are serious and it causes suffering.  I think it is important to remember that the narrowness of the road leading to salvation does not represent a failure either of God's imagination or of His kindness.  Rather these are reminders of sin's pervasiveness and its power to twist truth into a lie.  It is unsettling to read about Christ stopping short in His ministry but maybe that is because we have not fully understood what He came to do.  He came to assert His dominion, to save the sheep that know His voice, and build a kingdom which will never fail