The Gospel Without Roots

Metaphors only make sense when you have some experience with the thing being metaphorized.  If I say “cover your bases” to someone who has never heard of baseball, he wouldn’t have a clue what I meant by it.  If I described something as “the whole enchilada” to someone who knew nothing of the Mexican dish, my point would fall on deaf ears.  Common metaphors such as these have become a part of the colloquial tongue, but now and then you receive a puzzled look from someone who doesn’t get it.  To many modern readers of the Gospel, the gravity of Christ’s words is often missed due to a radically changed common experience that buries his parables and metaphors under a pile of disconnect.

My wife and I bought our first house in June of last year.  It’s a humble home, hidden in plain sight in the suburban landscape of our town in Northwest Ohio.  The house came with a modest backyard teeming with trees, bushes, vines, rocks, and roots alike.  A lack of regular maintenance, paired with the onset of Spring, produced a landscape requiring much work.  The metal fences on the property were transformed into wild hedges by winding, grasping vines.  The side walkway that connects the front and back yards became a jungle of weeds, thorns, and shrubbery.  Grass sprang high from the spaces between bricks in the back patio.  This was my project for many a Saturday that first summer- hacking, cutting, clearing, and pulling the overgrowth out of the ground.  My quest to make our property more sightly is ongoing, but it has given me a startling revelation.

The Gospel is seldom read today, and even more seldom is it understood.  Many regard it as irrelevant, or worse, a mere set of moral platitudes.  It struck me, as I labored under the August sun one day, pulling down endless vines that had colonized a small tree, why this might be the case.  The vines filled me with awe- from a single root in the ground an entire twisting and turning highway system had wrapped its way around every branch of this tree.  It was hard work removing them, and as I was doing so, I thought about what Jesus meant when he spoke of himself as the vine, and we as the branches.  And then something hit me- moderns have such a hard time accepting and understanding the Gospel because Christ spoke it to an audience of men and women with dirty hands.  

Ordinary people in first-century Galilee were poor peasants- fishermen, farmers, shepherds, and the like.  Their livelihood depended on tilling and keeping the earth and exercising lordship over the plants that grew and the animals that grazed.  Thus, it is fitting that our Lord taught these souls using parables and metaphors that would resonate deeply with them.  He spoke of natural things to describe heavenly things.  The examples are endless:

My yoke is easy, and my burden is light… (Matt. 11:28-30)
The tree is known by its fruit… (Matt. 12:33-37)
A sower went out to sow… (Matt. 13:3-9)
The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed… (Matt. 13:31-33)
I am the good shepherd… (Jn 10:14-16)
I am the vine, you are the branches… (Jn. 15:5)

To his original audience, Christ’s parables would have abounded with meaning.  Sowing seed for them was equivalent to survival; the account of seeds falling on a path, rocky ground, or among thorns would have caused them to shudder.  Receiving the Word of God as fertile soil receives a seed was a matter of life and death.  Vines produce branches, which must be tended and pruned to produce good fruit.  Every branch has its life in the vine- the winemakers of the time would have understood this well, and I only began to understand it in my backyard, some 2,000 years later.  Shepherds understand what it means to lead a flock, farmers know how a yoke tethers oxen together to equally share a load.  The hearers of these words would have instantly made the connections Jesus wanted them to make, for these parables were their lived experiences.

Is it any wonder why the seed today falls on rocky and thorny ground?  Most people have no sense of these things.  Ours is an age of radical disconnect.  How could we know what Christ means when he talks about seeds, trees, vines, and sheep when our lives consist of big box stores, touchscreens, and cheap plastic goods?  We don’t even know where our food comes from.  We live in this bizarre fantasy land where an abundance of every kind of food magically appears every day in massive grocery stores.  Food, the very thing that God chooses to become to have complete intimacy with us, is something we’ve completely lost connection with.  Our industrial approach to food is almost sacrilegious, an affront to Christ’s command that we ask our Father for “our daily bread”, both in the Eucharistic and in the provision that we require.  One can live his entire life using Doordash to destroy his body while consuming endless hours of entertainment to destroy his soul.  How can the words of the Gospels, dripping with the symbolism of the natural world, reach this man’s heart?  We are utterly disconnected from reality, so far removed from those first-century Jews to whom Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.  The all-encompassing consumerism of our time is incompatible with the Gospel, even at the level of understanding its basic message.  Progress has produced primitive minds, pure rationalism has bred sheer irrationality, and materialism has made a mere mockery of us all.