Jesus tells the people the parable of the seeds.
He explains it only to the disciples, not to the people. The reason He gives for that, is that the disciples are already knowing about the hidden things of the Kingdom of Heaven. If it is about knowledge understandable to the aware consciousness, as lots of textbooks in schools are meant to be for as well, one would expect that it is the people who would be most in need of an explanation, and not so much the disciples, because it is the people who knows the least.
Jesus doesn't seem to bother much that people don't immediately get the message of the parable.
And still he tells them. Isn't there an effect then? If not, why would Jesus have bothered to tell them?
Let's assume it does have an effect. Unlike us modern people, they didn't have a bible to have the explanation readily available as we do nowadays.
The circumstances back then are not really what Jesus likes.
- Materialism
- People making choices within the framework of the Law based on the wrong priorities between its aspects.
- Farizees who are convinced that they themselves operate more in the name of God than Jesus Himself.
- Farizees who are telling that only God can forgive, and don't believe that Jesus is representing God where He actually does what they only believe can be done by God. They would be expected the first to believe that Jesus is from God but somehow they just don't if Jesus who is looking too human, does it.
This is the hard situation Jesus comes into, and uses parables in.
His argument for using a parable is that the people's eyes don't see and their ears don't hear. You can fill in anything of the above mentioned as an obstacle for accepting Jesus' opinion about their mentality and lifestyle. They most likely are wrongly conditioned, and made resistant against anything or anyone that tries to interfere with the respect, fear, worries about earthly attachments which are in fact the obstacles to faith. It would trigger vehement reactions, if you make people feel like they are losing their foothold. Very confronting.
But if you tell a timeless story about a seed, it doesn't trigger this arsenal of worries, fears and allegiances. The defence mechanisms are not seeing, not hearing this as something that could be of any danger to the present mindset. It's just about a seed. People open themselves widely for it. And the story evades the defence mechanisms, and nestles in the memory undistorted, unmaimed, unharmed. It carries a working principle. The eyes may not see, the ears may not hear, but it is the mind which will link events. And after having heard Jesus talking, and not having understood it immediately, they may link the story to something they only afterwards come across, through association. And then they will remember the words of Jesus, and say "Jesus was right".
Jesus told his disciples not to speak in parables (of their own fabrication?). Speaking the right message in a parable requires that you have insight that is about deep principles which determine the synchronicity between types of events which make them fit to be used as a symbol. Seed has to do with LIFE and its earthly circumstances. An insight perhaps only Jesus really mastered and not his disciples.
Greets, Divinespark