Hopewit

The Parable of the Seed   Thomas Yoder Neufeld, 1979   Matthew 13 is a gardener’s guide to proper soil preparation , planting and harvesting of crops .   Or is it? Jesus’ parables, allegories and metaphors follow in a long tradition of how teaching for retention has been done through the ages. Greek philos o pher, Aesop, wrote the parable of “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf ” in about 600 BC, making him contemporary to the prophet Jerem iah, Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel . The Old Testament is primarily an account of the relationship of the Hebrew people to Yahweh and to others through the medium of allegorical stories: Creation, Tower of Babel, Jonah and the Big Fish , even the sojourn in Egypt and the celebrated Exodus through the Reed Sea may be better described as a story told for its allegorical teaching , than as an historical record. (For the debate over the historicity of the Exodus, Just search "Is the Exodus real?" or similar.) The chapter begins with the par...

  … but what if they threw a war and no one came? This anti-war slogan from the 1970s apparently did little to change public opinion that … what? …war is inevitable given human nature? For centuries, Mennonites, Quakers, Doukhobors and various secular peace movements have responded to the appeal to fight in wars by refusing to show up. They’ve always been minorities; the consensus being that the right, the patriotic response to aggression is counter-aggression-in-kind. W.B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1920 just after World War I and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. An exceedingly difficult time for humanity with little reason to hope for the Peaceable Kingdom any time soon. He might well have been writing about today: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of pas...