Jesus begins Matthew 13 with a parable of the sower. It’s a parable about a farmer who sowed seed into four kinds of soil: the path, the rocky soil, the thorns and weeds, and finally the good soil. This parable serves as an analogy about how people receive the message of the Kingdom.(v.19) Not everyone who hears the Kingdom message will accept it. “For the people’s hearts have become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes.”(v.15) At the end of Matthew 13, the parable becomes embodied in the reception of Jesus in his hometown of Nazareth. They are amazed and shocked that this mere carpenters son is teaching and healing with miraculous powers. And so “they took offence at him.”(v.57) Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth foreshadows the wider rejection of his message and ministry by his Jewish contemporaries. Their challenge to his prophetic and healing powers is a distant sign of the violent challenge that would come from the chief priests, and the Roman soldiers, right at the end.

We are reminded in the parable of the sower and Jesus’ hometown rejection, that the message of the Kingdom is not something that is always joyfully received. As N.T. Wright suggests, “If new creation and new life are going forward, those who have invested heavily in the old creation, the old ways of life, are bound to be offended.” As we journey through the season of Lent, we want to name that following Jesus will sometimes come with rejection from without —-and from within our own hearts. And so we need to ask ourselves: Where are our hearts calloused? Where might we be resistant to the message of Jesus? What is the condition of our own soil?