Matthew 13:1-17 Pastor Stephen “Tig” Intagliata
Summary: In the midst of all the noise and voices competing for our attention, Jesus says “to those who have ears to hear, listen!”. As followers of Jesus, we are called to selectively hear his voice above all the others, and not only hear but respond by putting into practice what he calls us to do.
How many of you have heard the term “selective hearing”? In which settings have you heard it used?
It’s sometimes used in the home, between spouses or between parents and children. Sometimes selective hearing is used to tune out something we don’t want to hear, so we pretend not to hear it.
Like in this picture. Presumably a spouse is being asked to take out the trash, but he pretends not to hear it. But when he hears “dinner’s ready”, he hears that loud and clearly.
In the bottom cartoon, the daughter is wondering why her father doesn’t hear her. It could be that he’s tuning the women out, or there’s another possibility—maybe he literally did not hear them, and needs to get his hearing checked.
I’ll admit that both of these possibilities have been true with me. On one hand, there are times when I’m so absorbed or I pretend to be absorbed–in what I’m reading, or watching or scrolling, that I tune out to what Karen or other people around me are saying, especially when it’s something that I don’t want to hear—
Maybe it’s something that’s been on the “honey-do” list for a while that I want to avoid, or maybe it’s an honest truth about me that’s too painful to hear, so I block it out and don’t listen.
And then there’s the other possibility, that I literally don’t hear when someone is talking to me. Did you notice I have hearing aids now? I was practicing “selective hearing” and not picking up things that people we saying to me,
So Karen encouraged me to get checked out, and it turns out that I have some hearing loss. So now I don’t have any excuse for not hearing or listening to what people are saying to me! Oh, that’s a bummer!
I don’t know about you, but really hearing and listening to people is hard work. Paying attention to people and being present with them is challenging in a world where there are so many distractions and so much noise around us.
I saw a stat recently which said that the average attention span of humans was 12 seconds in the year 2000, and it went down to 8.25 seconds by 2013. No doubt the smartphone had something to do with that, and I would guess that now in 2025, our attention spans are way below 8 seconds.
It’s pretty sad when us humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish, which is 9 seconds! I can actually remember times when I had stare downs with my goldfish, and the goldfish usually won!
I would suspect that human attention spans were much longer in Jesus’ day, but judging by the number of times Jesus told his disciples to listen, it’s a sure bet that they had trouble listening to him, and also had their share of distractions and voices competing for their attention.
Just in our chapter today, Matthew 13, Jesus uses the word “listen” or “hear” 14 times! And what he says in verse 9 he repeats several times throughout his three year ministry.
Let’s look at that verse and how some different versions translate it:
“Everyone who has ears should pay attention
He who has ears, let him hear.
Let the person who has ears, listen.
Are you listening to this? Really listening?” (the Message)
What does it mean to really listen to Jesus, and have ears that actually hear him?
I like the way the Know Jesus Christ website says it. It says:
To truly “have ears to hear” is to slow down, reflect deeply, and let the truth of Christ reshape our lives.
It’s a divine summons, a spiritual wake-up call urging every individual not merely to hear the sounds of truth—but to comprehend, internalize, and act upon the message of the Kingdom of God.
What I hear this saying is that hearing Jesus culminates in obedience to him, not just hearing with our hears but putting his message into practice in our lives.
And like this quote says, the core of Jesus’ message has to do with the Kingdom of God that he inaugurated when he began his ministry.
Jesus said many times things like, “The kingdom of God is at hand”, and “the kingdom of God is within you”, and the “kingdom of God is near,
And the way that he described it was often through parables, stories saying what the kingdom is like, using everyday things that people in his day were familiar with. In chapter 13 alone, Jesus tells 8 different parables to help us understand better what his kingdom is like:
First, he tells the parable of the soils, which we heard in our scripture reading. The farmer sows seeds in four different types of soil, and only in only one of those soils do the seeds grow up to produce fruit.
The seeds represent the words of the kingdom, and the three that don’t produce fruit reject Jesus’ kingdom. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says in his commentary that this rejection has to do with the dangers of wealth and how it has the power to distract us and shape our priorities in life.
The next parable is about the wheat and the weeds, or tares, and here Jesus is saying that there will be teachings and people who are in opposition to his kingdom, and like weeds, and they will grow alongside the wheat, the good news of the kingdom, and in the end everything will be sorted out.
In the third parable, Jesus compares his kingdom to a mustard seed, that starts small but over time grows larger and larger.
The fourth parable about the leaven, or yeast, is similar to the mustard seed in that yeast is a small part of the ingredients in bread, but quietly but steadily it works to expand the dough to make a large loaf of bread.
Then in the second half of chapter 13, Jesus tells four more parables. First, the kingdom is like a man who finds buried treasure in a field, and sells everything he has to buy it.
Next, it’s like a pearl so precious that a jeweler sells all the other valuables he has to buy that one pearl.
Then, the kingdom is like a net that brings in a big haul of fish, and the fishermen separate out the good fish from the bad fish.
And finally, there’s a parable of a well-trained disciple who brings out both old and new things out of his treasure chest, maybe representing wisdom from the Old Testament and wisdom from the teachings of Jesus.
There are a couple of main themes that I picked up from these 8 parables. First, Jesus’ kingdom keeps growing over time, and nothing can stop it. All the evil forces of the world whose values are contrary to God’s kingdom cannot extinguish it, no matter how strong they seem to be. That gives me hope in today’s world.
The other main theme I see here is the incredible worth of the vision and the values of the kingdom of God inaugurated by Jesus. I love the way that author Philip Yancey describes the vision and values of the kingdom in his classic book, The Jesus I Never Knew. He says:
“The kingdom of God will grow on earth as the church creates an alternative society demonstrating what the world is not, but one day will be:
A society that welcomes people of all races and social classes, that is characterized by love and not polarization, that cares most for its weakest members, that stands for justice and righteousness in a world enamored with selfishness and decadence, a society in which members compete for the privilege of serving one another—that is what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God.”
What a precious and beautiful thing God’s kingdom is in our world, right? In a world plagued by the ugliness of racism, in a world where a person’s worth is often measured by how rich or poor they are, in a world where hatred divides us in so many ways,
In a world where the rich love to flaunt their wealth with Great Gatsby-style parties, while at the same time cutting the SNAP subsidies that people depend on to just put food on the table,
In a world where stockholders stand up and cheer to make their CEO not a millionaire or a billionaire, but a trillionare—you can’t get any more decadent and despicable and anti-kingdom of God than that.
In a world where people get more satisfaction out of seeing people rounded up, imprisoned and deported than they do in serving their neighbors in need,
In this kind of world, this world that we live in today, Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is desperately needed because it values the things that matter most in the eyes of God—
the inherent dignity and worth of all people, the importance of caring for people who are hurting and vulnerable, and the power of love—love that is generous and compassionate, that forgives, love that heals and reconciles instead of harms and divides.
Friends, Jesus wants us to hear and respond to the message of his kingdom, because it’s the most valuable, most precious, most needed thing in our world. J.R.R. Tolkein had this in mind when he wrote the book, The Hobbit. Hey, that was the theme of our Fall Festival, right?
In the Hobbit, the evil dragon Smaug is guarding a big pile of gold, the most valuable treasure in Middle -Earth. Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist hobbit in the story, knows the value of that pot of gold,
And he is obsessed with getting it. The word that Tolkien uses to describe Bilbo’s passion for the treasure is “staggerment”. He says:
“There were no words left to express (Bilbo’s) staggerment… his heart was filled and pierced with enchantment… And he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.”
What a powerful way to describe what happens to people when they capture in their minds and their hearts the incredible value and beauty of God’s kingdom, and I think we could say also a relationship with the head of that kingdom, Jesus.
Bilbo Baggins was so focused and so enchanted with that treasure that it took away his fear of the dragon, and he was willing to sacrifice even himself to lay hold of it.
Friends, does the beauty and the value of Jesus and his kingdom capture us to the point of desiring to give ourselves to the cause of living it out in our world?
Can we echo the words of the prophet Isaiah who foretold the coming of Jesus when he said:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feed of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
Can we agree with the early Anabaptist leader Wofgang Brandhuber, who reflected on this verse in Isaiah and applied it to the real world when he said,
“How blessed are the eyes who look to satisfy the needs of the neighbor.”
Friends, there’s a big challenge we face in living the kingdom values like serving our neighbors–as Jesus alluded to in his parables, there are weeds growing along with the wheat, there are bad fish mixed in with the good ones in the world.
Earlier in Matthew, Jesus gives an example of this when he talks about false prophets who are like wolves in sheep’s clothing, mixed in with the sheep in order to lead them astray or devour them.
The early church leaders Peter and Paul also warn of these false teachers in their letters to the Christians in the first churches:
2 Peter 2:1: But false prophets also arose among the people. In the same way, false teachers will come among you. They will introduce destructive opinions…
Romans 16:17–Brothers and sisters, I urge you to watch out for people who create divisions and problems against the teaching that you learned. Keep away from them.
The climate we live in today has the same dynamic as the early church’s. There are voices in the church that are teaching and acting in ways that are contrary to the values of Jesus’ kingdom—
Some of these voices are stoking people’s fears toward immigrants and people of other faiths, like Muslims. These groups are being scapegoated and demonized, causing Christians to see them as enemies to hate rather than people created in God’s image to love.
Some of the voices are saying that the United States needs to become a Christian nation, favoring Christians in its laws and policies, doing this through gaining political power—this is Christian Nationalism, and I believe it’s a weed, a heresy in the church today that we need to reject it.
It’s easy to get sucked into these false teachings, that’s why we need to keep listening to Jesus, keep paying attention to what he taught about his kingdom, and tune out and speak out against things that are contrary to it.
So let’s keep reading the gospels, keep discerning in our community here at Daniels Run Peace Church what the Spirit of Jesus is saying to us and how we are invited to respond to it.
Twice in the gospel of Matthew, we hear the voice of God say, “This is my son whom I love: listen to him!” It’s said at Jesus’ baptism and also at his transfiguration. And it’s something for us to remember every day of our lives.
Amidst all of the distractions and noise around us, Jesus says, for those who have eears to hear, listen. This is one of those situations where selective listening is the right thing to do.
I want to close with a quote from Matt Woodley’s commentary on Matthew:
“When Jesus captures our eyes with true treasure, we will pay attention to him…
We don’t listen because Jesus—or some other religious authority—is screaming in our ears. We listen because we’re in love with the one who loves us. We listen because this God of ours invites us into his love, calling us his beloved daughters and sons…
And finally, we listen because God’s love compels us to love others…As we listen to Jesus, we also long for others to hear his voice and respond to his love.”
May it be so. AMEN
