There’s an old chestnut from the teaching profession about a teacher who asked his or her class to write an essay about Abraham Lincoln. One kid handed in a paper that began “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he helped his father build.”

Now, the kid’s heart was in the right place, but he was so enamored with the myth of Abraham Lincoln that he kind of mixed things up and made it seem that Abe was so eager to help his Dad, that he helped him build the log cabin before he was born.

Sometimes, what happens after an event, or after a story is told overshadows the original information or the original story. It prevents us from seeing the story as it began. That’s why I read the long version of today’s Gospel. Because Matthew took a parable of Jesus’ and used it as a teaching tool thirty years after Jesus spoke the words. And the difference is the difference between a parable and an allegory.

An allegory assigns a meaning to each person or detail in a story. A parable tells a story that has only one point, no matter what’s going on in the story. And so, even though most versions of the Sower and the Seed are revelation, they are two different revelations.

It’s very difficult for us to hear the original story because we know the second version so well. And every time we hear it, we begin to do what Matthew did in the 80’s. He explained the apparent failure of the preaching of the Gospel by assigning motives to each of the places where the seed fell, to explain to people why, if the Word of God was truly the Word of God, and if Jesus was truly the Son of God, people either didn’t listen, or didn’t understand, or rejected what they heard. That was not the intention of Jesus’ parable. Jesus’ parable was intended only to show the immense generosity of God – that no matter what happens, God will make things come right. In order to understand it, I’m going to tell you three brief stories.

I went to a large Catholic grammar school as a kid. We had a parish with four priests in it – a pastor, two assistant pastors, and a guy who lived with us and worked at the Chancery office. And each of the priests approached the teachings of the Church in a different way. Well, one day, one of the assistant pastors came in to talk to the children. I was probably in sixth or seventh grade at the time. He had just been to the hospital, and he apparently must have been really in turmoil as a result, because the story he told us was this, “Boys and Girls, I just came from the hospital. I went to give the Last Rites to a man who was dying. And as I entered his room he threw me out! Boys and Girls, that person will probably never go to heaven because he rejected God’s final offer of grace.”

Is that true? Probably not. But this man was so upset that he delivered this opinion to us as though it was doctrine.

One of the other priests who lived in the parish was known as the priest who took care of the troubled kids, the juvenile delinquents. After he came home at night, he’d deliberately go out to buy the evening paper so he could wander around the neighborhood looking for the ne’er-do-wells – the kids who were on truancy report, the kids whose parents had given up trying to discipline them, the kids who were hanging out, smoking, and all that kind of stuff. He dragged them by the ear into confession. Right then and there, he’d make them go to confession. And I was friends with him too, but I wasn’t that kind of kid.

I asked him one time, “Why do you do that? You know they’re only going to do the same things again.”

He said, “Because, we really don’t understand the mercy of God. We are all too judgmental. Who knows if maybe it’s just that one time in confession, that one experience of God’s grace, that God wants that young man or young woman to have in order to be with Him for all eternity?”

During St. John Paul II’s first visit to the United States, when he was here in New York, he had a huge, huge Youth Rally in Madison Square Garden. And it was pretty hard to get a ticket for that Youth Rally. But I had a number of young people in my parish who also were going to the local Catholic high school, and some of them, who were in honors classes and stuff like that, were given tickets to go to the rally.

And I watched that rally on television. John Paul came out and wild yelling, waving, and screaming, all that kind of thing, then he began to speak. And he laid it all on the line. No premarital sex. No drugs. This, that, and the other thing. One punchline after another. And every time he said one of the things, all the kids cheered, yelled and screamed.

A couple of weeks after the rally, I happened to see this one young man, whom I knew very well, and I knew a lot of his friends very well. I said, “You were at the rally, weren’t you?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “I have a question for you. How come - I know what you guys do, cause I hear your confessions – how come you cheered for the Pope when he said all those things that contradict your lifestyle?”

And he said to me, “Because, when we’re with the Pope we feel one way, but when we’re with our friends we feel another way.”

See, we have a tendency to hear the parable through Jesus’ explanation of the parable, which is really Matthew’s explanation. And so we see the hard pan road, and the rocky soil, and all the thistles and thorns, we see those as separate people. THEY didn’t accept the Word of God. THEY didn’t accept the Word of God. They rejected it. They fell away. But the purpose of the parable suggests that we are all, at one time or another in our lives, the good soil, the rocky soil, the weeds. We aren’t always one thing.

Jesus says that, despite the fact that sometimes we are this way, and sometimes we are that way, in the end He will bring us to a great harvest.