The Hidden Teachings of Jesus

On Sunday, July 12, 2026 I was a guest-preacher at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego, California. Here is the video and the transcript of the 10:30 sermon.

Hello St. Paul’s! Please be seated.

Did Jesus keep secrets? Did he hold something back? Is there such a thing as “the hidden teachings of Jesus?”

And this question too—did the Rabbi from Nazareth, the Master Teacher, sometimes struggle to impart the wisdom he himself seemed to embody?

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew opens a door though which we might engage in that inquiry, and I want to walk through that door with you this morning.

The Parable of the Sower appears in all three of the synoptic gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke. And in all three versions it unfolds in pretty much the same way.

When I was invited to speak today, and when I got the readings, I was surprised to see that our lectionary excluded about nine verses—the middle part—what is to my mind the most interesting part—and that’s the part I want to focus on with you this morning.

So as we just heard, Jesus was met with a large crowd—so big in fact that he climbed in a boat and pushed away from the shore in order to be seen and heard by as many folks as possible.

“Then he told them many things in parables,” Matthew tells us, but we only get this one. And it’s a doozy. But I’m haunted by all of the parables of Jesus we don’t have.

“Listen,” Jesus said, “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil they withered away. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

And then Jesus said what he said at the end of many parables: “If you have ears, hear.”

And in our reading today we skipped over the next nine verses—in my mind the best part. Here’s what we skipped:

Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”

And Mark’s version makes it even clearer, that this conversation is happening long after Jesus’s Sermon on the Shore.

It’s later, it’s backstage, it’s probably nighttime. His disciples seem genuinely puzzled. And they say to him, and I’m paraphrasing: Jesus, why do you talk like that? These people, they just want to want to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, of the Kingdom of Heaven. Why do you speak in riddles? Why can’t you just speak plainly?

And again, Jesus’s response to his disciples is, “Look, to you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.”

So a portrait is emerging in this scene that there are two levels of awareness, and therefore the Master Teacher needs to use two different teaching methodologies, two different pedagogical styles—one for the insiders and one for the outsiders. And the parables are for the outsiders like us.

Insiders like the disciples—people who walked and talked and ate and traveled and lived with Jesus all day everyday—they experienced the Master Teacher directly, without mediation, one on one. They were there. They breathed the same air. The transformational consciousness of the Kingdom of God came into them not through concepts or doctrines or words—it came into them through spiritual osmosis. Or in a word, presence.

I’m borrowing the term osmosis from biology here. I’m going to take you back to seventh grade biology class. You recall that osmosis is when the material in one cell passes through its own semi-permeable membrane and travels across space to pass through the semi-permeable membrane of a second cell, to become part of the substance of that second cell. No words, no concepts—material transmutation.

I’m going to take you back to your favorite teacher—we all have one or two or three, whether it was grade school, middle school, high school, maybe college—we all remember those favorite teachers. And I remember one of mine, his name was Barrett Culmback. He was my first philosophy professor at Ventura Community College. I was fresh out of high school. I can’t tell you one thing he ever said to me, or what he wrote on the board, or all of his brilliant lectures—I don’t remember any of it. But I can never forget how it felt to be in that room, as my entire life changed in his presence.

To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “People will never remember what you said. They’ll never remember what you did. But they will never forget the way you made them feel.”

That’s spiritual osmosis.

And the Indian traditions—Hinduism, Buddhism—are full of stories like this; the transmission of wisdom from guru to devotee, wordlessly, through presence. There’s the famous Zen Buddhist story about the Buddha called the Flower Sermon, when he gathered his company together to give a dharma talk but on this day Buddha just held up a flower and said nothing, and only one man Kashyapa signaled with his eyes that he understood what was being said.

In religious studies we often speak of these two levels of teaching—esoteric or inner teachings, and exoteric or outer teachings. Clearly, according to Jesus, you cannot convey the transformational wisdom of the Kingdom of God through ordinary language. It can only be apprehended through non-conceptual awareness, that is to say, through direct experience.

So if you believe that Jesus is God—as so many do—then even God himself cannot convey the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, through words and concepts. It cannot be received second-hand. The best Jesus can do is offer a parable—an analogy, a metaphor, a poem, a symbolic story which does not convey information directly, but merely suggests something.

Now, about those problematic explanations of the parables, and there was one in our reading today, where Jesus suddenly goes back through the parable and explains the meaning of all four sub-metaphors (seeds on the path, seeds on rocky soil, seeds choked by weeds, and seeds in good soil).

Am I alone here? Do the explanations of the specific meanings of each element of the parable feel a little forced, a little out of place, a little tacked on after the fact?

I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that after Jesus told the parable, and then said, “If you have ears, hear,” and then left, that he would then pull his disciples aside to explain the meanings of all four metaphors, when as he’s already established, his disciples didn’t even need the parable in the first place.

In screenplay writing this is called “expository dialogue”—dialogue not intended for the characters in the scene, but for us, the audience.

So I dug a little deeper, if you’re like me, you might be relieved to learn, or you might be upset to learn, that it is widely understood across Biblical scholarship that the explanations of the Parable of the Sower in all three synoptic Gospels were added later.

That’s exciting and liberating to some, and maybe offensive to others. But in our Episcopal tradition we are invited to bring our reason into our scriptural study.

So perhaps it is true that Jesus never explained his parables. Some well-intentioned commentator added that in later, and now it’s scripture. Maybe Jesus didn’t explain his parables. He dropped them on the ground like seeds, brushed the dust off his feet, and walked to the next town.

So I love this whole story because it just opens up such an invitation for us.

A parable, it turns out, is not an explanation—it is an invitation to engagement. A parable is also exoteric teaching—teaching designed to convey the inner mystery as artfully as possible to folks outside the mystery—you know, us. To those already inside the mystery, that is to say, to those already awash in the direct experience of God-consciousness, the parables are simply not necessary, redundant even.

The parables are “the menu, not the food,” to bring Alan Watts into this. Or the parables are “the map, not the place.” As the Zen saying goes, “The picture of a plumb does not take away one’s hunger.”

So what else did Jesus tell his disciples that day, in that scene about why he used parables? Jesus said to his disciples, “The reason I speak to them in parables is that (citing Isaiah) ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’”

Ouch. This is a teacher struggling to reach his students.

And then Jesus said to his disciples, “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”

So the disciples are being held up as a paradigm of openness, receptivity. They are the good soil in the parable. We, not so much.

So we hear a challenge here, and I think we hear an opportunity here. Jesus is clearly delineating two distinct levels of understanding, and consequently two camps or categories of people.

But rather than seeing this as elitism or as exclusionary, I think it’s much richer to see all of this as deeply instructional, and ultimately as an invitation. The depth of esoteric knowledge is available to all of us, if we make certain sacrifices, certain shifts, certain accommodations—if we move from conceptual knowledge to embodied awareness. If we move beyond words and scriptures to the depth of knowing that gave rise to those words and scriptures in the first place.

This whole scene, this whole scenario of the Parable of the Sower is calling us to open up to higher consciousness, to metanoia, to higher consciousness, prajna in Sanskrit, the Kingdom of Heaven. We are called to allow and receive, not coerce and achieve.

Do you get it up here (pointing at head), and then fall into the trap of spiritual pride? Or do you live it from here (pointing at the heart), humble to the bone and falling in love with the whole world and everyone in it?

Is God an idea to be understood and explained? Or is God where we live, move, and have our being, as Paul said?

Time for a little check in on this beautiful agricultural, horticultural metaphor of seeds and soil.

Is our mind like the soil of the path, packed down by many feet and impenetrable to wisdom? Closed?

Or is our mind shallow and there’s nowhere for wisdom to take root?

Or is our mind overrun with briars, and choked with busyness, distraction, and fear?

Or is our mind open and receptive and uncluttered and still?

At the heart of the Parable of the Sower is this question: What if our consciousness is the soil upon which the ever-falling seeds of God-consciousness continually rain?

Are you empty enough, soft enough, open enough to receive, not someone else’s second-hand dogma, but the wordless mystery of God-consciousness itself, a realm of being beyond all concepts and doctrines?

The good news is that it is always raining down around us. The bad news is we do not allow much of it to enter and take root.

We do not have a proximity problem—we have a perception problem.

No matter how brilliant the teacher, it is the readiness of the student that decides whether learning happens or not.

If you have eyes, see. If you have ears, hear. Let go of what you think you know, and make room for what is raining down all around you continually.

In stillness, less and less do we need to speak, and more and more do we begin to experience the mystery.

We all know the line from where God calls us in the 47^th Psalm:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

(Silence)

May God be with you.

Namaste