Why is it?
Why is it that men, God's children, divine creatures created in such refined and complex way, endowed with consciousness and intelligence, able to mentally construct ideas, philosophies, concepts, and images, are unable to understand what Jesus is saying? Is Jesus' revelation to humanity so distant from human understanding? Are the concepts so difficult to understand? Why is Jesus forced to reveal His word to the people through parables, knowing that in any other way the message would not be understood? Where does the problem lie: in the inaccessibility of Jesus' words or in man's difficulty in understanding? Jesus is not inaccessible and does not say incomprehensible things, but for some reason man's intellectual abilities are not properly exploited, thus reducing man's chances of understanding. Why does man struggle to understand what Jesus says? Because intelligence is not knowledge. Being intellectually capable does not mean possessing wisdom, just as owning a horse does not mean that one is capable of riding it, or having the necessary ingredients does not mean being able to make a cake, or to build a fire. l
Jesus finds it difficult to make clear to mankind what the kingdom of God is. Why? Because we are so used to being filled with doubts about God's existence, suspicions about His goodness and mercy, or accusations against Him for being the cause of evil, disease, affliction, and death that we are unable conceive of knowledge concerning God and His world. Someone who does not know the laws of aerodynamics finds it difficult to understand what a plane is and how it works. By forcing one's mind to think ill against God, man has gradually destroyed his intellectual capabilities with the result that he/she is no longer able to use them to the fullest in order to be wise and to evolve along the path of true wellbeing and happiness. Thinking ill of God gradually makes people stupid. And what is stupidity? Stupidity is the inability of the mind to to relate all of its contents harmoniously with one another. Stupidity is using intelligence only partially following fragments of knowledge, without relating them to one another for our true welfare. Stupidity is studying, recognizing, knowing flour, fire, water for centuries as distinct and separate worlds, without ever being able to put the information, knowledge, energy of these elements in relation to oneahother in order to make bread.
Jesus is forced to give some examples to make people understand His message, because examples have the power of connecting different brain areas, facilitating the exchange of information and increasing cognitive abilities, and this gives the human brain a momentary glimpse of wisdom. The light of knowledge and wisdom is thus as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.