Matthew 13 starts with the words “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.” But what “same day” was it?

It was a day in which the Pharisees started plotting to kill Jesus because he healed somebody on the Sabbath. And when he drove out demons, they accused him of casting out demons by “Beelzebul, the prince of demons.”

Many Christians think Jesus performed miracles to attract people to believe in him—to “prepare the soil.” But when Jesus performed miracles, people hated and persecuted him for it. For Jesus, doing good for others is not a strategy for making people Christians. It is simply the character of God. This is why Jesus often told people not to tell anyone after he healed them.

Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. (Matthew 12:16)

As Christians, then, we must do good not as a means of making people Christians, but because it is our identity as Christians.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. (Luke 6:35)

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation. (Matthew 12:45)

Jesus came, healed, spoke in parables, and did everything he did in order to testify to the truth.

“You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. (John 18:37)

Many Christians believe Jesus told parables to help people understand truth more easily. But Jesus said he told parables for the opposite reason:

He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables ¹² so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’” (Mark 4:11-12 NIV)

Jesus’ parables are not merely illustrations. They are soil detectors—diagnostic tools that reveal the heart condition of the listener. In other words, Jesus tells parables to reveal whose heart is good soil to receive his word and become his disciple.

In Matthew 13:3-9, Jesus tells a parable:

Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear. (Matthew 13:3-9 NIV)

Jesus is not only telling this parable; he is enacting it—and has been enacting it since Genesis—as the one who has sown the word of God in the world from the beginning. In Genesis, Satan snatched up the word of God from Adam and Eve like birds snatching seed, telling them they could be like God and self-sufficient instead of depending on God.

God could have given Adam and Eve over to death immediately. But in his mercy, he made a way for humans to receive his care. He created temporary mediators—kings, priests, laws, tribes, families, and others—to mediate his care to humanity. These were temporary life-support gifts through which God cared for us after humans rejected him and became enslaved to sin. But humans became accustomed to relying on these mediators and pushed God even further away.

It is almost like this quote from the character Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth…that you are a slave…like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Jesus does not use the tools of the Matrix to make people more receptive. He does not “till the soil.” He sows the seed as it is, regardless of the condition of the ground. This is the way Jesus chooses to sow.

Those like the “rocky places” are people who cannot withstand persecution. And those like the seed that fell among the thorns are described this way:

The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. (Matthew 13:22)

These are people who look to Jesus to fix their worldly problems in the way they want. When he does not, they return to relying on the mediators of the world rather than on God.

Those who are good soil are people who want to live in the real world of God’s truth, which they access through the word of God.

The disciples are confused by Jesus’ evangelism strategy. Why does he speak in parables instead of simply stating the truth? But for Jesus, the parables do tell the truth—only in a way that reveals the receptiveness of a person’s heart.

Telling the truth does not always mean explaining everything plainly. The parables are designed to plant a small, uncomfortable sense in people’s minds that the world we know is not the real world—like a splinter. Some people dig at it until they remove the splinter, the seed. But in good soil, the seed is not removed; it goes deeper.

This is why Jesus says:

Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matthew 13:12)

In this way, there is a significant difference between modern evangelists and Jesus. Jesus does not say, “Whoever does not have, you must prepare their soil so that they may eventually receive the seed.” A person either desires to leave the Matrix, or they do not. You cannot make a person more inclined to leave the false world of the Matrix for the real world of the kingdom of God. What counts as good soil for the Matrix and what counts as good soil for the kingdom of God are entirely different.

Good soil for the Matrix is what Jesus describes as “the path”. Perhaps Jesus refers to it as “the path” because it is, in a sense, smooth and easy for mediators to walk on. It gives no resistance to the Matrix. It shows no openness to the seed sown by Jesus.

The stony ground and thorny ground are also good soil for the Matrix. These soils may show initial openness to the seed, but the persecution and prosperity of the Matrix prevent the seed from taking root.

When a missionary or evangelist tries to “prepare the soil,” they are only preparing people to receive the world, because they are using the tools of the world. People who are of the world have no use for the seed.

When Jesus tells the disciples to find a “person of peace,” it will probably not be the mayor. It will probably be the woman who has had five husbands and is currently living with a man who is not her husband. A “person of peace” is not someone who is at peace with the Matrix. It is someone who has realized that the things of the world can provide nothing of lasting value and who therefore has no peace in this world.

This is why the disciples of Jesus look so shabby. They have no value to the Matrix or to the mediators. They are tax collectors, prostitutes, drug addicts, divorcees, fishermen, and zealots. The Matrix calls such people losers. But Jesus calls them “good soil.” And the way he finds them is by speaking in parables. When they hear Jesus’ parables, they recognize that what he offers is completely foreign to this world. So they follow him to learn more, and they keep following him all the way out of the Matrix.

The only way out of the Matrix is through the waters of baptism. After we pass through those waters, we keep following him.

As Morpheus said,

If you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.