Most people are a little surprised when they discover that of all Jesus’ parables, only a small handful occur in all three Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Parable of the Sower is one of those omnipresent parables, indicating that this particular story was one that all of the Synoptic evangelists recognized as somehow going to the core of Jesus’ mission, ministry, and message.
The Year A Common Lectionary opts to skip verses 10-17 in which Jesus bluntly states that the reason he speaks in parables is because the people don’t understand him anyway and parables may just be the easiest way both to reveal that and even deepen the thickness of their spiritual fog. As Tom Long once pointed out, Matthew presents a kinder and gentler Jesus in his reply to the disciples. Whereas Mark has Jesus saying “I tell parables IN ORDER to confuse them,” Matthew tweaks that Isaiah-esque language a bit to have Jesus say that “I tell parables BECAUSE they are confused.”
Either way or both ways, however, Jesus is saying that if his words cause a lot of arched eyebrows and furrowed foreheads, it’s not strictly speaking his fault, as this landmark Parable of the Sower likewise claims. Because the word of the kingdom—that vital seed that Jesus came to sow into people’s hearts—may well be the most important word anyone will ever hear but the fact is that things have fallen into bad enough shape in this old world that the odds are definitely stacked against the success of the gospel seed.
Four soil types are identified but only one has a shot at yielding anything resembling a good crop. But then, this would be no news at all to actual farmers. You wonder what the people heard when Jesus first told this story. Maybe some of the actual farmers in the crowd chortled to themselves to hear the story. “This guy’s been in the woodshop too long,” some may have mused, “because he ain’t got a clue as to what farmin’ is all about.”
Today we might have the same reaction if we heard a story about a farmer who hooked up his planter to the back of his John Deere, started up the tractor, but then threw the PTO switch to activate the planter even before he was out of his driveway. There he is putt-putting down the country lane with corn seed scattering everywhere as he goes. It bounces on the road, some flies into the ditch. When he finally gets near his field, he first has to cut through a weedy and thorny patch with corn seed still flying out loosey-goosey from that planter that, by all rights, had been switched on way too early.
In truth, no farmer would be so careless, so profligate in the scattering of valuable seed. It would not even make sense to do this. It would be a waste, a spectacle of great prodigality that a frugal and economically minded farmer would never tolerate.
But Jesus says that God is just such a foolish farmer. He’s got (apparently) more than enough seed to go around and so throws it anywhere and everywhere, the odds of success notwithstanding. Maybe if the whole world were as God intended, maybe the seeds would find a higher success rate—maybe they’d even sprout 100% of the time as every heart would be fertile ground for the loving words of the Creator.
As it stands, however, people have built roads in their hearts, veritable highways that have gotten too packed down by the busyness of life, by the high-falootin’ claims of science, and by the cynicism and arrogance of the age. We’ve met these people and a few of them have been publishing best-selling books of late to sneer at the very idea of God, religion, faith. The seed of the gospel can just bounce off such a hard heart. Maybe a bird of the air will eat it. Maybe the seed will get smushed under the tires of whatever vehicle whizzes through that heart next. But it won’t grow. Not in this life anyway.
Others are not that bad off but they have nevertheless been made fiercely shallow by a get-rich-quick, instant gratification culture of indulgence and fads. They’ve been trained by the media to always be on the lookout for products touted as “New and Improved” and have come to believe that the next best thing to come along is always just around the corner and it will be theirs for the snagging. These are people who have lost weight on the Atkins Diet but then gained it back and so switched to Jenny Craig but then got bored with that and so gave Weight Watchers a try but then found the South Beach Diet more sexy because Bill and Hillary Clinton used it but then found out that . . . You get the idea. And these people become spiritual samplers, too. Organized religion was fine until sleeping in on Sundays looked more attractive than going to worship and so they did spiritual blogging instead but eventually were attracted to a TV ministry until someone gave them a book about angels that somehow led to a brief flirtation with Native American spiritual practices (and that peyote was kind of cool) and . . . Sometimes the seed of the gospel shoots up like a fast-growing kudzu in people’s hearts but then withers just as quickly when the shallow, me-first craving for novelty once more takes over.
Still other hearts—and we’ve met these people, too, and in this case even some of us in the church can identify with this third heart all-too-easily—are just plain busy and crowded. These hearts are neither calloused nor shallow. In fact, there is some real depth to them. Lots of stuff grows here. But in the end, it’s too much. The seed of the gospel comes in and sprouts just fine but faces stiff competition for light and warmth and nutrients. Because just over there the plants of commerce and business are growing. Concerns about the 401k fund, the Roth IRA, the kids’ college funds, and the growth of their stock market portfolio absorb a lot of nutrients from the soil of the heart (isn’t it interesting how financial firms in their advertising always use the horticultural images of growth?). And also in the garden of this heart are the plants of community involvement, of the PTA at school, of politics and social justice and ecological activism and . . . and it’s all good stuff (or a lot of it is) but it sure makes one busy. And so when the pastor calls looking to recruit some new elders and deacons for the church, well, what can one say? Sorry, pastor, but I just don’t have time for everything.
There is, of course, that fourth and final heart/soil and the seed of the gospel does splendidly well there, thanks be to God (literally). Because given the apparently long odds for gospel success, you have to assume that the hearts whose soil is deep, wide, and unencumbered with other things is a field cleared by the Holy Spirit himself. Only the power of Almighty God could overcome the obstacles thrown up by this world: the obstacles of cynicism and despair, of media hype and incessant novelty, of sheer busyness and greed.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear. She who has ears to here, let her hear. The coming of the seed and its success—when that happens—is all grace. Maybe that’s why the farmer keeps lobbing seeds at even the unlikeliest of targets. It’s not that the farmer doesn’t understand the long odds. It’s just that when you’re talking about salvation by grace, it’s not finally about the odds but about the persistence of the Holy One who won’t stop. Ever.
If God in Christ is the farmer casting his seed about willy-nilly in this world, why doesn’t he do something to ensure a higher success rate? As noted above, no sane farmer would literally waste his seed on roadbeds, ditches, and brier patches. He’d save every precious seed for the field—indeed, for the “fitted” field. Near where I live there are vast fields where local farmers grow potatoes by the truckload as well as tons of corn (both feedcorn and sweetcorn). These farmers are very careful to “fit” their fields each spring. They have special machines that gather up the rocks and stones that have pushed their way up to the surface of the earth, and so each spring you can see large piles of these stones in the corners of the fields. They then disc the soil to break up clumps of dirt, put down fertilizers to prevent the growth of weeds, and only then do they sow their seed in fields that, when the seed is all sown, look like a vast but neatly combed plot of earth. “There’s nothing like seeing a nicely fitted field” my father likes to say. Indeed, even before the plants begin to grow a fitted field has its own kind of organized beauty.
That’s what real farmers do with their real seeds. The farmers in Jesus’ day were no less careful and prudential. But God the gospel farmer has no compunction about tossing seed anywhere and everywhere whether or not it will have much of a shot at succeeding. Why? Because unlike real farmers who love and lavish attention on only the good field, God as farmer loves every field, every plot of land, every heart. God cannot look at his own imagebearers and fail to spy people he loves. Their hearts may be hard as asphalt, having accumulated years and years and layers and layers of cynicism, but God loves them anyway and keeps throwing his gospel their way. Other hearts may be as shallow and ignorant as can be having been eroded by too much television and too little reflection, but God loves them anyway and so keeps tossing his gospel their way. Other hearts may be so crowded that God can hardly see his way through the thicket of concerns about money and family and justice and politics, but God loves them anyway and so keep dropping gospel seeds into that over-crowded environment.
When someone is as prodigal with a good thing, with a great gift, as this parable’s farmer is prodigal with his seed, there can be only a couple of explanations for that prodigality: the farmer is either foolishly crazy or lovingly crazy. Either way be may be a little crazy, a little overly effusive but in this case the enthusiasm springs from an ardent love that is as old as the creation itself.
Why doesn’t God do more to ensure the success of his gospel seed? Maybe we ask that question because we’re looking at this parable from the wrong angle. Maybe it is precisely the lobbing of seeds onto all soils, regardless of the likelihood of success, that is itself a sign that God does aim at success and, by his power and persistence and above all by his grace, in the end we may find that God’s crazy agriculture succeeded way more often than we thought possible. Because every once in a while, we’re stunned to see a cynic melt into a loving follower of Jesus. Every once in a while we’re startled when someone who used to be as silly and shallow as they come suddenly turns thoughtful and signs up for every Bible study she can attend. Every once in a while we’re amazed when some hard-driving tycoon gives huge chunks of his wealth away, simplifies his life, and settles into the church pew every Sunday morning as eager to receive the Word of God from the pastor as a baby bird is to get breakfast from its mother.
These things happen. And each time they do, that crazy farmer winks at us to ask, “Who’s crazy now?”
Matthew 13 opens by telling us that on the day when Jesus told this set of parables, starting with the Sower, the crowds following Jesus and hanging on his every word had grown very large—so large that Jesus had to invent his own shoreline amphitheater to be heard. So maybe it’s no wonder that Jesus tumbled to tell this parable first. Looking out over that big crowd and scanning not only the shining faces turned his way but scanning also the hearts of those people with a kind of spiritual MRI, Jesus could see the hard hearts, the shallow hearts, the thorny hearts, the pure and unencumbered hearts. And so Jesus as much as said to that wild assemblage of hearts, “Have I got a story for you . . .”
In preaching on Mark’s version of the Parable of the Sower, Tom Long claimed that Jesus preached in these confusing parables in order to make people deeper thinkers about what the gospel is all about. Jesus did not want to have people grab the gospel too quickly because such a quick grab almost always resulted in bad faith or shallow faith that did not last long (a point made within the Parable of the Sower itself, of course). In that connection of wanting people to grow deeper, Long told this story:
The great preacher George Buttrick was once flying on an airplane. As he sat there, he had a legal pad out on which he was furiously scribbling some notes for his sermon the coming Sunday. The man next to Buttrick inquired, "Say, what are you working on there, sir." "My sermon for Sunday--I'm a Christian preacher." "Oh," the other man replied. "Well, I don't like to get caught up in the complexities of religion. I like to keep it simple. You know, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' The Golden Rule. That's my religion!" "I see," Rev. Buttrick replied, "and what do you do for a living?" "I'm an astronomer. I teach astrophysics at a university." "Ah, yes, astronomy," Buttrick shot back. "Well, I don't like to get caught up in the complexities of science. 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.' That's my astronomy. Who could ever need more than that, eh?"
