Scripture: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
One thing leads to another. I ended the sermon last week by offering some reflections on a few different interpretations of the parable of the Good Samaritan. I thought afterwards: maybe it would be good to look at some other parables for another Sunday or two during Lent. The question then is which one. There are lots. There are some other rather well-known ones, some that are particularly challenging, at least to me, and that would raise lots of issues to talk about. But the parable of the sower occurred to me. It appears in three of the four gospels. It’s depicted in each case as the first parable Jesus told. I don’t remember having preached on it at Sojourners before. So maybe it’s time. Sometimes it’s good to do a sermon that is just sort of like a Bible study, just a straight reflection on some Biblical passage. This one seems pretty much as good as any for today. If you think you’re going to get a better reason than that for why I’m preaching on the parable of the sower, well, too bad. I don’t have a better reason than what I’ve just said. So: the parable of the sower.
There is one obvious and unique characteristic of this parable. Jesus actually explains it. In some detail. He goes through the story almost line by line—you heard it in the reading— telling the disciples that this stands for this and that stands for that. This was something that Jesus never really did again. He may have occasionally dropped some enigmatic hint as to what he might be talking about, but more often than not, his parables seem to be the cause of some serious head-scratching, for people in the first century and the twenty-first century. Which actually is good for preachers, at least my style of preaching. It gives us preachers plenty of room to operate. We can speculate up and down and this way and that about what Jesus might have meant, what we think he didn’t mean, what questions as much as answers the parable might raise, what its multiple meanings may have been, and so forth.
The parable of the Good Samaritan, or the parable of the man in the ditch, as the case may be, is a good example. I mentioned last week three quite plausible interpretations of that parable that in each case might cause our own thinking to go in some helpful direction. Even if Jesus didn’t exactly mean for us to interpret a parable the way we do, he leaves us room to play with it, since he didn’t say exactly what it meant. To me it’s a little like reading a novel where we might, because of what we bring to it, find something in a novel that the author wasn’t explicitly or consciously thinking of when he or she wrote it. And to a certain degree that’s ok. The author of a story might well get offended if people mangle, twist, distort, and misuse what she’s trying to say, but that a story might prove to be even richer than what the storyteller consciously and specifically intended should be a compliment to the storyteller, and my image of Jesus is that he would have been like that. He would have wanted us to take a parable and run with, to look at it front ways and sideways and back ways and upside down, to consider this character and that, always trying to remain faithful to the overall message and spirit of what Jesus was all about but not thinking we can nail down some particular meaning to a story and be done with it.
But—sorry for the digression—none of this is true, or at least as true, with this parable of the Sower, since Jesus does actually lay it out for us. Come to think of it, this may be why I haven’t preached on this passage at Sojourners before and I think not much at all in the thirty years prior to Sojourners. For one thing, it’s a little boring if Jesus has already told you what the parable means and all I have to do as the preacher is find some different words to say what Jesus has already said, what he has already said he said. And it seems a little, I don’t know, uppity to say something different about the parable than what he said about it himself, as though I somehow know better what he meant to say than he did himself.
But I think I’ll just go ahead and be uppity. I’m going to assume that Jesus didn’t in fact say everything there is to be said about his own parable. I’m going to assume that maybe there are some things that we need to talk about, even though he left them out of his explanation. I’m going to assume that there are some things that, even after his explanation, may need some clarification or some further explanation. I’m even going to assume that what Jesus said by way of explanation, or at least the way what he said is reported, might not be quite in the spirit of the original parable, that his explanation might, just might be a little misleading.
The first thing I want to point out though comes straight from what Jesus said in his explanation. “Hear the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what is sown on the path.” Anyone who has ears to hear, let her hear what Jesus said there. The seed referred to in the story is the word of the kingdom, the kingdom of God, the realm of God, the reign of God. That is what this parable is about. It is what all, or very nearly all, of Jesus’ stories are about. It is what all of his preaching is about. Maybe not directly and obviously, all of it. But that is what Jesus was all about. Matthew describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: “Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom…” In Luke Jesus begins his ministry quoting Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed…” And Mark describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: “Now after John was arrested Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God and saying, ‘the time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is at hand…”
This is no small matter, no quibbling over the presence of a certain word in the text. From the beginning and consistently throughout his ministry Jesus is all about preaching, proclaiming, directing people’s attention to, embodying the kingdom, the reign of God. And specifically, with regard to the parable of the sower, the word that is being spread is not some generalized word about Jesus, the idea that God has come among us in his person. It is not a message that God loves you, or that Jesus died for your sins, or that he opened up heaven to everyone who believed in him, or that he has the secrets to personal health, happiness, success, serenity, salvation, or a fulfilling life—any or all of the above. The word that is being sown by the sower is the word of the kingdom of God. We should assume that, even if Jesus didn’t say it explicitly, but in this case, he does. “Hear the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what is sown on the path.”
I make a point of this because I have read too many sermons and other commentaries on this scripture that take a kind of evangelical view of the story, that is, they assume that what it’s about is spreading the gospel, meaning trying to turn people into Christians, which is a whole lot different from spreading the word of God’s reign on earth. And it is, by the way, God’s reign on earth. We’re not talking here about the good news of some otherworldly heaven. The fact that this first parable Jesus told is about planting the seeds of the kingdom in the soil, sort of silently underlines that point.
But some people insist on treating this as more of good news about Jesus text, in a more evangelical style. Jesus went about scattering his words around and some people latched onto them and became followers and others didn’t. In a like manner the latter day followers of Jesus should be going around like the sower, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ, knowing that their message will sometimes fall on deaf ears or achieve only moderate or temporary success, but that in some people the Christian message will take root and that will make all your sowing worthwhile.
It’s actually a pretty good message for evangelists, and indeed for anyone trying to do things, like teaching for example, where the results may not be immediate and where there can be a lot of frustration and wondering whether the people you’re teaching care about what you’re trying to teach them, and so forth. Keep at it, is what some people say the parable says, keep at it. Some failures and frustrations are inevitable. Some seed always falls on rocky ground, but you never know but what it will find good soil and sometimes you don’t know until much later. This may be not only an OK message, but maybe even a really important message. It just doesn’t happen to be what Jesus is talking about—as I understand him here.
And here’s another thing I think the parable is not about. I think it is not about whether you or I are good soil or not. Some people read this parable and their minds go immediately to which kind of soil they are. Am I like a hard path where the seed can’t penetrate at all, or like a rocky path where the seed can’t grow any deep roots, or like a ground where the thorns of worldly cares chokes off any good growth, or am I like good earth where the seed can live and grow to its full extent?
This too is a fairly common approach to this parable. And it’s understandable, I think, because it’s a natural tendency to want to put ourselves in the story, and it’s an important question who we identify with in any of the parables because it will change how we read the story and how it speaks to us. So we either see ourselves as the sower who is out spreading the word, maybe trying to make Christian converts, or maybe witnessing to the faith in some other way, more the way progressive Christians might do it, doing good deeds, acts of mercy, or advocating for justice; that can be spreading the word too. In any case we’re the sower. Or we’re the various kinds of ground, the hearers of the word, the receivers of God’s word, and wondering whether we’re the kind of soil where that word will end up producing good fruit, or not. Those seem like our options here.
And what those options have in common is that they both assume that the responsibility for spreading the word, the word of the reign of God, is ours. You or I must be an energetic, tenacious spreader of the word, which to be sure may take the form of being an energetic and tenacious doer of good deeds, or we must see to it that we are good soil so that the word has a place to dwell and to prosper. We have an obligation to be good soil, probably better soil than we are, and an obligation to be always working to improve the kind of soil that we are. And that means that if the seed doesn’t get spread or if it doesn’t bear good fruit, then it is our fault. We are to blame. If only we were better sowers or better soil.
You see, I think either of those approaches to the parable of the sower leads, directly or indirectly to guilt. We’re responsible, and the word can always be spread better or we can always be better soil, so there’s always something we can feel bad about. These approaches, either of them, also lead to the assumption that we are somehow in control of this whole process, or ought to be. It leads to treating the parable as a kind of commandment, an instruction, a demand that we be better sowers or better soil, to which the listener may respond with a kind of grim, tight-fisted determination to do better at being a sower or soil. Or of course the listener may respond by not listening, not wanting to take it seriously precisely because it may seem to be wagging its finger at us and we don’t care for the attitude, the kind of demanding, judgmental, guilt producing religion that goes along with that approach to the parable.
There’s another option. It could be that this parable is only a little about us and a lot about God. It could be that this parable is not so much an instruction or a teaching about how we could or should be better people or better Christians, but instead is a vision of God, a God who sows seeds of the kingdom, or, if you will, seeds of the peaceable kingdom, seeds of the beloved community, who sows those seeds randomly, indiscriminately, incessantly, everywhere, to everyone, to every corner of the earth, in every corner of the soul. And yes, we might compare ourselves to the various kinds of soil that the seed falls on, but we don’t have to decide which one we are, because the reality is we’re all of them at one time or another, and if sometimes we’re hard path or rocky ground or filled with weeds, that’s ok, because God will just keep right on sowing, scattering seeds of the kingdom with reckless abandon, and every once in a while some will take root and bear fruit and produce a harvest thirty or sixty or a hundred fold. But it is not a matter of our being very serious about living up to what the parable asks of us. And it is not a matter of our trying to carefully construct our idea, our idea of what the reign of God ought to look like and then setting out to bring it into being through our own carefully planned and determined efforts, as though we were in control of the whole process. It is about having this vision, that Jesus gifted us with, that suggests what God is all about, what God hopes for this earth and this earth’s people, a vision that doesn’t fill us with guilt, or with all the duties and obligations of faith, but instead fills us with gratitude and grace and joy, because it is God who goes about the earth scattering seeds of the reign of God so that signs of the kingdom can break out anywhere at any time in anyone, and all we have to do is recognize the signs, not produce them, and maybe do a little nurturing of the seeds along the way.
I’m not sure how this other way of looking at the parable of the sower plays out in any detail, what all the implications of it might be. Even if I were clear on all that, I wouldn’t have time to talk about it this morning. But I’m fairly clear that the spirit in which Jesus told the parable is significantly different from the spirit in which it’s often taken. For today I’ll just note that difference and leave us with the image that I believe Jesus meant to leave us with, the image of a God whose heart is devoted to the reign of God—on the earth—and who goes about planting the seeds of the kingdom’s possibility everywhere she can think of. For now, let’s just hold that image in our spirits, without asking what we therefore have to do. Let’s just hold that image in our spirits and give thanks. Amen.
Jim Bundy
March 22, 2009