The Parable of the Sower

Have you ever tried to start a lawn from scratch? I did once. We had just bought our first house. It was in a housing development in a nice suburb. Included in the price of the house was a small amount of sod which some men came and laid in our front yard shortly after we moved in. But the back yard was completely unfinished. Our lot had been in the midst of a forest which had been cleared for our house, and others, to go in. The lot was leveled as much as possible. In fact, the back yard, while completely dirt, looked nice.

But then the rain came before I had a chance to plant grass seed in the back yard. The contours of the yard completely changed. One corner fell off precipitously. I figured I better get working fast. I bought some grass seed and went to work.

I was amazed, however, on closer inspection, to discover how many rocks were still there in our back yard. So, I went to work with a metal rake and other tools purchased at Lowe’s or Home Depot. I got rid of as many rocks as I could. I had never seen so many rocks in one place in my life. There were still some left when I started planting grass seed. But I planted anyway. And I laid straw on top of the seed to protect it while it grew.

Then the rains came again. Most of the grass seed washed off that slanted corner of the yard I just told you about. I had to start over.

I don’t recall how many times I planted more and more grass seed on that one small piece of land. Eventually I got a scraggly looking lawn growing. It would be interesting to go back and see what that yard looks like today—and to ask the owners if they had to do even more planting of grass seed to get that back lawn looking right.

Jesus told a story once about a farmer sowing seed. Matthew tells us that he told this story on the same day that the Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign of his identity, on the same day his family had come to collect him because they thought he was crazy. Jesus told a crowd by the Sea of Galilee a number of stories that day. But the first and most important story he told had to do with planting seeds.

Listen for God’s word to you from Matthew 13:1-23. . .

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the 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. 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. Let anyone with ears listen!”

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. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:

‘You will indeed listen, but never understand,
    and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
    and their ears are hard of hearing,
        and they have shut their eyes;
        so that they might not look with their eyes,
    and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
    and I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.

“Hear then 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 was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Can you imagine what it would be like to be Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, or any other celebrity for that matter? Sometimes when I’m standing in the supermarket checkout line and reading the headlines on the tabloids, I wonder. What would it be like to have paparazzi following you wherever you go? What would it be like, not even being able to go out to dinner without someone coming up to your table and asking for an autograph?

Life for Jesus must have been something like that. On this occasion all he did was leave the house where he was staying, perhaps in Capernaum, walk down to the Sea of Galilee and sit down to enjoy the view. Then suddenly a crowd gathered around him.

What were they drawn by? Certainly, they were drawn to Jesus because he healed so many people. But on this occasion, he doesn’t heal anyone. He just tells stories. Many of Jesus’ stories focused on the judgment of God to come. The people had heard stories like this before. What drew them to Jesus’ telling of these stories?

As N. T. Wright has written, “They came because they were starting to guess that the judgment was already beginning, and that Jesus was part of it. They came because they hoped he would tell them more about the way in which the one true God was beginning his work of rescuing them from their enemies then and there and wanting them perhaps to help in the process.” 

The people sensed that a new day was beginning—a new day when God, like a good farmer, would start a new agricultural year. God would sow his field with crops that would bring in a harvest. Some of the prophets had talked about the day of God’s rescue in this way. No wonder the people listened with rapt attention when Jesus told the story about the farmer sowing seed.

Some time ago, I happened to read a blog post on the internet by a British student who talked about her 60-year-old male Religious Studies teacher. She loved going to Mr. Campbell’s Religious Studies class because he made her wonder about the world and her place in it. I think that is the same reason people were drawn to hear Jesus.

However, the story Jesus told on this day wasn’t exactly what the people were expecting. Jesus didn’t talk about God sowing Israel in its own land, restoring the fortunes and greatness the crowds hoped for. Jesus’ story of the farmer was a story with some success, yes, but also a lot of failure in it. When Jesus said, “He who has ears let him hear,” he was inviting the crowd to think through what he was saying. There was nothing obvious in his message. 

Why did Jesus speak to the people using these obscure stories? That’s what Jesus’ disciples wanted to know. Jesus answered their question by assuring them that the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven would be given to them. What the prophets and righteous people of the past longed to see, was taking place.

In addition to the lawn I planted in back of our first house, I also planted a tree by the side of the house. It would be nice to go back and see how that tree is getting along. But most people who plant trees don’t get to see the end result. 

Jesus was telling his disciples that they were like children standing beside full grown oak trees that had been planted hundreds of years before. Jesus was telling them, in a cryptic way, that it takes time for the kingdom of God to grow. It isn’t easy to grow a lawn or to grow trees or to grow any kind of crop, or even to grow a church. A lot of seed is wasted, and you hope against hope that at least 25% of the seed will produce what it’s supposed to produce.

I’m sure Jesus’ response to his disciples’ question was frustrating for them to hear. They wanted a quick fix. They wanted Jesus to give the people all the answers and get on with building his kingdom right then and there. They were like children planting acorns and expecting full grown oak trees to sprout up overnight.

Jesus quotes Isaiah 6 to explain to his disciples what is going on. It is a troubling answer to a perplexed question. Isaiah 6 tells about the prophet’s call. In the year that King Uzziah died Isaiah saw a vision of the Lord in his temple. Isaiah was one of the few prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures who actually asked the Lord to send him on a mission. But the mission God gave him was not a pleasant one. “Go and tell this people ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding.’”

If you read through the book of Isaiah you will find that his message did contain the promise of salvation, but that promise only came true on the other side of judgment. Forests would have to come down so that a new shoot could start to grow—the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 10:33-11:3).

Jesus is telling his disciples that God is doing a similar thing in their time to what he did in Isaiah’s time. Just as Isaiah prophesied exile followed by restoration, so Jesus is promising salvation, but first God has to do some pruning of his beautiful olive tree, Israel. Yes, God’s kingdom is appearing at last, but it is bringing with it—judgment as well as mercy. Some in Israel, like the Pharisees, will listen over and over again to what Jesus has to say, and they just won’t get it. The same thing happened in Isaiah’s time, so it should come as no surprise, Jesus is saying. Judgment must fall on some people before mercy can spring up. But the good news within this warning is that Jesus himself will take the brunt of the judgment upon himself.

Have you ever walked through a maze? It can be very confusing can’t it? I’ve walked with my boys through mazes in England and Ireland and here in the United States. It helps to have a map of the maze to figure out how to get from where you are to the exit. Even better, in some ways, is what we experienced at a farm near Harrisonburg, Virginia. They had a maze created out of the dead stalks in a corn field. But they had a few key points throughout the maze where you could climb a ladder up on to a platform and see the whole maze. At one point, when I was desperately lost, someone else in our group who was atop one of those platforms told me what to do to get out. If she hadn’t, I would probably still be there!

Just like that person who told me how to get out of the maze, Jesus explained the parable of the sower to his disciples. He warned them about various dead ends in life, as well as telling them the way through.

But before we talk about all of that, we should notice, again, how surprising this whole story would have been to Jesus’ first disciples. They expected that when God’s kingdom finally arrived it would come in with a blaze of glory that would quickly sweep over the whole earth. A traveling preacher telling riddles and getting a mixed response was not what they expected.

Why was God’s kingdom coming in this fashion? The reason was because if God brought his justice to bear all of a sudden then many people would be caught in the dead ends of the maze. The same is true today. God is still giving people time to work their way through the maze and find his way out—the way that works through Jesus himself.

The seed of God’s word is central to this story. That seed is like a map, explaining the maze. Or in another way, it is like a voice from above giving us a “bird’s eye view” of life. When we take in that seed, that word, we have an internal map to guide us through all the craziness of the maze of life.

Not everyone who heard Jesus’ word had the right response. We have seen the Pharisees as an example of this. Some of them were like the soil on the hardened path. They didn’t understand what Jesus was saying, and they didn’t seek understanding from him, so Satan came and quickly stole from them the seed that Jesus, the farmer, had sown.

Still others are like the seed sown on rocky soil. They receive the word of God enthusiastically at first. But since they have no root going down deep, they last only a short time in the kingdom—just like my grass seed that got washed away by the rain.

Yet others are like the seed sown among the thorns. The worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the seed making it unfruitful. How is wealth deceitful? It promises answers to all the problems of life. It promises a way out of the maze, but in fact, wealth, in and of itself, is only a dead end. We can probably each think of people we know who have heard the word of God but have been distracted by making money. They never make their way out of the maze.

When I was in my first church after seminary, I was involved in youth work. During that year long internship in that large church I encountered one young man and his friend, out of a group of probably one hundred students, who really wanted to learn the Bible. Robby and Tim met me once per week for in-depth Bible study. Among other books, we studied the book of Revelation together. When we got to chapter 4 which describes the throne room of God in heaven, I remember Tim saying, “I can’t wait to get there.”

Amazingly, within a week, Tim had died of a sudden on-set of spinal meningitis. He had been a vibrant witness to those around him right up to the end of his life. When he asked a nurse at the hospital if he was going to die, she said: “Oh no, we have better hopes for you.” And Tim said, “You know, it will be alright even if I die because I know where I’m going.”

The week following Tim’s funeral many of his stunned friends and family members showed up at our Bible study—something Tim had often invited them to do, but they never took him up on the offer while he was alive. Many of those young people voiced commitments to follow Christ that night, and many of them continued in Bible study throughout the summer. 

I often wonder how each of those young people is doing. Did some of them fall away from the Lord because they had no root? Have others allowed the cares of this world to choke out God’s word from their lives? Have some, perhaps, continued with the Lord, shared his word with others, and produced a crop of thirty, sixty or a hundred times what was sown in their lives?

It is interesting to think about what kind of soil the people around us are. However, what I think the Lord really wants us to do with this parable is ask ourselves: what kind of soil am I? Am I like the hard soil on the path, or the rocky soil, or the thorny soil or the good soil? If we are honest with ourselves, we will probably have to admit that at different times in life we are each like each of those soils. There are times when I have been hardened to the word of God. There are other times when I have responded enthusiastically, at first, to God’s word. But then I haven’t pursued deeper learning. Still other times I have been distracted by the cares of this life.

Allowing Satan to steal God’s word from us, or not developing roots that go deep, or allowing the cares of this world to choke God’s word out of us, these are all ways of getting stuck in the maze of life. The good news is that Jesus shows us the way out of the maze—he tells us how to be good soil. We can be good soil by hearing his word, seeking understanding and then spreading that word to others to produce a good crop. Doing all of that takes a long obedience in the same direction. It does not happen overnight.

As Eugene Peterson has written, it is not difficult in our “world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest. Millions of people in our culture make decisions for Christ, but there is a dreadful attrition rate. Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly; but when it loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.”

The same was true in Jesus’ day. If we follow the parable literally, Jesus only expected about 25% of those who heard his word to take it to heart and then spread the word to others. So, I suppose if modern day preachers are only batting 250 then we aren’t doing too bad. The good news is that some do hear. Some do have their lives permanently changed for the better by the seed of God’s word. And some do spread that seed to other good soil producing a crop of thirty, sixty, even a hundred-fold. The important thing to do is not to focus on all the bad soil all around us, but rather focus on being good soil ourselves. The question I must ask is not, “What kind of soil are you?” But rather, “What kind of soil am I?”