Trinity 6: The generous sower

 Isaiah 55.10-13, Psalm 65, Romans 8.1-11, Matthew 13.1-23

 

“Hear then the parable of the sower”

 This famous story is one of the best known of Jesus’ parables, partly, I’m sure, because it is one that is easy to tell to children, so many of us heard it first in school or Sunday school. It’s very visual, too. We can imagine the sower casting handfuls of seed around him. We can imagine the birds descending on the seed on the path, the withered plants in the rocky ground, or smothered by thorns, never having a chance to grow. If we are gardeners, we’ve probably know this in real life. We sow seeds hopefully in the spring, but only a fraction will end up as full grown plants. Heat, cold, drought, flood, slugs, pigeons, and in the vicarage garden wild rabbits too. There’s always something waiting to snuff the life out of our seedlings. It’s a wonder anything makes it at all.

This is one of only two parables that Jesus himself gives a title to. “Hear the parable of the sower”  he said. The other is the parable of the weeds in the field, not the wheat and the tares, as we often call it, - it’s next week’s Gospel. The titles we give to parables tend to reflect what we think they’re about, and can skew our interpretation of them.  The parable we call the “prodigal son”, for example – the Gospels don’t give it a title – could equally be called the Loving Father, or the Two Sons, or “Family life and how not to live it” which would change the focus completely. In this week’s parable, though, Jesus is clear. It’s the parable of the Sower.

And that’s a bit odd, because actually, the sower is hardly mentioned at all. He comes along, sows the seed and then disappears. It’s the other “characters” in the tale, if you can call them that – the seed and the various types of ground it falls on - who take up most of the column inches. Despite this, though Jesus’ title puts the enigmatic Sower centre stage. Hold that thought, because we’ll come back to it later.

So what about those other, inanimate, characters. The seed, Jesus explains to his disciples -  though not to the wider crowd to whom he first tells the story - is the “word of the kingdom”. Words are a way of expressing ourselves, making ourselves known, making things happen. Words change things, for the better or for the worse, and once they are uttered we can’t take them back. If human words are powerful, God’s words, the “words of the kingdom” are even more so.  In the book of Genesis, when God spoke the words, “let there be light” there was light. His word brought everything into being. In John’s Gospel we hear that the Word was God. He identifies Jesus as God’s living Word, God’s supreme way of speaking to us, of revealing himself to us.

The seed in this story, then, is the presence of God, God at work, God’s very self, given to us and for us. And where is it? It is everywhere, thrown around with what seems like no thought for where it might land, into unlikely as well as likely ground. It’s not carefully rationed, not planted deliberately in places where it would do best; it just lands where it falls.

The different soils in the story, are the human hearts and lives it lands in.

This parable can be interpreted in a very judgemental, condemnatory way – woe to you if you are stony ground, weed-infested, plagued by birds! There’s no hope for you. That interpretation tells us that we should all make sure we are a good seedbed. But the problem with that is that soil is what it is. Soil has no choice, no agency. It can’t decide to plough itself. It can’t do anything about the bedrock underlying it. It can’t fight off the weeds, or the birds.

If we hear this parable as an instruction to us to be better soil, we are on a hiding to nothing. Of course, there are things we can do intentionally to be more receptive to God’s word, and Jesus speaks elsewhere about that. But here, he very deliberately chooses an image of something that can’t do anything about itself to represent us, and that seems to me to take the story in a very different direction.  

The clue is in the little episode that separates the telling of the story and its explanation. The disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables. Wouldn’t it be better just to say what he means in plain words? But Jesus tells them that it doesn’t matter how plain the words are, some people will hear and others won’t, or won’t at that moment. It’s just as true today. We look around us – and in the mirror at ourselves – and see unpromising, stony, thorn infested, downtrodden soil. We see indifference, carelessness, apathy, anger, abuse, manipulation. We see people trying to make the world better, but being knocked back again and again, their efforts coming to nothing. It looks hopeless. Why bother to try to change or influence anything? What’s the point?

But this is where I come back, as promised, to the title Jesus gives to the parable. It’s the parable of the Sower, not the parable of the seed or the soil, because the Sower is the key to it. If this sower knows his land at all, he surely realises that much of it is inhospitable, unlikely to produce a crop, but he doesn’t write it off. He carries on sowing anyway, because between the stones and thorns, in cracks in the pathway, there will be good soil too, maybe just in patches or pockets, maybe with only room for one stray seed to germinate, but if he doesn’t sow anything there, there is no chance for that stray seed to bring forth life the life that is in it. If he does, though, that one seed might bear 100 more.

It would have seemed like a risky, wasteful strategy to those who first heard the story. Seed was precious and limited to them, not something just to be chucked around willy-nilly. But I think Jesus means them to be surprised, to notice that, and to realise that you can only behave like this if you have an unlimited supply of seed, and that, he is saying, is how it is with God. God doesn’t need to ration his word, his love, his presence and activity in the world, and we don’t need to do it for him either. The green shoots of God’s life might take root and spring up anywhere, not just in the neatly ploughed and weed free corners of the world where we might expect them. After all, they somehow took root in us. If we want to join in with God’s work, be part of his kingdom, we do that by loving people wherever we find them, just as we were loved where others found us.

“My word shall not return to me empty” said God in our first reading. God’s love is never wasted, never pointless, never in danger of running out. He’s not anxious about where he sows it, and it’s not up to us to judge who is worthy of it and who isn’t. Freely you have received, freely give, said Jesus, elsewhere; God will do the rest.  Amen