Texts: Matthew 13: 34-35; Luke 8: 4-15
Slanted and Enchanted: The Parable of the Sower
When I was in sixth grade, I got baptized on a Sunday evening, and afterwards my grandparents gave me a Bible – this Bible. It was one of those red letter editions of the Bible. All the words were printed in black, as you’d expect, except the words of Jesus, which were printed in red. By ninth grade I decided to read the Bible, every last word of it, and when I finally got to the words of Jesus, they seemed to scream from the page. By college, I encountered a New Testament scholar who scorned such editions of the Bible as a weird marketing ploy. Besides, he said, isn’t it what Jesus did that mattered most, far more than what he said? Why fetishize his words in that way, as opposed to all the other words contained in the Bible?
That all struck me as more or less right, but there I was, positively in love with books and words and the worlds they contained. Surely it’s what Jesus does that matters – his healings and miracles and confrontations and friendships and ultimately, his sacrificial love – no doubt those all matter, and deeply. But what about his words, I wondered? Aren’t those important too? Don’t they, if we pay attention to them, fairly holler from the page, the way that red letter edition of the Bible I received in 6th grade depicts it? As much as the actions of Jesus, don’t his words contain the power to startle and redirect us? Don’t his words have the power to challenge and confront us? Don’t his words have the capacity to comfort us, and to help us encounter the world in surprising ways?
Throughout the season of Lent, I’d like to explore the words of Jesus, and especially the stories that he tells, as a way of entering the story that Jesus finally becomes. If one of the methods of communication that Jesus preferred was the parable, might we understand Jesus himself as God’s parable told to the world, a slanted and enchanted tale that introduces us to a new form of being? For the next several weeks, I’ve selected what I think of as Jesus’s greatest hits, the parables that get told and retold, because of their insights, but also because of their strangeness, their mystery, their capacity to surprise and instruct, even after all these years. By Easter, we’ll arrive once again at what Jesus does. But as we move toward Easter, I’d like us to meditate on what he says, and specifically, on the stories that he tells. This week, we’ll concentrate on the parable of the sower. It’s not the first parable that Jesus tells, or even the most famous one. But it seems to convey something powerfully important about what Jesus is up to in the Gospels, and what God is up to in the world.
But first, we should ask a more basic question. Just what is a parable? And why might Jesus speak in such a way? Let me address the question of “why” first. When asked why he speaks the way he does, Jesus quotes Isaiah, who says, “I speak in parables so that, looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.” Jesus is telling secrets in other words. He wishes for some to understand what he says, while also concealing his meaning from others. So it’s a kind of code, deliberately designed to keep his meanings hidden, most especially, we can surmise, from the religious and political structures that Jesus antagonizes. Parables, then, are a kind of subversive speech.
But there’s more. Some truths, the deepest truths in life, can only be accessed sideways, slantways, from your peripheral vision, like staring at stars on a dark night. Sometimes the best way to see something clearly is to look to the side. And that’s the precisely the meaning of the word parable: it comes from the Greek word “parabole.” Para means to draw alongside something, as in a parallel line, moving in tandem with it, but without touching it. Bole has to do with seeing. The idea is to access a truth not by seeing it or touching it directly, but by creating a kind of parallel vision, a parallel world, that somehow throws the ordinary world around us into relief, startling us into some new awareness. Theologians in modernity haven’t taken that kind of speech very seriously. It’s been the novelists and film makers and short story writers in modernity who best illustrate what it is to encounter a parable. If you want to experience something of the strangeness of Jesus’s way of speaking, you’d do well to dust off your Kafka or your Borges, rather than a biblical commentary. Jesus creates worlds for his listeners and readers that are slanted and enchanted, akin to the world we inhabit, but just a little bit off, like a dream, like a cubist painting, like a sci-fi film, like a circus.
In Luke 8, we find the parable of the sower. Jesus tells his story about the sower scattering seed to a crowd that gathers around him. The disciples are lost and bewildered after hearing the story, and so they ask for an explanation. And so Jesus gives them one. He concentrates on the seed, which he says is the word of God, and the four types of soil named in the story. Perhaps we too would do well to listen in on his explanation.[1]
The seed falls first on a well-worn pathway, Jesus says. There’s plenty of ground there, plenty of soil, only it’s been so well trodden that the seed never really has an opportunity to enter the ground at all. And so it remains on top of the ground, where it can be picked up by birds, or kicked aside by other feet trampling upon the path. And we have known people like that. Those with a tin ear for religion or for matters of the spirit, those for whom no matter how hard you may try to explain what matters to you about the life of the spirit, just can’t be bothered with it all. Words land, explanations land, but it never goes anywhere, because the ground upon which the seed lands is too hard packed with settled opinions. They already know what they think, they are firm in their habits of mind, and nothing new will bloom, let alone be cultivated, in lives such as that. We have known people like that. Perhaps we have been people like that – too crusty and hard to receive a new revelation, too firm of mind to grow in a new and unexpected way. Such people hear the word, but it merely bounces off the hard packed surface of life.
There are those like the second type of soil too. There are those whose lives resemble rocky soil, without much depth to speak of at all. The word can fall upon their lives, and they can receive it with joy, but there’s no space available for it to take root and grow. It’s not that the soil is packed too hard, as with the first type of soil. It’s not that they’ve made up their minds and don’t care to consider anything further, thank you very much. It’s that the ground doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity to yield much. There is, in other words, no depth to speak of. And so they live on the surface of things. They don’t think too deeply. They prefer not to be reflective about their lives, or about their interactions with others. They’re happy to be a part of a church – they receive the word with joy, the parable says. But nothing much ever takes root in those lives. There are people like that, I suppose, rocky soil people, for whom nothing much can grow in their hearts, because there’s not enough soil for anything to take root.
There’s a third type of soil. That’s the kind where things can grow, at least for a time, but then weeds and thorns choke the seed and crowd it out. And we know those people too. Perhaps we are those people. There are those who wish to be people of prayer, people of wisdom, centered in the practices of faith. But life gets so full. There are the kids to worry about. There’s the stock portfolio to think about, and education funds, and retirement savings. There are office politics and social gatherings and every organization under the sun that needs volunteer hours. There are aging family members to care for and vacations to be had, but none of it seems to provide a center, or move toward deeper spiritual growth. Those with such soil collapse at night without a moment’s reflection, never having taken the opportunity to open themselves to the transcendent. And so the worries of the day crowd out the seed, and again, nothing much can grow. There are people like that too. Proximate concerns crowd out the possibility of being possessed by an ultimate concern.
And then there’s the fourth type of soil. That’s the soil where somehow, the word takes root and grows, producing a life of flourishing growth. And we’ve known those individuals as well. I think of some of the young people who grew up in this congregation, and have gone on to commit themselves to lives of service and human rights advocacy. They’ve wound up in medical school, or working for environmental justice. They’ve found themselves working with refugees or advocating for the rights of women in various parts of the world. A few have even found their way into seminary, and into the church. I think about them, and I think, “good soil.” But I think the same thing when I see so many of you coming through these doors week after week, in search of some kind of growth and wisdom. I think the same when I see so many of you contributing in large and small ways to make this little part of New England just a little better, just a little more compassionate and just. There are good soil people in the world, those for whom something profound has grown and is growing still in the soil of their lives. I give thanks for such people.
Of course, it bears mentioning that each of us is probably a mixture of all four types of soil. Perhaps one point of the parable is that we all have moments in which we’re too thick and hard packed, or too rocky, or choked by thorns, even as we also have moments in which our lives bear remarkable fruit because something has grown within us. Maybe it’s that we move through those descriptions like stages of growth. Or maybe it’s that each of those types of soil is mixed within us, so that we have the capacity for growth, or not, in each moment of our lives. I can’t say for you, but I’m certain that each of those applies to me in different moments. Growth doesn’t always happen, but sometimes, miraculously, it does. There’s a grace in knowing that.
But there’s another feature of the parable that I want to pay attention to, the most curious and subversive feature of the entire story. That’s the behavior of the sower. He spreads his seed like no farmer I have ever known or witnessed. He’s certainly not a master gardener, or any kind of gardener that I have known. To be a gardener is to exercise care and planning. It’s to match the seed with the proper soil, and then to cultivate that soil so that the seed can grow. But in the story Jesus tells, there are no carefully staked plots of ground. There are no pumpkins here and beans there, flowers in one row and corn in another. The sower in Jesus’s parable is entirely random. He’s scattering seed everywhere, wherever he can throw it. The sower, in other words, is a profligate fellow, extravagant, wasteful even. He doesn’t worry too much about his expenditures, or about containing his growth within a confined space. He roams about, just….scattering. It’s a strange practice that the sower exhibits, but there’s something I like about him. There’s something playful about his spirit. Something exuberant, excessive, irrepressible.
Is Jesus suggesting that God is like that? Is God somehow akin to the sower in the story, scattering the word in every sort of place, profligately, promiscuously, without worrying overmuch about whether the soil is good or bad, muddy or rocky or thorny? Is that to say that we’re invited to discern the growth of spirit in all sorts of places, precisely because the sower has been so irrepressible in scattering the seed? Is that to say that we’re as likely to find the evidence of the sower’s passing throughout all the world and all of culture, and not just in those places designated as religious? Is that not to say that the love of God, whether it travels under that designation or not, can take root in all sorts of places? Might good soil be found not only inside churches, and inside the religious institutions, but outside of them as well? We know that to be true from our own experience of the world. We know that the spirit blows where it will. We know that we can never put limits around the experience of the divine. But the story of the sower seems to confirm it.
Let’s put a finer point on it: Doesn’t the profligate behavior of the sower look an awful lot like Jesus himself? You’ll recall that many people criticized Jesus for the company he kept, enjoying as he did the company of tax collectors and prostitutes, the working poor and the lepers – all sorts of folks with questionable reputations. Why does Jesus spend so much time with people like that? Perhaps it’s because, like the sower in the parable, Jesus knows that God’s word, God’s spirit, can find good soil in the most unlikely of places. Maybe it’s because the seed could take root in any human heart. Like yours. Like mine. Who can say?
I wonder if the parable that Jesus shares isn’t about the soil so much as it is the sower. I wonder if it’s about a God who scatters goodness and love anywhere and everywhere, trusting that some of it, enough of it, will take root and grow. Maybe that’s what Jesus is saying when he shares his slanted and enchanted tale of the profligate sower.
I have one final thought before I’m through. There may be good news to be found in this parable for churches as well as individuals. We all know the statistics about declining participation in religion among younger people. We all know that people attend churches less frequently than they once did, and that participation in a community of faith is but one among many things that we all juggle. We wonder if all the things we do actually make a difference, or if we’re just scattering seed into the wind. It’s easy, sometimes, to get discouraged.
Jesus seems to be saying: get over it. Quit worrying about whether what you’re doing and saying is having an effect. Quit worrying about whether the seeds of the word of God are taking root or not. Some of the seed will take root and grow, and some will not. Get over it, and get on with it. Do what God does. Sow the seed. Preach the gospel. Be exuberant and extravagant in living the gospel out, creating zones of compassion and hospitality around you. Some of the seed will fall onto hard ground. Some on rocky ground. Some on thorny ground. But some of it, some of it will take root and grow, surprising everyone, including you.
[1] I have learned much from a sermon preached by Eugene Bay, contained in the self published volume A Sower Went Out. The sermon is also entitled “A Sower Went Out.” Many of the insights that follow were first discovered in that sermon.
