By Erik Beck
(The text below is the original manuscript used for the sermon above.)
Thank you Nate, and thank you everyone for having me. It’s always good to be back up here at Imagine. I promised Josh that I would do better today than the Gophers did last night; let’s see if we can fulfill that promise.
Especially since I’m going to do something scary, or at least uncomfortable, for me--I’m going to talk about a passage I’ve spent a long time on, like 7 or 8 years, and that I still feel like I haven’t totally wrapped my head around.
And that statement might lead you to ask, “oh, which deep, dark, unknown corner of the Bible has he been mulling over for that long?” Well, the answer fits none of those categories: it’s the parable of the sower. Yes, perhaps to your surprise and certainly to mine, arguably the second or third most well-known parable, and a parable which Jesus immediately interprets, has been the focus of my brain power off and on for quite some time.
Now, who’s familiar with the parable of the sower? Yeah, if you’ve been in church for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard the story. A farmer goes out to sow seed in his field, doing so in what we would call the broadcast method, the typical method of the day where you’re literally spreading the seed by hand. And as he’s spreading the seed, some falls on the footpath, where it gets trampled on and eaten by birds. And then some of the seed falls on rocky ground, where the seed sprouts very quickly, but since there isn’t much soil it can’t get rooted, and it withers under the heat of the sun. And then some of the seed falls into a thorny area, and as the seed grows it gets choked out by the thorns. And finally some seed falls onto good soil where it grows and produces grain, yielding 30, 60, and 100 times what was expected.
And what we hear in the interpretation from Jesus is that the seed that falls on the footpath represents people who hear God’s word but don’t understand it, and Satan immediately snatches the message away from their hearts. The seed that falls on the rocky soil represents people who hear the word of God and immediately respond with joy, but without any root, they immediately fall away at the sign of tribulation or persecution. The third seed that falls among the thorns represents someone who hears the word, but the cares of the world choke out the word. But finally, the seed that falls among the good soil represents the person who hears the word, understands it, and bears fruit.
And if you’ve heard a message on this passage, you’ve likely been encouraged to be like the fourth soil, to be a person who hears the word, understands it, and becomes a good Christian. Amen, we can all head to brunch.
Nothing I’ve said is wrong. Again, the interpretation comes from Christ, so we know that is what he meant by the imagery of the story. But a quest I began one day to see if there was anything else I could glean from this parable led me to a journey to ask whether there is more here to know about Jesus’ intention in telling this parable, and whether there is more to know regarding the application of this passage to our lives.
So, I’m going to invite you to open your Bibles this morning to do some exploring with me. This parable is presented to us three times in the Bible, and we’re mostly going to focus on Matthew’s telling in Matthew 13, but if you want to keep tabs on all three tellings, you can stick a bookmark in Mark 4 and Luke 8 for future reference.
So again, we’ll be in Matthew 13; you can keep tabs on Mark 4 and Luke 8 if you’re interested. And while you’re doing that, I’ll pray for us here.
[prayer] Lord, we come before you and we thank you for giving us today. As we are here, let us begin to ponder what it means to have eyes to see and ears to hear what it is you have to share with us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
So, the first thing that will be helpful for us here is a brief discussion about what a parable is. If someone asked us to define a parable, most of us would respond with something like: a simple story that helps us understand a complex theological topic. That’s certainly what I thought when I was first studying this passage.
But when we take that definition with us into the text, we run into some questions really quickly. Matthew 13 starting in verse 1; I have the NIV,
“The same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. (2) Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. (3) Then he told them many parables, saying…” and he tells the parable. So far so good, he’s telling the people simple stories so they can understand theological issues.
But then in verse 10, we get this: “The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’” And Jesus replies, “so I can give them an easier way to understand deep truths about the faith.”
No. “He replied, ‘Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (13) This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.”’”
It seems our definition might have taken a hit.
Our first clue here that something is amiss should be from the disciples question. For one, if the stories help easily describe things, we might hope it would be self-apparent to the disciples why Jesus speaks this way. But then, drawing from the other accounts of the parable, Mark 4:10 says “When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.” And Luke 8:9 says, “His disciples asked him what this parable meant.” So we get a spectrum of accounts here, from Matthew’s portrayal of a cagey, “hey, some people were wondering what your story meant,” to Luke’s straightforward, “hey, we don’t understand what your story meant.”
See, it seems simple to us, because we have the answer to the test. We get to see what the parable meant immediately, so it seems like it should be apparent. But in the text, it seems like no one, not even Jesus’ closest followers, understand what he’s saying. To them, there is no clarity, no ease of understanding. Which means, I think, that we need to return to and amend our definition.
I say “I think.” I wouldn’t have known to think about the definition of a parable without an assist, in this case from The Bible Project.
Back in March of 2020, right as we were all locking down, The Bible Project Podcast began a 7 part series on the parables, which I devoured because I’d already been thinking about this for some time. As much as I’d like to play all 7 episodes for you, we don’t have 6 or 7 hours for that. But I will share at least a little from their discussion, and I’ll encourage you to go track down the episodes for later.
Now as one would do at the start of a presentation about the parables, they begin by defining a parable. *gesture* Great minds. And what I remember from the beginning of their discussion is an acknowledgement that, in general, a parable is in fact a simple story that either makes something clear or presents a lesson. Indeed, if you were to open the dictionary, or maybe in my case a couple days ago were to type “parable” into the Google search bar and read the AI overview, courtesy of Wikipedia, you might see that a parable is “a short, simple story that teaches a moral, spiritual, or ethical lesson.”
This is not, as the podcast hosts summarize from their research, how Jesus uses parables. In lieu of just playing their conversation, I’ll read through three quote here, each of which I believe came from host Tim Mackie.
First for our hearing, Mackie states that ”Whatever the parables are, they are not, as children are sometimes taught in Sunday school, earthly stories with heavenly meaning. Rather, they are shocking announcements that God’s kingdom was arriving on earth, as it is in heaven.”
Expanding on that, he says “The parables are a commentary on what Jesus is doing to bring the kingdom of God.”
And finally for us today, of the parables he says “They’re not neat little stories that make things clear; they’re puzzling stories that invite you in.”
So if we take all of this, along with the rest of their discussion, we can think of Jesus’ use of parables as inviting us into a surprising new way of seeing reality [potentially also a quote--I didn’t mark it with quotation marks in my notes]. Jesus invites the hearer in to what would be a shocking discovery if understood: He’s telling the hearer that the kingdom of God is coming in that time; that He is the one initiating the entry of the kingdom on Earth; and He’s telling the hearer how he’s doing it.
The biggest revelation of all of this, for me, is that Jesus is using these parables to explain his ministry, which to me should shift our approach to this parable. When this parable is discussed, at least as I’ve heard it taught and preached, the focus is on us in the modern day, and how to apply the lesson of the parable to our lives moving forward. But if we are to understand this based on how Jesus used parables, we actually need to take the story and look backwards at his ministry! He’s providing commentary on what He has already done, and how people have responded!
Now, this is not to say that the parable has nothing for us today, or that there’s no application to our lives moving forward. We’ll get to that portion of the discussion soon. What this will do, I think, is move the starting point for us approaching the parable off of us, and onto who and what are actually the main characters.
So, if Jesus is telling this story about what has already happened in this ministry, I think it’s safe to say the sower represents Jesus. Hopefully that’s not a groundbreaking assertion; I don’t think I have to dig too far into biblical scholarship to back that claim up. The second assertion here; the seed is the word of God, the gospel message, the message of the kingdom; take your pick on phrasing there, even the gospel writers have variance in their texts. And using seed to depict the word of God was not a new form of imagery; that harkens back to Old Testament language and would have been familiar to every Jewish person who heard the parable.
So here we are: Jesus is the sower, He’s spreading the word about the Kingdom of God. With this in mind, and relying on our new understanding about the way Jesus uses parables, what can we learn about the kingdom from this story?
Well, like your standard sermon - I have three points for you today.
The first of what I’m calling “kingdom takeaways” is that good soil can be found in places we don’t expect. Let’s think about the description of the field. When I was a kid first hearing this story, I imagined that each of the soils was in its own individual section. Basically we would have quadrants: a quadrant of rocky soil; a quadrant of thorny soil; a quadrant of path, because that makes sense *shrug*; and a quadrant of good soil. In that picture of a field, the question has to be asked: why wouldn’t you just plant the seed in good soil? It would be so simple to avoid the obstacles.
In real life, fields don’t work that way. Now I don’t have farming experience. The experience I do have remotely resembling farming comes from the summer of 2000, when my family moved to a brand new house in a part of Brooklyn Park formerly occupied by potato fields, where I was tasked with helping to get rocks out of the ground in preparation for plants, trees, and sod going in.
What did I learn about the ground from that experience, and from living in a new development as it was being built? I learned that all the rocks weren’t in one spot. I learned that prickly, thorny weeds could grow in abundance among the grass, especially in the lots that were awaiting houses. I learned that it was all mixed together. Which means that the seed from our story could potentially be viable anywhere in the field because there is good soil mixed in with the hazards; we just can’t always see what’s below the surface that could get in the way.
Now, I said earlier that the sower in the story would have used what is known as the broadcast method of planting. In the time of Jesus, obviously you wouldn’t have had the same level of farming equipment available today. Farmers would have been out sowing seed by hand, literally using their hands to toss the seed across the ground. In some cases the farmers would have plowed the land first and then sown, in others they would have sown and then plowed to mix the seed with the soil. In either case, with the broadcasting method, you could understand how, even if you were trying to sow within a certain planned area, seed might fall into a thorny area, or a rocky area, even if you were trying to avoid them. Scholars also argue whether the footpath in the story is more like a road or just the route a farmer would have walked within the field as they were sowing. In either case, we could understand the seed falling on the path based on the method of sowing.
What I think could be remarkable to us is that, in a place we might not expect, either right in the midst of the thorns, right in a patch of rocky ground, right next to or even touching the footpath, there could be good soil. The seed could sprout and grow in those places to the point of bearing fruit. And on the flip side, in the midst of what appears to be perfectly good soil, a hidden rock or an unexpected cluster of weeds could end the growth of the crop.
But wherever it was in the field, Jesus sowed the seed, all the way to the margins. And, as we will also get back to, Jesus tended the field to the margins, devoting time to the places where it might or certainly would be difficult for the seed to grow.
And what we know from the story, our second kingdom takeaway, is that the seed is good, and will grow in good soil. The seed does not wither in other soils because there is something wrong with the seed. The word of God’s kingdom, the true gospel sown by Christ, is inherently good, so it will grow in good soil.
This brings me back to our yard in Brooklyn Park. We had a spot in the front yard that was one of several places where my dad planted a tree. If you were looking left out the front window, it would have been about halfway between the corner of the house and what would have been the corner of the lot. Relatively soon after it was planted, it was apparent that the tree was not doing well, and eventually the tree died. So my dad replanted a new tree in the same spot; it seemed like it should be a good place for a tree, and maybe the issue was the previous tree. But again, the tree started failing.
This time, my dad took the tree, dug it out, and moved it further to the side of the house. And in that new spot the tree flourished and grew, and as far as I know is still there today. It turns out that, likely, the issue was not with the tree--it was the spot it was planted.
When it comes to the seed sown by Christ, we get to remove the word “likely.” The seed grows in good soil, wherever that soil is found.
The third kingdom takeaway for us today is this--the sower is the one who determines which plants have borne fruit. This might seem to be a curious statement for us as we sit outside the story. Shouldn’t it be apparent, we might think, which plants or crops have borne fruit?
But when it comes to this point, I think about the finality of the story compared to what the growing process would have looked like. In the parable, the seed from the footpath is taken away by birds--imagery which would have been familiar to Jewish people hearing the story as depicting the enemy. But in each of the other three soils, we see sprouts. We even see some growth. And in that early stage, any of those plants might have been viable.
If I may get ahead of myself chronologically and come to the present day for a moment, I think about how concerned many Christians can be with who is Christian, who’s acting Christian or not, as though where we are now is the final picture. And I think, when this parable is told today, we can get stuck on the feeling of finality that comes from the parable, applying that finality to our lives now. I’m in church now and I’m a Christian, that other person over there is doing bad things; clearly I’m the good soil and they’re not. But friends, the plants do not determine which other plant will bear fruit as they’re still growing. We are not at the end of our story, and as I know Josh consistently tells you, if you’re not dead God’s not done. If the person who you just know isn’t going to heaven isn’t dead, God’s not done.
As Bible scholar Michael J. Rhodes says about the kingdom, “Because the true empire of heaven is run by lamb power, sinners, rebels, oppressors, and idolators may yet receive the salvation from God (Reimagining Biblical Politics, 121).”
It should not have to be said, but we are not the ones bearing final judgment. It seems like a logical step to me that the sower will become the harvester of His field, and when the story is done, he will determine the spots where crops withered and where others bore fruit to abundance, whether we would expect those outcomes right now in either of those places.
Because here’s a truth that’s sneaking in without being on a slide: Christ is the main character of this story. You will notice, as Matthew records in verse 18, that this is the parable of the sower, not the parable of the four soils. Clearly there is much to be said about the soils, and as Bible scholar and my former New Testament professor Craig Blomberg notes, Jesus uses the juxtaposition between the first three soils, the path, rocks, and thorns, to demonstrate what a faithful response looks like; the good soil demonstrates the people who are actually following Him.
But when this passage is discussed, the takeaway is often “be more like the good soil.” Your goal leaving today would be to work harder to be better Christians, be more Godly, maybe go out and help spread the proverbial seed. But with the work we’ve done so far, that lesson feels incomplete at the very least.
To this point, Bible scholar Diane G. Chen, in the commentary The New Testament in Color, gives voice to this parable from a Chinese American perspective that I think is beneficial for all Christians to consider. In reference to the rhetorical questions “What type of soil are you?” and “How do I become good soil?”, she says:
“These are questions a well-meaning Christian might ask. Among the Chinese immigrant community is the conviction that diligence will yield the desired result. ‘Work hard and you will eventually achieve the American dream.’ But can we, even industrious Chinese Christians, turn ourselves into good soil by mere human resolve and hard work? The answer is no, which is humbling. Soil is a passive image. Bad soil cannot simply become good soil by itself. The point, therefore, is not self-improvement but awareness of the reality of the mission field and the necessity of God’s transformative power. Even with Jesus as the sower par excellence, there are obstacles against faithful receptivity to the good news, be they Satan, the hardness of the human heart, of competing loyalties in this world. Bearing true spiritual fruit entails not just hearing the word of God but doing it. The ability to abide by Jesus’ word lies not in sheer will or good intentions but in the empowering of the Holy Spirit (Diane G. Chen, NTIC, 144).”
To the point of the Holy Spirit, this is a place where I had sort of an internal jumping up and down, Rocky at the top of the steps sensation within the last week or so. We know Jesus is the sower, we can surmise that he and/or the father are the harvester, but in the real time of life, we should note that THE HOLY SPIRIT IS TENDING THE FIELD. The Holy Spirit is here with us in this life, walking among all of us, tending the field so that we may have the chance to bear fruit.
But this, my friends, is where the 7 or 8 years of pondering leave me with ongoing questions. If a point of the story is that people who have responded differently to receiving Jesus’ ministry have responded a certain way, and the people who have responded faithfully are in this category which bears a remarkable amount of fruit in whatever quantity, it does seem like there is a call for us to model our lives in some way on that group. We have some agency, some part in this. The soil may be a passive image, but again, I would say the story is told as a reflection on what has already happened, while we are currently in the middle of our own.
So if the soil is passive, then what’s active? What’s active here is that the plants bear fruit. If we shift from trying to become the good soil to trying to understand what it means to bear fruit, I think we start to move down a different path that begins in verse 9.
“Whoever has ears, let them hear.” Jesus utters this sentence immediately after finishing the parable. Then, when the disciples ask why he speaks in parables, he tells them that, though seeing they do not see, and though hearing they do not hear, fulfilling a prophecy from Isaiah. Then he tells the disciples that their eyes are blessed because they see, and their ears are blessed because they hear. But the disciples didn’t understand the parable either, so what is going on?
Having ears to hear doesn’t mean immediate comprehension. It also doesn’t seem to be a special dispensation, if you will, based on status; as bible scholar Kay Higuera Smith notes, the disciples, those closest to Jesus, not only have issues understanding what he’s saying here: they repeatedly fail to understand and believe (Kay Higuera Smith, NTIC, 116).
It’s not immediate comprehension. It’s not status or proximity to Jesus. So what is it? It is their continuing to come back that points us in the right direction. Returning to the Bible Project’s series on parables, they walk through how the parables require the listener to keep coming back, to ponder the meaning in order to understand the teachings of Jesus. And ironically, in a lot of ways it’s because of the simplicity of the stories. This parable that Jesus tells doesn’t seem like a remarkable story. “A farmer planted some seed and it only grew in good soil.”
But remember, the seed had been used in Old Testament imagery. The birds were known as an evil omen. If Jesus’ listeners were willing to return to the story, the pieces were there to begin to understand His message. It is the willingness to continue coming back, to keep exploring the mystery, that begins to demonstrate what it means to have ears to hear.
So, we continue to come back. We think, we ponder, we explore. We, like the plants in the story, make our way through the entire growing season, being tended by the Holy Spirit, unsure which soil represents the story of us or our neighbors. But when we finally have made our way through the whole growing season, what is the final characteristic of the crops we’re hoping to be, the ones in the good soil?
They bear fruit. Their ultimate response after thinking and pondering is enacting what they have learned.
So what might it mean to bear fruit? The first thought that comes to mind, with similar imagery, is the fruits of the spirit. And we might say, “ok, no reason to outright reject this. Developing personal spiritual characteristics in the Spirit.”
But then we think further, and perhaps something like the Great Commission comes to mind. And we might think, “ok, a little less comfortable, a little more outside myself, but you know, putting faith into practice, spreading the word, we can make that happen. And yeah, there might be some people who make life difficult for us because of that, but if that’s all we’re dealing with I think I can stick with it.”
But if we take it a little further, we start thinking about the different things Christ actively calls us to, the people he calls us to care for. And then we start thinking about other places in the Bible, where faithfulness is demonstrated by meeting others’ needs, especially the poor, and the widow, and the orphan, and the foreigner. And we see people giving sacrificially to meet these needs. And the thorns start to come up, and we start to say, “wait wait wait. Are we sure this is all part of the same package? I mean, I’ve got troubles. I made this money for my kids, to pay for where I live, to pay for my student loans. Is this really something I can do?”
Speaking from my own life? I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t happen all of the time. It doesn’t seem like it will happen all at once. And as we’ve already heard, it does seem impossible to do it without the Lord’s help. [and then we wrap it up]
Thankfully, we have the Lord's help! And being aware that we need it is step zero, asking the spirit to give us eyes to see the opportunities all around us where we could practice “fruit growing” - and then practicing saying “yes” to those Holy spirit nudges. We’re not going to get it right every time. But if we aren’t even trying to look and listen for it, we’ll miss it every time.