A sower went out to sow | a sermon

A sermon by Jamie Howison on Romans 8:1-11 and Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

Tonight we are greeted by one of Jesus’ most familiar parables, and one that has made its way into logo of the Canadian Bible Society. You probably know that stylized image, of a figure walking along, a bag over his shoulder and his right arm flinging seeds as he walks.

It is a fine image, of course, and as we heard the parable read aloud we easily slipped into our own familiar ways of understanding what Jesus is saying. “Listen, a sower went out to sow,” Jesus says to the crowd gathered on the beach. Some of the seeds fell on the path where the birds ate them up, some fell on rocky ground where they quickly withered, some fell amongst the weeds and were quickly choked out, while others fell on good soil and yielded grain. “Let anyone with ears listen!” he says as he draws his parable to an end, and then only later does he offer an interpretive take on it, privately to his disciples.

He's talking about “the word of the kingdom,” he says to the disciples, or in the version in Luke simply, “the word of God.” Those different ground conditions represent the different states of people who might hear that word proclaimed; some hear but don’t understand—that’s the path people—some hear it and get excited, but have no deeper grounding and fade away—the stony ground people—and some might hear, but are more caught up in the cares and concerns of their day to day world and get choked out—the thorn folks. But there’s always the good soil people—the ones who hear and understand and so bear fruit—which, the average faithful reader thinks, is what I most want to be.

That’s a fair enough reading, of course, and it directly reflects what Jesus says to his disciples. Do we really need anything more?

Well, let’s back up for a minute, and place this parable in its arc of Jesus’ entire set of teachings as conveyed to us in the timeline followed by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The first thing to notice is that if you start reading any of those three gospels at the beginning, this is in fact Jesus’ first full parable. Prior to this there have been some instances of simple comparisons; things like “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matthew 6:24). But here, now, Jesus begins to offer parables that are actually stories.

And these stories are meant to get under our skin, not to make us feel like we’ve got all of our ducks lined up in a neat row. In the parable of the Prodigal son, am I more like the younger brother or the older? In the Good Samaritan, am I more likely to act like the Samaritan, or like the priest and Levite? And here, what sort of soil might I actually be, in the course of my actual day to day life? Can the seed in fact take the kind of root it needs in order to actually bear fruit, in other words.

You have to, in a very real sense, surrender to these stories as Jesus tells them, without jumping to a place where you conclude that obviously I’m the Good Samaritan, the good soil, the house built on the rock, and so forth. When Jesus says, “Let anyone with ears listen,” he’s not excluding Peter, James, and John any more than he’s excluding any one of us. He wants our ears open and our eyes willing to look hard at the textures not only of the story, but also of our own ways of living and seeing and hearing and choosing in our day to day lives.

That’s the power of his parables. We want to line ourselves up with all of the good soil or the good characters—including, of course, the penitent tax collector who goes to the temple and trembles at the way he’s been living. But Jesus wants us to hold off on doing that, and to first see if we don’t better fit with the rocky ground, the Elder brother sulking in the garden, or the pious Pharisee who imagines he has all of us moral and religious scruples properly lined up.

The second thing to really ponder here is how the imagery in this parable is working. The assumption is often made that Jesus himself must be the sower, and that his listeners are one kind of soil or another. He goes out on his journeys in and around Galilee teaching—sowing the seed, as it were—and the people who hear him respond in one way or another. They hear but don’t take any of it to heart, or they’re terribly keen but don’t have the depth to really let things grow, or they’re do distracted by a hundred other cares of life such that they don’t let any of it truly take root… or perhaps they’re the ones who actually do take Jesus’ teachings to heart, and so flourish.

But what if Jesus is not placing himself in the role of the sower? This is Robert Farrar Capon’s take on things, from his first of three books on the parables, The Parables of the Kingdom. In that book he makes the case that “the Sower is God the Father, not Jesus.” Well, that raises one’s head a bit, doesn’t it? The working assumption from Sunday School classes right up to how most of us have tended to hear the parable straight through into adulthood is that Jesus must be the sower. After all, he’s teaching right then and there, on a beach in Galilee to a whole crowd who’ve come out to listen to him.

And yet, Capon will argue, “What Jesus turns out to be – since he is the Word – is the seed sown.” Jesus is the Word made flesh, or in the translation by Eugene Peterson in The Message, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” (John 1:14) So take that little insight, and think on Jesus himself being the seed—the Word—sown.

Here Capon writes,

[N]ote what that in turn means. It means that in the plain terms of the parable, Jesus has already, quite literally, been sown everywhere in the world – and quite without a single bit of earthly cooperation or even consent.

And then he continues,

The seed eaten by birds is as much seed as the seed that produced a hundredfold. The snatching of the Word by the devil—and the rejection of it by the shallow and the choking of it by the worldly—all take place within the working of the kingdom, not prior to it or outside if it. It is the Word alone, and not the interference with it, that finally counts.

And here, in a very real sense, is the point of real wonder in this way of thinking about the parable. What exactly does the good soil do? Nothing. Aside from simply being reasonably decent soil, it doesn’t do anything. When you take that soil as an analogue for those who “hear the word and understand it,” we’re faced with a marvelous bit of proclamation. One final quote from Robert Capon:

It's not that they—the ones who hear and understand—It's not that they do anything, you see: rather, it’s that they don’t do things that get in the Word’s way. It’s the Word, and the Word alone, that does all the rest.

And isn’t that an odd and startling and comforting thing to proclaim on a summer Sunday night, that it comes down to what Jesus has done and is doing and will do that matters, not all of your or my attempts to bring in the kingdom. The kingdom is already sown, deep within us and all around us. All we need to do is remember that, and then let the Word take deep root in the soil of our hearts and minds and selves and see what is yielded. Oh, and not get in the way of the Word’s work and life in our midst, which has been a terrible error of the Church in so many ways over so many centuries, including our own century. We begin to imagine that it somehow all comes down to our theologies, our mission work, our particular way of doing things or understanding things or whatever. But it’s the Word, and the Word alone, that does what is most needful.