The Struggle of the Sower

The familiarity of the Parable of the Sower provides an (ironic?) example of its message—we know it, but do we understand it? Let those who have ears, listen.

Although this famous story occurs in all three Synoptic Gospels, this is the only time in the three-year lectionary cycle it comes up. Unfortunately, the Revised Common Lectionary version of the Gospel reading does us an active disservice by skipping over Jesus’ confronting explanation of parables generally (10-17) and going straight to the explanation provided for this one parable (18-23). As edited, it leaves the impression this explanation was offered immediately, and was universal and essential to the parable. In fact it is offered secretly to the twelve, as a coda to Jesus’ missing commentary on how the story was not (sic) meant to be understood. The option to extend the reading with the intervening verses —which is allowable1—is worth considering here.

It remains tempting to many of us to think of Jesus the earthy communicator with the common touch, explaining truths in simple terms using familiar images from rural life. An immediate problem for this attractive folksy explanation arises when—in all three Synoptic versions—the disciples, having heard the Sower, immediately ask Jesus what it meant (part of what we skip). Here in Matthew’s version they even ask why he speaks in parables at all. No, parables are not clear. This does not mean that they are intellectually complex, but rather that their message is easy to miss depending on who we are and where we stand. We sometimes offer this material as the direct opposite of how the Gospel presents it: for if we preach “Jesus the gifted anecdotalist who makes this easy” (let alone “how the wonder of nature brings growth”), we miss the point. This is the Jesus who divides (recall chapter 10), and comprehension of the parable reflects this division.

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The Sower parable itself (vv.1-9) involves more than just the wonders of creation or some “happy farmer.” The typical Galilean peasant who might sow such a field was likely in a dependent and difficult economic relationship, like tenancy or day-laboring, tributes and taxes related to Roman occupation notwithstanding. The obstacles to plenty included more than the marginal state of the land being sown (as described here); poverty, indebtedness and plunder meant uncertain returns regardless of a decent crop.

The key thing about the parable is not the details of the diversity of soils, but the remarkable end, the miraculous yield of what fell on good soil. To yield “hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” is not usual. The rest was dramatic tension; the result, which is God’s reign, is a yield that outweighs the frustration and struggle the peasantry have from the conditions under which they labored, poor soils and all. Here we have an agrarian paradise in which all needs are met, and where the despair associated with the weeds, the stony ground, and the arbitrary impositions of landlords and occupiers are all swept away. In God’s reign, the poor who sow— the little ones who are God’s favored (cf. Matt 11:25)—will have enough.

So the image of God’s reign here is not so intellectually hard to grasp, but it is a message of good news for those who understand the need for it, because of their own experience. It is not a message just of inner spiritual growth. The difference between hearing and not hearing is not about whether you read Andrew’s Version or my favored commentaries; rather the difference is the same one referred to in last week’s Gospel (“…you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants” 11:25), about how insight into the wisdom of the kingdom of heaven is related to experience and action. This is not merely a paradox, or some arbitrary divine distinction between those chosen to hear and those who don’t. The genre of parables by its nature allows those unwilling or unable to hear because of who they have become, and what they have decided really matters, not to hear.

Parables in general perform something like what is described in this particular parable, which makes it so apt: offering, creating, transforming, sometimes disclosing, but just as often—more often—falling on the stony ground of ears that do not want to hear, or amid the competing growth of other projects and priorities. And it is this lack of ability to hear God’s demand that underlies the oppressive reality sustained by the peasantry and others who experience injustice and marginalization.

The nuance of Jesus’ startling explanation of parables, of why they are obscure, does shift a bit between the three Gospel versions. In Mark, presumably the oldest, the question and answer (“And he said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?’” Mk 4:13) reflect the usual picture in that first Gospel of the disciples as hopeless, incapable (like all of us, admittedly) of grasping a messianic identity that only the Cross could reveal. In Matthew however, where the disciples generally appear more equipped, they receive a beatitude in their private seminar instead of a rebuke: “But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear” (13:16). Those hearing the Gospel today can receive that too, but must understand this is a corollary of discipleship.

While the verses just discussed are not part of the lection, there is material in the abridged version that hints at this point. The parable proper ends with the call to “hear” that implies some will not (v. 9), and the explanation opens (v. 18) with the note that incomprehension is itself one of the threats to fruitfulness, and hence an important part of this picture.

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Even for Matthew the point of the private explanation is not so much privilege for the disciples, nor even underlining obscurity of the parables (although this is certainly assumed), but the challenge to the reader (as a disciple) to know they that they have been included in the mystery, where others have not (whether or not we think we ourselves quite grasp the parable). The blessing of having ears that hear is not a prize, or an achievement, but a way of being. The disciple thus understands (then and now) that the habitual indifference and hostility of the world to what is just and true (“Alternative facts,” anyone?) is not only of long standing, but can even play some part in God’s purpose, as Isaiah suggests. In a different setting we have to admit athis opposition to Jesus and the Gospel includes many who wear them as a though a T-shirt, but ignore the substance. The parable would suggest this is not a new thing.

The explanation of the parable (v. 18 on) is regarded by many scholars as of separate origin. Its allegorizing tendencies, correlating the various soils with personal experiences of faith and failure, may reflect how the later audience of the Gospels experienced their own struggles of ongoing opposition and failure, and saw companions struggle or leave. This may also help us read the parable, but is not an invitation to leave behind the setting of Jesus’ ministry too quickly, so that we merely correlate these “soils” of early Christian experience with our own biographies regardless of concrete realities. The parable was offered to people who experienced despair and even food insecurity, and their experience should not be erased too quickly in favor of musings about wavering belief and shallow commitment—even though these do matter. Our experience matters, but might be a predictor of whether we listen and understand. Unless we acknowledge how the poor and marginalized here are at the center of the God’s care, we will not understand either.

The point then is not just that some people hear and respond and others do not, let alone that there are people in our experience who do so and why; it is also, as originally, that the “Word of the Kingdom” is offered to God’s chosen, the little ones, and that this power of God redeems the whole field, which is the world, when we listen. Let those who have ears, hear.