Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
July 10, 2011
A Sower Went Out to Sow
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
A crowd gathered around Jesus. That wasn’t unusual. That Jesus used a gathered crowd as a chance to teach is no surprise either. Nor is it a surprise that he taught them in parables. If Jesus is known for anything special in his method of teaching, it is that he taught in parables.
“A sower went out to sow.” And still there is no surprise, no startling new thing. We know this parable. In fact, we’re pretty sure we know them all. At least we’re pretty sure we’d recognize any of them. We may not understand them all, but we know how we’re supposed to go about understanding them. The parables are little stories. They are set in scenes that his hearers recognized, scenes drawn from ordinary life.
And, if we’re sure of one thing, we’re sure that they don’t mean what they say. They are what our English teachers called “allegory.” They aren’t meant to be taken literally. The elements in the story, like the sower, the seed and the different soils, are all metaphors, figures that refer to something else.
In our reading for this morning, we are even told what these particular elements in the story really mean: The seed that the sower sows is “the word of the kingdom.” The different soils are the different kinds of audiences. The hard-packed soil of the path is the hearer from whom the devil snatches the word away like a bird picking seeds off the ground. There are shallow people in whom the word of the kingdom can’t take root, so when hard times come the word dies. There are people who let their anxiety or greed crowd out the good news; they are the thorn-infested soil. And finally there are people who will take the word of the kingdom to heart. They will give it space to grow. They will guard it from the enemy. They will keep it from being crowded out by other commitments or concerns. So be careful about what kind of reception you give to the word of the kingdom: Be like the good soil in which the seed of the good news can take root and grow and bear a rich harvest.
There. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Of course, in this particular case we have the teacher’s edition of the textbook, the one with the answers in the back. For other parables we’ll be on our own. We’ll have to figure these out for ourselves. And it doesn’t look too good.
In fact, if we look at the stuff that lies between the parable itself and its interpretation, the part of this passage that the lectionary committee didn’t think we should read this morning, we’ll find some discouraging news. When Jesus’ disciples ask Jesus why he teaches in parables he answers by telling them that he speaks in parables so that the crowd will not understand what he is saying. They aren’t supposed to understand. Only the disciples are supposed to understand. They are only ones who get the answer key. It’s too bad that they didn’t pass it along to us! Instead we have an interpretation for this parable and a very few others and we’re thrown on our own too-meager resources to figure out the rest.
Now what? Where do we go from here? It looks like we’re stuck.
Let me suggest a way forward. As it often happens, the way forward begins by going back. Matthew’s gospel was written in the last three decades of the first century, anywhere from forty to seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Like every writer of every book of the Bible, Matthew was much less concerned with putting the tradition that he had received into writing while remaining a neutral observer than he was with helping his community deal with its own problems by making use of the tradition that he received.
Matthew’s community was puzzled as to why the good news that had meant so much to them didn’t seem to get much traction with many of their neighbors. Why was it that they just didn’t “get” it? Well, the interpretation that Matthew provided helped them to understand. Some people, maybe even most people, didn’t get it because they were the wrong kind of soil for that kind of seed. Matthew’s community could see their experiences mirrored in the results of the sower’s sowing: some people never seemed to hear the message at all, others seemed glad to hear it but wandered away soon after, still others were so distracted by other things that the message couldn’t really take hold. They, meanwhile, should concentrate on being fertile soil. And, behind those choices, there was another will at work: some people were not meant to understand while they, thankfully, were.
Matthew has recast the tradition to speak to his own day. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s the only thing that we can do. We live in Decorah, not Antioch, in the early part of the twenty-first century, not the latter part of the first.
I believe that Matthew’s reinterpretation of Jesus’ parable does not bind us to follow his reading. Instead, I believe that it frees us to recast the tradition so that it speaks to our world and our life in it, just as Matthew recast it to speak to his world. So the way forward lies back, behind Matthew’s reading.
I find it helpful and useful when reading parables to take the parable at face value. I assume that it means what it says. This parable begins, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” I am going to assume that this parable, then, is about “a sower who went out to sow.” Jesus’ listeners would have recognized this scene.
The figure of the sower with a bag full of seed walking through a field and casting the seed by hand was familiar. The sower sowed the seed. Then he would go back over the field with an ox and a scratch plow. The scratch plow wouldn’t turn the soil over as our plows used to do. It would—as its name implies—merely scratch the surface inch or so to cover the seed so that it could germinate and grow. Then, much the same as our farmers do now, they would hope for rain. Only they waited and hoped with a higher degree of anxiety. Agriculture was a close thing in that part of the world. Jesus’ hearers knew that farming was a gamble and that there were lots of things that could go wrong. Even if everything went right, it was not a way for a peasant to get rich. Even in good years the yield was meager. The ancients used to say that a harvest was divided into thirds: one-third for seed, one-third for the rats and one-third to eat.
Farming as done by peasants was no get-rich quick scheme, but it would provide a living, especially if the peasant was fortunate enough to have good land, land on a well-drained slope for example. Jesus’ hearers knew this, too.
This brings us to the first surprise in the parable: this sower’s land stunk. It was hardly worth the bother, as the story tells us by detailing the ways in which the land was unsuitable. In the first place, there was a road that ran through the field. The birds would eat any seed that fell on the road. And what they didn’t eat would be trampled.
Part of the field was too rocky and the soil was too thin. No seed that fell there would produce a harvest. Part of the field was thorn-infested. Farmers could and would burn the weeds off before planting but the roots were too deep to be destroyed by fire. The roots of the weeds would send up new shoots and thorns would be well-established before the grain had even thought about germinating.
How did it come about that the sower was casting seed in such a field? Why wasn’t he casting his seed in a more promising field? Why was he trying to farm an upland plot? Jesus’ hearers knew the answer to that question: our peasant friend was farming in the rocky, thorn-infested hills because the good soil further down the slopes was taken.
When the Romans took over Palestine, they began to shove peasants off their land. They consolidated the small holdings of the displaced peasant families into large plantations growing luxury cash crops. The land was being converted from subsistence to commercial use. The economy was changing from barter- to currency-based. Goods and money were moving more freely—not to mention the peasant families thrown off their ancestral holdings. The International Monetary Fund would have been proud.
So it was either farm the poor land in the hill country or give it up altogether. But why would he keep farming? Why would he do something so futile, when all these factors that he could not control were conspiring to frustrate his hopes? Why not just give up?
Why not take up banditry? If he couldn’t live long he could at least live well. Plus, banditry offered the poetic justice of repaying the rich for their theft of his good land. So why not?
Or maybe take up a trade. The life of tradesman didn’t offer the same dignity as being a peasant and he would have to make nice with the people who had stolen his land, but it was a living and those were not easy to come by in those tight times. So why not? Why keep doing what he was doing?
As different as our sower’s situation was from ours, there is still something in his story that sounds familiar. In our lives, if we are ever to accomplish anything worth accomplishing, if we are ever to matter, we will sooner or later face something like our sower’s dilemma. When we have a hope, a good dream, that we are pursuing and we’re working hard to move toward it, and we’ve controlled everything we can control and then things we can’t control come along and threaten everything, why not just pack it in and do something else, something easy?
A woman is raising two children on her own in a bad neighborhood. She works two jobs to keep a roof over their heads and food (of a sort) on their table. Her kids have to walk through gang territory to get to school and they’re facing pressure to join a gang or face reprisals. And, meanwhile, politicians are scoring points with their suburban constituents by calling her lazy and attacking the utility assistance program that makes it all just barely work. Why not just give it up? Why not just take the path of least resistance? Why not just live like the welfare queen she is accused of being?
I can’t speak for others, but I can say for myself that there are times when “the preaching life”—as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it—gets tiresome. We live in a world that, while it is beautiful and even wondrous, is also and at the same time ugly with injustice and pain. I hear Jesus calling us all to live lives that are peaceful and just and I know that this means more than being nice to each other, but I haven’t figured out just what it looks like, much less how to live that kind of life. I’m a preacher, so in the meantime all I have are words to oppose that injustice, to celebrate that beauty, and to ease that pain. Words are in abundant supply and the demand for them has not kept pace, so words have become cheaper and cheaper. We are overwhelmed with words. What we need is silence. What I have are words. So how do I speak so that it doesn’t just dump more words into the verbal floodwaters? Why not just give it up and find some other line of work?
Why does the sower go out to sow?
The sower goes out to sow because, in spite of the injustice he has suffered at the hands of the Romans and their rich friends, in spite of the plant-choking thorns, in spite of the hard-packed road running right through his field, in spite of the seed-gulping birds and the too-thin soil, in spite of all that, there is good soil in that miserable field and some of the seed falls into it. And then something wonderful happens. We’d call it a miracle although it’s not a miracle at all—it’s entirely natural. But it is a marvel: the seed germinates; the plant grows and grows and matures; it blooms; and, despite the long odds and unfavorable circumstances, it bears fruit. Some of the plants bear thirty seeds, some sixty, some even a scarcely believable one hundred seeds. It is those few plants, a gift from a generous God, that justify the absurd venture of planting in such an unlikely place. That’s why the sower goes out to sow. That marvel is what the sower is looking for.
And that’s what we’re looking for. It’s what that woman trying to shepherd her kids from fragile childhood to responsible maturity is looking for. It’s what the preacher who is trying to be faithful to his calling is looking for. It’s what anyone who sets out to do something that matters is looking for.
And there it is: some of the seed falls into good soil. And what happens next is marvelous. So, when you set out to do a good thing, much of what you do will be wasted effort. Much of what you do will come to nothing. Much of what you do will be frustrated. All of what you do may seem futile and foolish. But there is more at work than what you can see. The odds are long, but it only has to happen once. And then what you do will become a marvel, a wonder. It will grow and multiply and bear fruit, some one hundred times, some sixty times, some thirty times. And that will make everything worth the price you have paid. “Let anyone with ears listen!” Amen.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
No comments:
Post a Comment