The sower

A word for the week

Some seed fell. That is the quiet engine of this whole parable, the same seed landing on four kinds of ground and coming to four different ends, and Jesus tells it plainly and then, unusually, explains it himself, so we are not left guessing. A farmer goes out to sow, flinging seed by hand across the field the way they did. And the seed does not care where it lands; it is the same good seed everywhere. What differs is the ground.

Some falls on the path, the hard-packed dirt where feet have walked, and it just sits there on the surface until the birds eat it. Some falls on rocky ground with only a thin skin of soil; it sprouts fast, in a burst of green, but has no root, and when the sun comes up it withers as quickly as it grew. Some falls among thorns, and comes up, but the weeds come up too and choke it, and it never amounts to anything. And some falls on good soil, and takes root, and grows, and yields a harvest many times over. Same seed. Four soils. Everything depends on the ground.

Jesus tells us the seed is the word, the message of the kingdom, and then he walks us through the soils, and the striking thing is that he is not really describing four kinds of people out there. He is describing four things that can happen in you. The hard path is the heart too packed down to let anything in; the word lands and never sinks, and is gone before it can take. The rocky ground is the heart that receives it with instant joy but has no depth, so when hardship or opposition comes, and it always comes, there is no root to hold on, and the whole thing falls away. Do you know that one, the fervor that flares and dies at the first cost?

The thorns are the one that should stop us longest, because the thorns are not obviously evil. Jesus names them: the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth. Not sins, exactly. Just concerns. The mortgage, the ambition, the endless anxious noise, the pursuit of more, all of it crowding in around the young plant until there is no light and no room, and it is slowly, quietly strangled. Most of us do not lose the word to some dramatic rebellion. We lose it to clutter, to being too busy and too worried and too full to let it grow. The thorns do not attack the plant. They just take up all the space.

And then the good soil, the heart that hears and understands and holds on, that lets the word sink down and take root, and it produces a harvest out of all proportion to the seed, thirty, sixty, a hundred times over. That is the promise. When the word gets into ground that will actually keep it, the return is enormous.

So the parable hands you a question, and it is not about other people. It is: what kind of ground are you this year? Packed hard? Shallow and quick to quit? Crowded with thorns? Or broken open and ready? The good news is that ground can be worked. A path can be plowed, rocks can be dug out, thorns can be pulled. You are not stuck as the soil you were. But you have to tend the ground, because the seed is faithful, and it will grow wherever it is given the room.