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Readings (click here for full text of the readings): Today we begin the first major collection of Jesus’s parables – over the next few weeks we’ll hear the parables of the mustard seed, hidden treasure, pearl of great price, and many more. But today is the Parable of the Sower, the first and longest of the parables in this section, and the only one that comes with a detailed explanation. The story is probably familiar to most of us – A man sows seed, and some grows and some doesn’t. With the help of the explanation, we come to understand that the obstacles to faith are misunderstanding, persecution, and greed. It seems clear cut and familiar. But if we can imagine ourselves with Jesus that day, hearing those words for the first time, the meaning of His words was anything but obvious. Surrounded by crowds longing to hear Him teach, Jesus told them a story – a story that came right of their lives, for they were farmers, living off the land, well acquainted with seeds and soil. He told them a familiar tale – some seeds take and others don’t – mundane, and hardly revolutionary. If Jesus were to come to America today, particularly on a Sunday, He might tell a story like this: There once was a quarterback who had four receivers. The first one never ran the right pattern and so the other team always intercepted the pass. The second one invariably took his eye off the ball and dropped it. The third one always fumbled and lost the ball when he was tackled. But the fourth one caught the passes, sometimes for short yardage and other times for touchdowns. PAUSE Well, that’s a nice story, but it doesn’t tell us very much. We probably already know that it’s not too smart to throw the ball to someone who isn’t in the right place, can’t catch it even if he is, and then can’t hold onto it even if he catches it. In the end, rather than being inspired, we’re left with the basic question: “What kind of quarterback would throw it to those guys in the first place?” And that’s the question that plagued me this week, as I was struggling to come up with something to say about this all-too-familiar story that seems so clear-cut: “What’s up with the sower?” Jesus obviously knew the ins and outs of farming – many of His stories had to do with wheat and chaff and weeds and seed – and so He was well aware that seed was precious, and a good steward would take great care to sow the seed only in areas where it had a chance of growing. And yet here He gives us an example a farmer who sows indiscriminately – right here and over there, where there are birds and thorns and rocky soil, and where there is good soil, too. This might seem wanton and wasteful, unless we realize what the seed is. When Jesus explains the parable to the disciples, He identifies the seed as “the word of the kingdom,” the Word of God. And this can refer to many things – the spoken Word, the written Word (the Bible), but most fundamentally, the Word made flesh, Jesus the Christ. Here Jesus is referring to Himself, spread throughout the world, to all people regardless of the odds that they might hear the Word and allow it to live in their hearts. The Eucharistic Prayer says that Jesus shed His blood for us “and for many for the forgiveness of sins,” and it might as well say “for everyone,” because that’s the truth of it. Jesus is indiscriminate and undiscerning and foolhardy – no chance is too small, no odds are too great – everyone is worth His sacrifice, His seed, His love. And He is all that matters. For whereas today we realize that a lot goes into the growth of plants – seed, soil, water, sun – back then people thought that the seed was all that mattered. As long as the other elements didn’t get in the seed’s way, everything would turn out OK. That’s what Jesus meant with the parable, and that’s what’s true today as well – Jesus, the Word made flesh, offered for us, sown in our hearts – is all that matters. Some Christians go on and on about our responsibility to “bring Christ” to people who don’t know Him – that’s an honorable approach, but often a misguided one. Christ is everywhere, in all our hearts, and all we can hope to do is water, nurture, prune, warm. The other thing about seeds that’s important to remember is that they disappear. An acorn doesn’t grow before your eyes – it’s buried, hidden, seemingly dead and gone, and from nothing, over time, grows a mighty oak. And the seeds of herbs, which Jesus also loved to talk about, are so small that when you drop them into soil they disappear immediately, as if they’d never existed in the first place. But then comes their fragrance, erupting as if from everywhere, permeating, enlivening, undeniable. All from something that seemed so small and insignificant. And that’s the mistake that so many people make. Most of the people who heard Jesus talk about the mundane that day might have walked away saying to themselves, “He knows the pitfalls of farming, all right, and that was a nice story, but what’s the big deal about a lavish sower who wasted a lot of seed?” It was only the disciples who were privy to the explanation of the parable, for in the verses that were left out of today’s reading, the disciples ask Jesus why He spoke in parables. He was cryptic in His response, and quoted the prophet Isaiah: “The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’” Jesus didn’t mean that He was trying to hide the meaning so that people couldn’t understand; He was simply observing that the people just didn’t get it. The truth was there, but hidden – the truth of tiny seeds that were sown and seemed to die, only to rise in power and permeate the world. The people then, and most of us now, didn’t think along those lines – they were looking for self-dependence and grandeur and visibility. Only those who saw the underlying meaning had any hope of understanding the seed, the Word sown in our hearts, God made human, humanity reconciled to the divine. And so to those who asked, to those who could understand, only to them did Jesus explain the Parable of the Sower. And lest we think that “we would never do that,” rest fitfully assured that we do. We turn away from fields that don’t appear fertile so as not to waste our energy, not seeing that God is imprudently generous and willing to risk rejection in order to give everyone a chance; we get in God’s way in our lives and the lives of others, overestimating our own importance and underestimating the heartiness and wonder and potential of the tiny seeds of grace that lie within each person. We forget the humble beginnings of “the heroes of the faith” – Moses, the shepherd who came up with a thousand reasons why he shouldn’t be the one to stand up to Pharaoh; Rahab the prostitute, who sheltered the spies sent by Joshua; Jonah, who fled in the opposite direction when God told him to confront Nineveh with its sin; Peter the fisherman, who became the rock of the Church; and, ultimately, a Messiah who died a criminal’s death to redeem the world. As we enter the season of parables, where meanings are hidden and grace is too simple and commonplace and free for our tastes, may God give us the strength to get out of the way, luxuriate in the divine generosity for which we can take no credit, and allow the light of God within our hearts to burn and spread without fear or limit. Amen.
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