Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 Commentary

This week we transition to parables, Jesus’s stories that bend and challenge our understanding with essential truths shared through images that spark our imaginations. The parable of the sower and the seed is a teaching about how—or even if—we come to understand these things of God and his Kingdom.

We begin with the sower, or farmer, who is planting seed, throwing it all over the place: on the path by his field, on the edges were there are rocks, even in the places where he hasn’t yet weeded out the thorns, and yes, in the soil that’s been turned over and is ready to receive.

God, of course, is this generous sower and he is depicted as being more concerned about the seed getting out than making sure it lands in the places where its chances are maximized for success. The seed bag appears to be endless—our first mind-bending image. Instead of calling the sower foolish for wasting it, the farmer is simply sowing the seed he believes in.

The seed, Jesus says, is “the word of the Kingdom,” that mysterious mix of the logos Christ and the good news of God’s Kingdom in word and deed. God sends the message of the Kingdom as a seed that might grow and blossom in the lives of people, and he sends it without a care about the quality, readiness, acceptability, or receptivity of the person. Everyone has access to the seed that is the gospel good news. Our second mind-bending insight challenges our sense of boundaries.

Now, just because God sends the seed that is Jesus Christ and gives everyone an opportunity to seize upon the Kingdom and all of its values, doesn’t mean that it happens effectively or immediately. Good thing the seed keeps getting sown! Each of the different kinds of soil situations represent the kinds of responses people have to the call of the Kingdom.

For some, their hearts are hardened so much that their soil is so solid and compacted that it is described as a path. There are no cracks in which the seed can infiltrate, so the seeds sits atop the surface. Those of us like this kind of soil might hear the words of hope and love that come from the seed, but we do not want them—we refuse to understand them (see the Textual Point below about what it means to understand). We refuse to allow the seed to challenge, nurture, or heal our hardened hearts. And for good measure, the evil one comes and snatches the seed laid bare on the soil, keeping us dried up, parched and hardened.

For others of us, we’re more like the rocky soil—perhaps we’re even in a stage of life that has moved us from being hardened to a little more broken up, like the edge of the road where there are more breaks in the pavement. The indiscriminate invitation from God comes as the seed of the Kingdom and our freshly opened selves snatch at the thing we know is good news. Joy! But we’re a bit flighty and the patterns of our hardened hearts and stubbornness are hard to break. We want to the good news, but we haven’t yet learned the deep truth that the good news isn’t a promise of an easy road. We’re looking for the seed of the Kingdom to solve our problems but we don’t want to do the work involved in cultivating and nourishing its presence. We don’t let it deep within us, we don’t let it challenge us, our views, our lifestyles, our way of thinking and loving or worshipping. And so, when the going gets tough and when it’s not rainbows and butterflies but thunderstorms and hail, we lose the little bud of hope because we kept Jesus and his ways superficial in our lives.

And what of the seed sown in the life that has thorns? Jesus says that we are the ones who welcome the seed but don’t remove the other plants so that the Kingdom ways can flourish. We are the ones who need to open up our grip on our fears and worries, or on our drive for more money, more status more, more, more!—to pull up these things that are more deeply rooted in us than the things of God. If we do not, then the way of God will wither: we cannot serve two masters.

Finally, we come to the good soil. Let us pause first to remember the image of the farmer sowing. For me, the way the story is told paints a picture of a farmer who keeps happily going about the sowing his unending bag of good seed because the more the Kingdom takes root in this world the closer we are to the final fruition of the Kingdom of heaven here on earth. So, hopefully, each of the different kinds of soils, with each of the different times the seed of good news comes to it, is impacted ever so great or small until it becomes the good soil (or returns to being good soil).

Because the good soil represents when we hear and understand. When we let the good news sink in deep and take hold of our hearts in such a way that it changes our lives. We become not just soil, but the wildly growing garden of God, bearing fruit upon fruit upon fruit. Amen.

Textual Point

What words mean and how those meanings differ across cultures and contexts matters. For us in a post-Enlightenment context, the word “understand” is different than what Jesus means when he uses it here. The Greek word syniēmi carries with the kind of understanding that is not just cognitive (how we mostly think of it). The BDAG (biblical Greek dictionary) defines it as “having a grasp of something that challenges one’s thinking or practice.” In other words, to understand means that there is a change in action and way of being.

Illustration Ideas

“It’s not a house, but a home.” This might be too cliché, but it might help someone get the sense of the word “understand” in this parable… a house and a home are technically the same thing, but they feel and are lived in differently. A sense of home is deeply rooted within us, transcending the house providing a roof over our heads. A home allows us the safety and belonging to be someone. We carry homes with us, even when we leave the houses of our youth. This is what the word of the Kingdom does when we are good soil, when we understand it, nurture it, and in turn, let it nurture us and produce infinite Kingdom fruit.