The Parable of the Sower
Reflections on the Lectionary for July 16th
Lately I have been working on a series of four short talks, to be delivered at my denominational national meeting in a couple of weeks—the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). My assignment for those four talks is to talk about the kingdom of God—or, to be more precise, the kindom of God. To avoid the patriarchal and hierarchical connotations of “kingdom,” some people have begun to translate the Greek word basileia, which means “kingdom,” as “kindom,” which has a more egalitarian, less gendered meaning. Across four mini-lectures in late July and early August, I’ll be talking through some of the ways Jesus speaks and teaches about the basileia, asking what he meant by it and why he was so fixated on it.
I say in one of those talks—and I have heard other scholars say—that if you had asked Jesus to summarize his teachings in one sentence, it would not have been anything about personal salvation, sin and redemption, or proper worship. Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time talking about those things. Instead, Jesus probably would have answered you that the core of his teaching was that the kingdom of God had come near. (Note: the Gospel of Matthew, with its sensitivities toward Jewish tradition, nearly always says “kingdom of heaven” rather than “kingdom of God,” probably out of respect for traditions that avoided pronouncing nouns referring to divinity, either proper nouns or not. Luke and Mark say “kingdom of God”). In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), the topic of the kingdom never seems to be far from Jesus’ mind. He passes on warnings and teasers for the kingdom, and he explains it every way but plainly, using parables rather than direct language to make his points. The so-called “kingdom parables” are fascinating as strategies for talking about something without talking about it openly or directly. Jesus compares the kingdom to yeast, to small seeds, to treasure, to a net thrown into the sea, and to a field sown with wheat and polluted with weeds, among other things.
In this week’s lectionary, for Sunday the 18th, we have Matthew 13:1-9 and 18-23, which is one of the more famous of the kingdom parables, in a chapter full of them. The text is broken up like that—verses 1-9, and then 18-23—because it’s skipping over a section where the disciples ask Jesus why he teaches in parables, and he answers them with a citation from Isaiah. This whole chapter of Matthew, in fact, is full of metacommentary on parables. 13:3 says that “he told them many things in parables,” and in 13:53 Jesus is said to have “finished these parables.” The chapter is self-consciously about parables and about the ways people received the parables, and the section missing from the lectionary (13:10-17) is about people’s difficulty in understanding them.
Two thousand years of interpretation hasn’t necessarily made it any easier to understand the parables. Take this parable of the sower, for example. Even with Jesus’ explanations in 13:18-23, in which he glosses the threats to the seeds as the evil one (13:19), lack of endurance (13:21), and the cares of the world (13:22), the parable’s meaning is still a bit in flux. Here, Jesus is making it really clear that he’s not necessarily telling a story about seeds for its own sake, but that he’s doing it as a way to talk about people’s reception of “the word.” But what kind of opinion are we supposed to have of the seeds and the sower, in the face of these threats?
Many commenters have noted that the sower in this parable is not an especially skillful agriculturalist. “Some seeds fell on the path…others fell on rocky ground…other seeds fell among thorns.” The sower is putting the seeds in some tricky situations, seemingly broadcasting them willy-nilly rather than planting them with any intention. There are some kinds of seeds that can be planted that way, but most farmers would be more careful than that; most farmers would prepare the soil, plant in rows, and carefully cover the seeds to the required depth—and certainly not plant them on paths or in rocks. The sower seems careless or inexperienced. How is this meant to influence our interpretation of the passage? If the sower is a stand-in for Jesus, as he seems to be, what are we supposed to understand about Jesus from this parable? Is Jesus similarly careless with his dispersion of the word? Is he simply spread things as widely as he can, regardless of the suitability of the contexts where his words land? Is Jesus telling us something about himself here, or is it simply the case that metaphors (and parables) have limits?
In13:23, Jesus talks about the kinds of yields that might be produced by the seeds sown in good soil. This way of talking about the seeds suggests that the outcome of the growth has something to do with the seeds, which seems to be a little bit at odds with the rest of the parable. Even when sown in good soil, do some plants simply try harder than others? Are some plants content to not grow? Or is it all up to the sower, who is determining the conditions of the growth? The question might seem trivial, but it does seem to impact the meaning of the parable.
Another possibility for interpreting this parable is that Jesus is comparing himself to other preachers, or other spreaders of “the word,” and suggesting that others are planting without regard for the success of the seeds, but that Jesus himself was planting carefully and thoughtfully. This solves some of the theological problems with the text, as it relieves Jesus of the responsibility for some of the less successful sowing. It also suggests that Jesus had rivals in mind—something that we don’t see a ton of in the gospels, but that historically was probably the case. First-century Palestine was rife with messiahs and faith healers, and this parable might be Jesus’ way of differentiating himself from the rest.
This is part of the puzzle of parables. They don’t give us any tidy meanings. Their meanings are always multiple and contested, because they are stories and not direct statements. Jesus could have been more direct about things, as he often is in the Gospel of John, and that would have removed some of the uncertainty. But there’s something characteristically Jesus-like about parables—a denial of certainty and a refusal of clarity that seems to have been a part of his way of moving through the world. I can’t help but think that, when we struggle to figure out what the parable of the sower is really about, Jesus would have wanted it that way.