I enjoy having plants around the house and out in the garden, I think it’s fun to tend to them, but I can’t honestly say that I understand them.
A few years ago I decided to try growing orchids. I had four of them — all of the same variety, purchased at the same store within a few weeks of each other, sitting on the same shelf next to the same window, getting the same amount of water at the same time every week. And about six months later, one of them just up and croaked; I’ll be darned if I know why.
I have a pretty good track record with the plants I’ve tried care for, but it’s definitely not perfect. In fairness, a lot variables are out of my control to some degree — especially outside, where temperature, rainfall, wind, squirrels, birds and bugs have all undermined my efforts at some point. I have to admit that some of my indoor plants don’t fare so well either, though.
This past January I thought I had it all figured out when we got an indoor hydroponic garden setup — you know, one of those contraptions where you just put some seeds into holes in the centers of little cone-shaped sponges, place the sponges in the round cutouts in the lid, fill the tank below with water, and flip the switch.
LED lights above stay on for exactly sixteen hours and then turn off by themselves while a pump circulates the water in the tank below — thirty minutes on, thirty minutes off — all day long. When the plants eventually sprout you drop some liquid fertilizer in the tank and top up the water level every once in a while, but that’s about all there is to it. And in about two weeks you’re ready for the harvest.
Unlike situations in the wild where so much is left up to chance, or even on that shelf next to my living room window, where each of the orchids was in a different pot, there seemed to be no variables here — constant temperature, no wind and no critters to reckon with, seeds of the same variety from the same packet, one tank of water, a single shared light source, and all of it timed down to the second; everything was perfectly controlled, so what could possibly go wrong? So I followed the directions to the letter, and let time and technology do the rest.
Well, some of the seeds sprouted within a couple of days, some took more than a week to do so and some never did so at all; some of the plants got really big and some ended up being small; some had lots of leaves and others just a few. Even in ideal conditions, I had less than uniform, less than perfect results. Go figure.
One Saturday, while all of this plant drama was unfolding inside on the kitchen counter, I turned my attention to the garden outside in front of the house; it really needed care, so I spent some time watering and crawling along the ground pulling weeds. As I stood there surveying my realm after I was done with my work, something caught my eye. Against the wall, underneath the overhanging roof, in a spot of lousy soil that receives neither light nor rain, was a single plant, about eighteen inches tall with a bunch of red flowers on it. This plant drew my attention for two reasons: first, because it was nice to look at and second, because I hadn’t put it there.
I knew that I’d seen plants just like it somewhere before, which, in fact, I had — in my next door neighbor’s yard. So, how did this one end up making its way from his yard to mine? I’m not a botanist, so I can really say for sure, but I’m pretty confident it didn’t walk over. My best guess is that a seed from his yard somehow journeyed about fifty feet (via the wind or courtesy of some kind of animal), took up residence in the most inhospitable location of mine, and managed to grow there. Again, go figure.
While I may not be a botanist, I am a pastor, and this whole experience was what came to mind for me as I was thinking about today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel, which is commonly known as the Parable of the Sower.
As it begins, Jesus leaves the house to go sit out by the sea, which sounds relaxing. And yet, it isn’t relaxing at all because the crowd that’s been following him gathers around him there on the beach — probably hoping to see him perform another miracle or something. The crowd is so overwhelming that Jesus commandeers a boat and sits in it a short distance offshore so that he’ll have a little breathing room and everyone will be able hear what he has to say. And then, in typical Jesus fashion, he presents them with a parable; here’s how it goes:
A sower goes out to sow seeds, but he’s not very particular about the details of his job. He drops some seeds on the path, where the birds then eat them before they sprout; and then he drops some seeds on rocky ground where they sprout, but the shallowness of the soil leads them to wither away in the hot sun because they have no roots; and then he drops some seeds in a bunch of thorns, where they also sprout, but eventually end up being choked out by the thorns; and then he finally manages to drop seeds on good soil where they sprout and grow and produce and abundance of grain. The End.
As is the case with all of Jesus’s parables, his audience is left to draw whatever connections they can between the various elements of the story and real-life things. At first glance, it seems like this might be a pretty straightforward exercise with respect to this story — one that appears to be made even easier by the fact that Jesus himself decides to explain the story in the second part of our reading; then again, maybe not so much.
Jesus says that the soil corresponds to different groups of listeners and their respective capacities for receiving and living the gospel — what Jesus calls the “word of the kingdom,” which is represented by the seed. The path represents those who are unable or unwilling to understand the gospel at all. The rocky ground represents those who seem to understand it and take it in with joy, but who then run away from it at the first sign of difficulty. The thorny ground represents those who understand it, but allow it to be overtaken by the cares of the world and the lure of wealth. Lastly, the good soil represents those who hear it, understand it and live it; with such people, the gospel takes root and, as it grows and spreads. On one level, the point story seems to be this: “Be good soil.” But there’s more to it than that.
You see, in Matthew, part of being the Messiah — and part of being his disciples— is dealing with rejection. In some of our readings over the past few weeks, Jesus has given his followers an earful about how hard the work of discipleship is going to be, and part of that difficulty is that people won’t necessarily be receptive to what they have to say; indeed, we see Jesus experience this throughout the gospels. So, at another level, this story is Jesus’s way of being candid with the apostles about the reality of their situation.
Okay, so Jesus himself has told us what the various types of soil and the seed represent here, but who’s the sower? Well, since Jesus has just finished telling his apostles about what a life of discipleship — a life of spreading the good news like seeds among the people — will be like, it’s reasonable to conclude that the apostles are the sowers, right?
Or is Jesus the sower since he’s the one who came here bearing the good news in the first place?
Or maybe God is the sower because God sent Jesus here to share the good news with the apostles, who have been called to go share it with the world. And besides, God’s grace — the good news — which is symbolized by the seeds, is infinite so only God could go around scattering that grace everywhere and never have to πworry about running out.
Or wait – maybe we’re the sowers since we’re supposed to pick up where the apostles left off and spread the good news in our place and time. Heck, I don’t know; I don’t have all the answers. Then again, maybe that’s actually the point of all this.
Jesus often uses parables as a way of speaking about God and God’s reign — and this is no accident. These stories are, by their very nature, hard to figure out — they give us ideas, but provide little in the way of definitive answers; they provide analogies, but ones that are never perfect; they help us to understand, but only up to a point; they allow us to glimpse something beyond ourselves and beyond our world, but only, as Paul says, as if “in a mirror, dimly.”
The funny thing about the explanatory retelling of the parable that Jesus gives in the second part of today’s reading — which, incidentally, is something he doesn’t very often — is that it’s probably not his. Most scholars believe this commentary was a later addition, put there by someone who was trying to make sense of it all for the reader, and perhaps for themselves as well. Because living in a world full of uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. But maybe that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Maybe Jesus’s parables don’t always make sense because the reality they speak to doesn’t always make sense. We all know from experience that we live in a world where things often defy explanation, a world where bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people; a world where some things don’t thrive in conditions that are seemingly perfect, while others end up thriving in the harshest of environments.
Maybe Jesus’s parables don’t make sense because Jesus himself doesn’t make sense. He’s a king born to a poor family on the wrong side of town who, chooses to demonstrate power through love and humility instead of through the more typical methods of violence and grandiosity. He’s the Messiah who comes here to live as God among us, calling us to eternal life, who ends up being nailed to a cross like a criminal.
Maybe, in God’s ways of seeing things, the one in a million chance that the gospel will take hold in an unlikely place is better than the none in a million chance it has of taking hold if you don’t actually risk sharing it.
Maybe God’s willingness to continually dispense grace absolutely everywhere as if it were a limitless supply of seeds, hoping against hope that it will take root and grow wherever it lands, wouldn’t make sense to a farmer; but maybe God isn’t a farmer.
Maybe God is a sower and we are farmers — called to tend to the good news that God, being God, chooses to dispense so indiscriminately, wherever and whenever and however we can with whatever we’ve be given;
hoping that it will thrive absolutely everywhere, while realizing that it probably won’t;
celebrating when it does take root and grow, but not allowing ourselves to be deterred from our work when it doesn’t;
accepting that there are some things about God’s ways that we understand and countless others that we don’t;
trusting that God cares about us, and about all creation;
focusing on loving God and our neighbor as God has called us to do from the beginning, and giving the rest over to God;
and reveling in all of the maybes rather than agonizing over them as much as we do.