A few weeks ago in our Gospel reading we heard about how Jesus sends out his disciples to cure the sick, and proclaim the good news of God’s Kingdom. As he sends them out, he says: ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’. Sending the disciples out to tell people about Jesus, then, is like sending out labourers to bring in God’s harvest. But, of course, you can’t reap what you don’t sow… Today’s reading helps us to understand where this plentiful harvest has come from. In particular, I think, it helps us to understand why Jesus insists that the harvest is plentiful, despite the fact that he still has only a relatively small number of followers at this early stage in his ministry, and despite the resistance that he meets and the persecution that he knows his disciples will come up against. Where, we might ask, does this plentiful harvest come from?
The parable that Jesus tells is well-known, of course. A sower goes out to sow. He scatters seeds and some fall on the path and get eaten by birds, some fall on rocky ground where they lack the soil to flourish and grow, others fall among thorns and get choked by the weeds and fail to thrive, but some fall on good soil and produce a great and abundant harvest.
Jesus even tells us what the parable means. The seeds that fall on the path are those people who hear the word of God but fail to take it in. The seeds that fall on rocky ground are those who hear and respond to the word of God, but whose roots are flimsy, who give up on God as soon as the going gets tough. The seeds that fall among weeds are those who hear and respond to the word of God but who get easily distracted by material things or by the banal-but-necessary details of their everyday lives. The seeds sown in good soil, however, are those who hear and understand the word of God. These are the people who really bear fruit. This, surely, is the harvest that Jesus sends his disciples out to reap…
Well… maybe. But I wonder if there isn’t perhaps also more to it than this. After all, this story – like so many of Jesus’s stories – raises more questions than it answers (even with Jesus’s own explanation). If the sower knows where the good soil is, why does he just scatter his seed about indiscriminately? He seems to be just casting it hither and thither, not planning his sowing, but hoping for the best. In an agrarian economy, seed is precious – seed is food. You don’t just chuck it about willy-nilly. And why are all those weeds and thorns out there in the sower’s fields? Why doesn’t he send labourers out to hack them back, to give the seed space to grow? Why doesn’t he put up netting to protect the seed from the birds? Why doesn’t he fertilise the poor soil to enable the seeds to grow? Doesn’t he know what he’s doing?
Let’s assume that the sower is God, and that, therefore, he does actually know what he’s doing. Let’s assume that, far from being careless and indiscriminate with his sowing there is a point to the way in which the sower sows in this parable. How might those assumptions help us to read this story?
We often read this parable as being about how we receive the word of God. Read that way, it’s an anxiety-inducing parable, one that makes us worry about whether we are good enough. Are we attentive enough, receptive enough, to God’s word? What kind of soil are we? Oh dear, I went to the pub last night and talked about football and politics all night… was I like the seed that fell among the thorns, distracted by the stuff of everyday life? Oh no, what about me? I fell asleep during last week’s sermon. Am I like the seed that fell on rocky ground and had no staying power? Well, I’m a lost cause… I had no clue what that sermon was all about. I must be like the seed that got eaten by birds…
But is that really what God wants from us? For us to live in perpetual anxiety about setting a foot wrong? After all, which of us would be brave enough to put our hands up and claim that, yes, we are the ‘good soil, the ones who hear and understand and act on God’s word all the time? If God relied on us to be ‘good soil’ the harvest would, I fear, be anything but plentiful.
So what if, instead, we read the parable from the point of view of the sower? The sower knows, we presume, which soil is good and fertile, which soil is thin and stony, which is overgrown with weeds and thorns, which is open to the elements and to the greedy birds. He knows where the seed is most likely to flourish. And yet… and yet he sows the seed everywhere, indiscriminately, abundantly, generously. There’s a parallel here, for me, with the story of the feeding of the five thousand. In that story, God does not simply provide the crowds with just what they need to survive. The twelve baskets of leftovers attest to the superabundance of God’s generosity. God gives us all that we need and more. And so it is with the seed sown by the sower. God knows that we are often poor soil: we lack understanding, our hearts are unreceptive, we are easily led astray. God knows and sees our weakness. And God, amazingly, miraculously, generously does not turn away from us, but gives us all that we need to grow and flourish, and more.
And the seed, even when it lands on poor soil – as it inevitably must – is never wasted. If you think about it (and without wanting to get too earthy about this…) even that seed that lands on the path and is eaten by birds will eventually land on the earth again, ‘re-fertilised’ (so to speak) and with the potential to grow and flourish elsewhere. The sower keeps on sowing, and will keep on sowing, sowing generously, until all have heard God’s word; until all have understood and received it; until all are able to grow and flourish.
Is not this also the message of the story of Jacob and Esau, whose beginning we heard in today’s first reading, and which we will be continuing to explore in the coming weeks? Esau is the firstborn in this story, the one to whom the inheritance and blessing of his father should be passed on. But, as we will hear, it will be through the line of Jacob – eventually renamed Israel – that God will bless God’s chosen people; it will be from the line of Jacob that Jesus – through his earthly father, Joseph, will be descended. Indeed, Matthew’s Gospel opens by telling us that ‘Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob…’ and so on. Esau has, apparently, disappeared, completely sidelined.
In today’s reading we see Esau exchanging his birthright for, as the old translation has it, a mess of pottage, a bowl of stew… Esau is someone in whom God’s promise – the promise of the firstborn son – fails to take root and thrive. So little importance does Esau give this promise that he is willing to throw it away for a meal which is gone in minutes. But this does not mean that Jacob is, instead, a paragon of virtue, fertile soil, in whom God’s promise grows and bears fruit in an entirely unproblematic way. On the contrary, Jacob will receive Isaac’s blessing by deception and will be forced to flee for his life, only returning much later to be reconciled with his brother.
Neither Jacob nor Esau is perfect; one is shallow the other dishonest. Neither brother is really the kind of fertile soil that Jesus’s parable envisions as the ideal growing material for God’s word. And yet dishonest Jacob is blessed by God and becomes the father of a great nation whose line reaches across the generations to Jesus himself. And weak and shallow Esau will eventually show great depths of forgiveness and love when he is reconciled with his brother. And if this is true for Jacob and Esau, it is surely also true for us. Jesus’s parable is surely not intended as a way of making most – if not all – of us feel that we are not good enough to receive God’s word, not receptive enough to God’s message, not fertile enough to bring forth a good harvest. No, I believe that it is a story about the unending generosity of the God who sows and sows and sows the seeds of love, mercy, forgiveness and faith despite our many failings… It is, above all, a story of hope. So let’s be grateful to the sower, who sows seeds in us and trusts that, one way or another, at some time or another, they will grow.