The Parable of the Sower

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 12 FEBRUARY 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

I want to start tonight with a question: what is the meaning of a thing?

How do we know?

What if it changes?

What if we change? 

I know that’s a bit vague, so let me make it more concrete. Consider a wedding ring. If you have one, take it off and have a look at it (if it can come off!). This is my wedding ring: if you can’t see it from where you’re sitting, it’s a gold band, plain and maybe a bit thicker than average. When I ordered it some 19 years ago, I told the jeweler I wanted one that looked like the One Ring from Lord of the Rings. On the inside there’s an inscription: “I love you forever.” It’s a pretty simple object; fairly common. What does it mean? I’ve officiated a handful of weddings at this point, and oftentimes, the script will call for me to answer that question, to say that the circle has no beginning or end and symbolizes the constancy of love. But is that what it will always mean? Consider what it might mean to someone who is not married, but longs to be. Consider what it means to a person who is at the start of their marriage…or what it means to someone whose marriage is over? What does it mean to a person who has divorced? To a person who has been widowed? To a person who has worn a different ring before? It’s one object, and a simple one at that. But does it mean only one thing? Does it mean any one thing forever? 

I bring this up because tonight we’re starting a new series which will run intermittently throughout the year. We tried this practice last year with a series on the Psalms, and we talked about various examples in the weeks in between our other, major series for the year. As a Preaching Team, we really loved that experiment, as it gave us both brief breaks between the “big lessons” of the year, as well as a kind of “through line” to keep us connected to our annual theme. So, we’re trying the same kind of thing this year, but this time discussing not various psalms but selected parables from the teachings of Jesus. The series (predictably) is called Parables, and this week, I want to start by trying to dig as deeply as we can into a fundamental question of Jesus’s approach to ministry: why doesn’t Jesus simply say what he means? In the brief time in which God walked this Earth in the physical body of a man, and spoke in the plain language of a group of people, why didn’t he choose to lay out the secrets of God, the secrets of life, more clearly? Why did he speak in stories instead of lists or doctrines? To answer that, I think we need to keep something like a wedding ring in mind. I think we need to consider whether the clarity we are often seeking–the certainty–is as helpful as we imagine it will be. Or if the harder truth–the deeper Truth–is that meaning isn’t something we hold as much as it is something we experience. And if real learning–about the world, about God, and about ourselves–is a process of knowing a thing more rather than knowing more things. 

To center on a specific example this week, we’re going to look at what I’m half-jokingly referring to as the “First Parable” of Jesus, which is the Parable of the Sower. I’m calling it the first because it is the first one to appear in the gospel of Mark, which we are fairly confident is the first gospel account of Jesus’s life to be written. The timeline of Mark’s gospel (which, as an aside, will be the subject of our next full series, beginning next Saturday) is pretty clearly a tool the author uses to organize Jesus’s ministry rather than a strict representation of the historical order in which Jesus did things, so it’s a leap to say that the Parable of the Sower was, in historical fact, the first parable Jesus told. But even so, the Parable of the Sower has another distinctive which makes it a good place for us to start: it is also the only parable Jesus ever unpacks and explains for his disciples. 

So, let’s get to it. The context here is that Jesus has begun traveling around the northern region of Israel known as Galilee and performing various miracles: specifically, he has been casting out demons and healing the sick. In response to these wonders, townspeople have begun forming crowds around him and expressing interest in who he is and what he might have to say to them. In Mark chapter 4, he begins to talk to them about the coming Kingdom of God, and he starts by saying, 

“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Mark 4:3-9

On the surface, it’s a story that the people in this rural part of Judea could easily understand. They know from experience that not every seed a farmer scatters leads to a plant: animals eat them, or they land in places that are infertile, or they wither if the conditions for growth aren’t right. And they were also capable of working with this as an analogy: sowing seeds is like what Jesus is doing, what God has done. Not everyone will take root in Jesus’s teaching, and not everyone will have a secure place in God’s Kingdom. But what makes the comparison frustrating–and what makes it more than an analogy–is the uncertainty about why: a farmer scatters seed because he only has so much time and can only be so diligent in his planting; couldn’t God be more careful and purposeful? A bird eats a seed because it is hungry, and it also serves a part in the ecosystem: who are the birds eating the seeds God plants? Can he not stop them? The story seems to baffle at least the disciples, and so later they ask Jesus about it. And Jesus says to them,

“Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Mark 4:13-20

Well, everything’s settled then, right?! We don’t actually hear the disciples’ response, but we do have their memory of the conversation recorded here in the story of Jesus’s ministry. So, what can we make of it? 

The first rule for reading a parable is to accept Jesus’s challenge to “have ears to hear.” There are a few verses between the parable and Jesus’s explanation which I cut from this conversation because they’re complex and I didn’t want them to lead us down a rabbit trail, but the heart of them is that Jesus is here to help us recenter our perspectives from fixating on ourselves to fixating on the kind of world God intends for this world to become. We can call this a “Kingdom mindset,” if we want: the point is that Jesus is bringing God’s Kingdom here, in a tangible and personal way, and the parables exist at this intersection of the way we see the world and the way God wants us to see the world. So, when we read or hear a parable, we have to shift our perspective from how this relates to us to how this reveals God’s heart. 

This is tough for us, as Christians! So often, we sit through times of teaching like this one with a single purpose in mind: preacher, you better tell me something that matters to me. It can convict me, it can encourage me, it can reinforce what I already believe…but I want to relate. But I think the parables push on that agenda: I think the parables ask us to move from a focus on ourselves and our experiences to a new focus on who God is and what God is up to in the world. It’s not that a self-focus is always bad–I hope all of us are finding deeper and more challenging relationships with God through church! But we aren’t the most important thing: God is working to redeem the whole thing, the big picture, the entirety of His Creation! Parables help shift our perspective from what we know to what God is revealing…but we need “ears to hear” this. 

In the case of this parable, what God is revealing, according to Jesus, is that the seed of His words is spread much further than Jesus’s listeners, which includes the authorities from the synagogues, might have expected. Also, that those seeds are not guaranteed to take meaningful root, or to endure: even ones planted “in the path” are at risk (which is a troubling thing to hear!). In this case, the “path” is so well-worn that they are easy pickings for birds…one is left to ponder what that might mean, in the context of Jesus’s already-building tensions with the Pharisees. The parable also reveals that there is no danger here to the ultimate harvest: the seeds which take healthy root will produce an abundance, and the Kingdom will come. What the parable leaves open is how the farmer might feel about all of this…unless, of course, the listeners with “ears to hear,” who are looking for how their experience can inform the lesson (rather than only how the lesson matters to them), consider how they feel when they are the farmer: do they fret over every lost seed? Or is their eye only on the eventual harvest? 

I don’t say this to provoke a heresy! There will be parables to come which emphasize how much differently God sees the results of his labor when compared to how we tend to see the results of our own. “Seeds” will get their due! But Jesus’s explanation leaves lots of room for questions, doesn’t it? And I think that’s an essential part of how all this works. So, the first point is to shift what we are expecting from how it relates to us to how it reveals, and invites questions about, what God is doing in the world. 

But what makes a parable distinct from a simple comparison or an analogy is that rather than trying to condense meaning by drawing from the quality of one thing to illuminate another, a parable draws on a person’s experience of one situation to expand their understanding. When we say somebody is “as stubborn as a mule,” we’re taking one thing about mules–that they are hard to make move–and using that to say somebody is being difficult. We don’t ponder what makes mules stubborn and how the hearts of men are shaped by the same instincts as donkeys. The comparison isn’t meant to deepen what we’re talking about, it’s meant to clarify what we’re talking about. But parables don’t work that way! So, the second rule for reading a parable is to look for more, not less.

This is where the “wedding ring” comes back into play: what is the meaning of a thing? Is it singular? Is it fixed? When we hear parables, Jesus is giving us a window into how God’s Kingdom works, into who God is, into the heart of things. But a window isn’t a picture! What’s in a window is alive and changing; it’s fresh each time we look out at it, with more to see and consider. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing fixed or concrete about it! The window in my living room isn’t sometimes facing a pond and sometimes facing a mountain and sometimes facing an ocean: it’s the same view each day, and in the same way, a parable is a view into God’s Kingdom. But at the same time, my window never reveals the same scene twice: the light is different, the weather is different, the birds at the feeder or the fox across the pond are different. When I look out of it, I’m not trying to bottle up or capture “what is outside”: I’m getting a deeper and fuller understanding of it. In the same way, the change in the meaning of a parable–the questions that come from it–don’t make it an incomplete or faulty kind of teaching, they make it a richer kind. So, what is the complexity and the richness here? 

That’s a hard thing for me to teach, isn’t it? I can tell you what richness there is for me today…and maybe that can help you see something new. Or maybe you’re seeing this for the first time, and that’s a separate experience altogether. Maybe you are the one with the right ears to hear or the eyes to see this week. When we stop and think about the situation, I think it makes it much easier to see why we need each other! This teaching time each week can’t be a kind of CliffNotes of the Bible for us: it has to be a time when we are stretched, when we encounter more of the mystery instead of less. 

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, when I was growing up, a guest preacher came to visit my little Baptist church. He taught on this parable, and in the end, this is what he took away from it and shared with us: your salvation is not secured if you don’t keep working for it. If you think a prayer and a dunk in the baptismal guarantees your spot in Heaven, you’re a seed that has fallen on the wrong sort of soil. He looked at the birds which came to eat the seed and said they were temptations to stray. He looked at the seed that quickly withered and said that was us, if we didn’t keep to spiritual disciplines like prayer and reading our Bible. My church went ballistic: it was a key part of our doctrine that once a person was saved, they were saved forever! There was a meeting after the service, and several folks quoted Scripture to this point: “nothing can separate us from the love of God”! The man was called back the next day, not to teach, but to be formally rebuked as a heretic. There was an emergency service, just for our pastor to tell us that man was wrong. 

I know why this happened, and I also know that guarding the doctrines of our faith is important. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t help but feel like my church was putting what we already felt we were sure of in front of what might have pushed us to feel challenged or convicted. It made our belief seem brittle, both in the sense that we refused to listen, and also in the sense that the man who spoke (who I also believe was sincere in his faith) worked so hard to say that this one thing–which ultimately got tangled in his own beliefs about “predestination”–was the only reason Jesus shared the parable. To have “ears to hear,” we must look for what God is revealing over what we want to see revealed…and we must trust that a story’s meaning can be rich and varied and even changing, as our perspective of it changes. God is speaking, and sometimes His words take root, and sometimes they don’t. But when they do, the Kingdom comes.

The Parable of the Sower makes us wrestle, but we are richer for that wrestling. We grow. Which, in the end, is exactly how the parable says things work: when we are planted in a place that is deep, when we reach down into the difficulty of things, we begin to flourish. Shallow understandings wither, or are snatched away. Emotionalism and sensationalism don’t endure. The Kingdom of God is a place where seeds scattered in dark places, even ones far from the path, can take root and be nourished. 

This week, I want us to hear more than a single lesson or takeaway. I want us to consider the ways we listen: are we hoping to know a thing more…or to simply know more things? What kind of soil is your heart? Are you content with the answer?

Rather than leading right into Communion this week, I want to give us space to pray and wonder about this: am I ready to let the words of Jesus settle into me deeply? Am I ready to let them take root? In a few moments, Sarah will lead us as we receive Communion, but before that, I’m going to pray for us, and then encourage you to take a few moments to pray as well.