Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
In the name of our Loving, Liberating and Life-giving God. Amen!
Jesus leaves the house that day and walks down to the water. The crowd that gathers is so large that he has to push off in a boat just to have room to speak, while everyone else stands crowded along the shore. And there, with the sea at his back and the fields probably visible somewhere behind the people, he tells a story about farming.
It is worth pausing on how ordinary that story would have sounded to his first listeners. Nobody in that crowd had ever tested the pH of a field or laid down seed in neat, irrigated rows. In first-century Palestine, you scattered the seed first and plowed it under afterward. You threw it across the path, across the rocky patches, into the weeds, and onto the good ground, all in the same sweeping motion, because you could not always tell in advance which parts of the field would produce and which would not. Then you waited for rain that you could not control, over a harvest you could not guarantee. Every farmer in that crowd would have been nodding along, thinking, yes, that is exactly how it goes.
So when Jesus describes seed falling on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns, and on good soil, he is not describing something strange or symbolic to begin with. He is describing an ordinary Tuesday. The strangeness comes later, in the ending, and in what the story assumes about the sower who keeps throwing seed onto ground that, by any sensible calculation, is not going to produce anything.
Notice, too, how the story is framed. It opens with Jesus saying, "Listen!" and it closes with "Let anyone with ears listen." Whatever else this parable is doing, it is asking for our full attention, not our anxious diagnosis. And it arrives in Matthew's Gospel at a hard moment: the chapters just before this one are full of misunderstanding and outright opposition to Jesus' ministry, and the chapter will end with his own hometown rejecting him. Matthew is writing to a community that knew what it was to proclaim good news and watch much of it fall on ground that produced nothing — through persecution, through poverty that scattered people from the region, through false teachers sowing confusion inside the church itself. This parable was first heard by people who needed reassurance that a disappointing public response did not mean their message was wrong, or their labor wasted.
That is where I want to start today, because it is easy to hear this parable and immediately turn it into an inventory of ourselves. Which soil am I? Am I the hard path, closed off and unreceptive? Am I the rocky ground, quick to catch fire with enthusiasm and just as quick to burn out when life gets hard? Am I choked by thorns, distracted by ambition or worry or the hundred small hungers that crowd out anything deeper? I suspect most of us, if we are honest, have been all four kinds of soil at different points in our lives, sometimes in the same week. I know that when I was young, this parable was taught to me almost entirely as a checklist for self-improvement: figure out what is wrong with your soil and fix it. It is a tiring way to hear good news, because it turns the gospel into one more thing you are failing to get right.
But look again at where Jesus puts the weight of the story. He does not linger on the soils nearly as long as he lingers on the sower and on the harvest. And when the interpretation comes, in the second half of our reading, it is offered almost as an afterthought, a clarification added because the story on its own was too open, too strange, too likely to be misunderstood. The center of gravity in this parable is not the quality of the ground. It is the character of the one doing the sowing.
Picture that sower again: walking a field, throwing seed in every direction, including places that everyone standing nearby could see were hopeless. Not one seed reserved for the good ground and withheld from the rest. Not one calculation of odds before the throw. This is not a cautious, efficient sower rationing precious seed for maximum yield. This is a lavish, almost reckless sower, acting as though there is no such thing as too much seed, no soil too far gone to be worth the risk. If you have ever been on the receiving end of that kind of extravagance — loved by someone who did not first check whether you deserved it — you know it does not feel like sound business practice. It feels like grace.
That, I think, is the first piece of good news buried in this familiar story: the parable is not primarily asking whether you are good soil. It is telling you what kind of God is doing the sowing. This is a God who does not sort us first, who does not calculate our likely returns before showering us with love. God's word goes out toward hardened ground and rocky ground and weed-choked ground with the same generosity it goes out toward the ground already prepared to receive it. Nothing about our failures — the times our hearts were closed, the times we scattered under pressure, the times ambition or anxiety choked out something truer — makes God stingier with the seed. There is always more where that came from.
The second piece of good news is that none of us is only one kind of soil, forever. The path, the rocks, and the thorns are not fixed identities assigned to certain people while others get to be the good soil. They are conditions — seasons, really — that any one of us can move through. Hardened ground can be broken open. Rocky ground can have its stones cleared. Thorns can be pulled. We are not seeds, locked into whatever patch of earth we happened to land on; we have the strange and demanding freedom to notice our own condition and to let it change. That is part of what it means to keep showing up to listen, week after week: to let something soften that had gone hard, to let roots go down deeper than the last hard season allowed.
And then there is the ending, which is the part I think we are most tempted to skip past too quickly. Jesus does not conclude with a modest, reasonable harvest. A good year for a first-century farmer might yield seven or eight times what was sown. Jesus says thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. That is not agricultural realism; that is a promise of abundance that breaks the scale we normally use to measure return on investment. The point is not simply, keep trying and eventually something will grow. The point is that when God's word does take root, it produces far more than the effort put into it could account for. We are not meant only to endure; we are invited to expect abundance we cannot engineer or predict.
There is one more thing worth naming before we close. Paul, writing to the Romans, tells his readers that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, because the Spirit of God dwells in them. I think that is close to the heart of this parable too. The sower is not standing over us with a clipboard, grading our soil. The seed that has already been planted in us is not something we manufactured through our own discipline or worthiness; it took root because the Spirit of the very sower who planted it also dwells within us, doing the slow work of clearing stones and pulling weeds that we could never manage entirely on our own. That is not permission to stop tending the ground of our own hearts. It is the reason we can tend it without dread, trusting that the outcome was never solely up to us in the first place.
So perhaps the truest response to this parable is not anxious self-examination but something closer to trust, followed by imitation. Trust that the sower sowing in us is patient, generous, and unbothered by our rocky or thorny seasons. And imitation, because we too are sent out to scatter seed without first demanding proof that the ground is worthy. Speak the kind word to the person who seems closed off. Offer forgiveness before it is requested. Show up for the neighbor whose soil, as far as you can tell, looks like nothing but path and rock. You will not always see what grows. But the sower we follow was never stingy with the seed, and the harvest, when it finally comes, is always far larger than anyone had a right to expect.
Let anyone with ears, listen. Amen.
