Matthew 13:1-9
You may or may not have noticed, because I deliberately ask Gwen not to print the Gospel in the bulletin so it doesn’t become a memory test for me, but I only read half the assigned Gospel reading for this morning. What you just heard was verses one through nine. We will get the second section, but I wanted to try something different this morning. See the lectionary gives us two sections of chapter thirteen. And Jesus was speaking to two different audiences in those two sections. The part we just heard Jesus was speaking to a large crowd of people, then verses eighteen through twenty-three, he spoke only to his disciples, only to those who had traveled with him and were closest to him. And I wondered if the relationships of the audiences may have affected the way Jesus spoke to them. So I thought rather that look at the text as a whole this morning, we might break it up into two smaller sections, so we could really focus on hearing Jesus through the experiences of those to whom he was speaking.
But before we get into that, let’s step back even one step further and talk about parables. Because this is the first time in Matthew that Jesus told a parable. And parables are a unique literary tool. They are not like an allegory or a fable, with one clear and distinct meaning. Parables instead open the hearer to consider a variety of different possible meanings. Dr. Eugene Boring described parables as “like a musical composition, a painting, or a poem…to reduce a parable to a “point” is to dismiss it as a parable and domesticate its message.” Jesus used parables to challenge his hearers understanding of the world around them and offer a new and different vision for how the world could and should be.
So who was the audience for the parable we just heard? Verse two tells us that great crowds gathered around Jesus, so many people that he got in a boat and pushed out to sea so that they could all hear him better. Who were these people? We know from other Gospel stories that the crowds who followed Jesus were not the wealthy and powerful of Judean society. They were the outcasts, the downtrodden, the lost, the least, and the lowly. Tax collectors and sinners, lepers and beggars, children and widows, people who in the game of life had been dealt bad cards. Caught between the power grab of the Romans and the jostling of their own religious and political leaders, at best they were overlooked and forgotten. At worst, well, think about what happened to Jesus when he drew too much attention.
But beyond the people to whom Jesus was directly speaking, remember this summer we are reading the Gospel of Matthew not just as a history lesson on Jesus but on a guidebook for discipleship. So let’s also consider who was in Matthew’s wider audience. The Gospel of Matthew was very likely written in what is now modern-day Turkey around eighty C.E. It was an area where both Jews and Gentiles lived, and as Jesus followers, Matthew’s community faced persecution from both groups, in addition, of course to the threat of the Romans. We’re still just ten years out from the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Given all of this hardship and persecution, Matthew’s audience could easily relate to the people in the crowd, hopeful but unsure about the promise Jesus offered.
So imagine yourself in the crowd of Jesus followers on the beach or the crowd of the community of Matthew. Your whole life has been struggle and opposition. You are powerless and you know it, and the people in power over you are cruel and heartless and sociopathic. But you’ve heard some of this message of Jesus, and how he has promised that the kingdom of God has come near, come near to people like you. It seems too good to be true, but he speaks with such hope that you want to hear more. It is to this crowd that Jesus said, “Listen! A sower went out to sow…” And then he told this story of this reckless sower who seemed to throw seeds around willy-nilly, with no regard for where they would land. The sort of subsistence farming practiced in the arid Galilean region required focus and attention, no farmer worth his sense would waste good seed like that on ground that seemed worthless, yet the sower in Jesus’ story did. And what’s more, despite the adversity the seed faced, from birds, from thorns, from rocky soil, even in the face of all of that, somehow, the seed produced an impossible return, a hundredfold, sixty, thirty, this in a region where fourfold was common and ten was the best imaginable.
To an audience who understood what it felt like to be seen as worthless, to daily face down adversity, what unbridled hope this story must have filled them with. Because here was a sower in Jesus who shared the seed of the kingdom abundantly, extravagantly, almost wastefully. This sower did not care about the seeming potential of the ground. The love and the grace and the hope Jesus offered was not restricted to those whom society deemed could give a good return, but was spread far and wide, regardless of worth. And the sower’s seeds faced adversity, so the adversity faced by the crowd and the community of Matthew should not be a reason for despair but for hope. This story told them the journey from sowing to harvesting was not a straight line; Jesus said were birds and thorns and rocks. So when they faced adversity, they could take comfort in that promise. But regardless of the struggle, in fact defiance of that adversity, the seed of God’s kingdom would take root and grow and produce a harvest more plentiful then they could even imagine. The Parable of the Sower promised the crowd that the victory of the kingdom of God was sure. Jesus the sower was casting out the seed widely, and because God is faithful, God would bring forth from this abundance an extravagance of riches. As the crowd pondered their own struggles, what hope and optimism must have filled their hearts at the promise of God’s abundant harvest. Triumph was not their work to bring, but Christ the sower sowed the seeds wildly, and from those unlikely and trial-plagued seed, God would bring forth worth beyond measure.
This was the story Jesus told to the crowd gathered on the lake shore. But the disciples, who had been with Jesus for a while, and who were used to the complexity of his teachings, pulled him aside. “Why do you speak to them in parables?” They asked. You can hear the unspoken question, we’ve been traveling with you for a while now and we don’t always understand your parables, what makes you think that these yokels are going to get it? And so to them, his closest followers, his faithful students, whom he had been discipling and mentoring and whom he was preparing to fulfill his own God-given mission, he offered this explanation.
Matthew 13:18-23
Notice a shift in the focus. When Jesus was speaking to the crowd, the focus of the parable was totally on the action of the sower. It was the sower alone who sowed the seeds with reckless abundance. The seeds faced adversity but eventually produced extravagant harvest. But with the disciples, Jesus called it the parable of the sower, but he never mentioned the sower at all, instead he immediately began talking about the soil. So I wonder if the message for the disciples was for them to not worry about the sower or the harvest at all, because their focus was to be on the soil. This of course brings up the question that always accompanies this text, what kind of soil are you? Turning the disciples’ attention to the specific types of soil forced them to stop worrying about what the crowd may or may not have understood and instead pay attention to their own understanding. Had they really “heard the word and understood it”? Or were they weak soil, with thin roots, at risk of attack from birds or thorns, or plagued by rocks? Don’t worry about the crowd Jesus seemed to be saying. The harvest is sure and as the sower I will cast seed where I please. As for you, focus on your own soil. Will the seed that I have cast in you bear fruit, or are you so focused elsewhere that it will be snatched away?
But more even than simply, focus on your own soil, to these twelve who have just returned from the mission on which Jesus sent them, the one we’ve been hearing about the last couple of Sundays, to “proclaim the good news…cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons,” I wonder if Jesus was calling them to consider the sort of soil they were creating. Because the thing about soil is it is not a stagnant reality. Good soil over time can grow fallow and bad soil, with care and tending, can be amended. Had they, as they had traveled about on the mission to which Jesus had sent them, been making good soil of the places where they’d been? Jesus the sower was busy casting out the seed, had these disciples increased the probability of the seed falling on good soil to produce the harvest a hundredfold, sixty, or thirty? Or had they left the soil untended, the weeds to roam, and the rocks in place so that the seed could not gain hold? For the crowds Jesus offered unbridled hope, but for his disciples, he left work to be done.
There is then both good news and challenge for us in the parable of the sower and its accompanying explanation. The good news is the harvest is sure. Christ the sower does not reserve judgment for who should and should not receive the seed of grace. Like an extravagant and foolishly hopeful farmer, Christ sows love far and wide. The good news is that while we were still sinners, that though we may still be rocky soil, riddled by thorns and plagued by birds, still Christ comes and sows love in us. And in the miraculous, extraordinary kingdom of God, that expansive sowing leads to a harvest beyond our imagining. Yes there are trials along the way, but the promise of the kingdom of God is sure. God is faithful, and there will be a harvest.
The challenge for us is there is still work to be done. The harvest will come, that is not our doing. But while we wait for the harvest, our job is to be about amending the soil. To be about pulling weeds of distraction and greed, removing rocks of shallowness and self-absorption so that roots can take hold, chasing away birds of violence and hatred that steal away promise.
This is the work for us, dear people. Christ the sower is casting out grace with abundance. We know that God is faithful and the harvest will come. As the laborers we prayed for, our job now is to tend the soil of this good harvest. Thanks be to God, not only for the promise of abundant harvest, but for the privilege of getting to participate in the tending. Amen.
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