Extravagance
Text: Matthew 13:1-9
Christianity is an evangelical faith. From its beginning it has inspired its followers to proclaim good news. Thus Christians publicly proclaim things about their faith. And they say that what they proclaim is news, good, useful—and sometimes transforming—information to those who listen. Christians are convinced that they have good news worth sharing.
Not everyone concurs with this view. So a common and long-standing experience of Christianity has been rejection. This resistance to uninvited proclamation probably should not be surprising, yet it has continued to mystify the followers of Jesus. If the news is really so good, why do not all people welcome it joyfully? This passage we just heard in Matthew is the beginning of a series of parables that try to help people figure that out.
This story of the sower, the seeds, and the soil is a parable, described that way by Jesus. It is one of eight parables in chapter 13 of Matthew. This particular parable appears also in the all the synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—one of only six parables that do.
Parables are not allegories. That is, things in parables do not necessarily stand for things or people in the world. Parables do not make things clear (Jesus says as much in the next few verses). Some people say parables are like riddles or like koans, brief stories whose intent is to make you ponder an important but often disturbing truth.
This is true of the parable we just heard, notwithstanding the explanation in Matthew that follows in this chapter—and which probably was placed there later. Explanations of parables serve to channel their meanings for some particular purpose. In this case, it seems, to comfort the early church and to make sense of the world’s rejections of the Jesus movement. That is a worthy purpose, but it was not necessarily Jesus’ purpose in telling it. It could be, but it could be other things, too. That’s what we’ll talk about today.
This is an unusually rich parable. It has lots of characters in it. It contains a sower, and some seeds, and four different kinds of soil or conditions. It talks about growing things and dying things, life-giving and life-destroying things. And abundant harvests.
Though parables are not allegories, they do lead us to concoct and imagine stories about things and draw lessons from those stories. So we might think that the sower acts as we think God would (and we therefore say in shorthand that the sower is God). The parable makes us think; it makes us think about how God works.
Because of its richness, there are lots of ways you could interpret this parable. For example, people call this the Parable of the Sower, or as some say, the Parable of the Soils, or the Parable of the Abundant Harvest, but you could call it something else and still be right.
You might, for example, think of the seeds as the Word of God. Or maybe as the disciples themselves, sown—sent out in mission—by God. Or maybe it is the preaching that the disciples do as they go from town to town. Or maybe God’s abundant blessings.
Maybe the various soils make you think of different individuals who hear the disciples, or maybe different nations and cultures, not individuals at all. Or maybe the reverse: maybe the different soils make you think of your own faith, sometimes receptive to what God seems to be saying, sometimes not at all, sometimes just fleetingly.
But there are some things we can see happening just within the story itself.
Neither Jesus nor the sower comment on the goodness of the soil. Some conditions promote growth in whatever kinds of seeds these are, and some do not. This is not about the moral character of the soil and the rocky paths and so forth. There is no lesson here regarding our ability to choose or reject God, and certainly not about converting through our own efforts and choices from one kind of faithful person to another (a skeptical one, for example, to a devoted one). There does not seem to be a lesson here about proselytizing.
There is no mention about the quality of the seed, either. So if the seed makes you think about proclamation or prophecy, there is not much in this parable to support the notion of expert, or trained, or pious disciples and witnesses. The same seed that produces nothing on the rocky path brings forth abundance on the fertile soil.
The most amazing thing about the parable is that the sower seems not to care where he or she sends the seeds. This is not an efficient use of resources. Or maybe it is not about caring; maybe the sower does not know ahead of time where the seeds will land. Or maybe to the sower, all the places seem the same. Maybe the sower is blind to the differences that seem so important to us. Maybe yield is not the thing most valued by the sower.
This is not how farmers sow their fields. For that reason, it is natural to think that we are talking about God here. If we think that—and I do, at least in part—then it tells us something about God. It tells that God is generous and full of grace. That as far as blessings go, God does not differentiate between one kind of person or another (or one people or another, or each of us at one time or another). Not everyone responds equally to God’s voice at all times, but we all get God’s blessing.
Perhaps this parable is hinting to us that God likes the whole thing: the sowing and the growing and the drying and the dying and the harvest. Not that God likes particularly to see things wither, but that God likes the workings of the world, which include birth and death, and the variety of it in space and time. God likes the path and the thorns and the thick soil equally.
The parable tells us about God. But it also tells us about ourselves, about our own natures. And gives us a model for our own actions. We are great at differentiating, and optimizing, and being efficient. We make judgments about who is deserving. We are stingy with compassion. We do not forgive as we have been forgiven. We do not bless as we have been blessed. We do not love one another as we have been loved. We favor the productive and energetic. We fear to be too generous lest we appear foolish. We evaluate and measure.
But if the parable is an example of life in the kingdom, then it teaches us to not worry so much about results, but to bless others extravagantly. Not to think so much about who deserves what, but to be generous to all in all ways. Not to honor our own abilities, but to be thankful for God’s graceful abundance. And not to trust so much in our own knowledgeable assessments, but to be—as perhaps the sower was—to be surprised.
