+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I must be slow on the uptake, because it never occurred to me until this time through the lectionary cycle that the parable we just heard is self-referential. In fairness, it’s not obvious at first, since just like last week we skipped some verses. In the elided section, the disciples ask Jesus why he always speaks in parables, and he essentially says that it’s in order to hide the message from those unable to hear, just like how the seed can’t take root in the bad soil.
Now you can guess why we didn’t hear that part of the story. It seems harsh and unfair. When he finally explains the parable, it’s just to the disciples. The crowd has left, many more confused than when they arrived, and now Jesus and the disciples are alone in a boat.
It may seem harsh, but isn’t this just a natural human proclivity? If one isn’t prepared to hear something, one simply won’t. If you don’t have ears, it doesn’t matter how stirring the rhetoric is or how careful the logic of an argument. I once had somebody upset with me after a sermon until he realized that he took umbrage at something I said in the first clause of a sentence, stopped listening, and didn’t realize I was arguing for his point of view in the second clause. This was not somebody who had bad intentions, just somebody who had got in the habit of expecting always to hear either precisely what he wanted to hear rather than what was actually said. And we probably all fall victim to that foible from time to time.
So, this raises a difficulty, because is it not God that gives the ear ready to hear or who plows the field so that it can accept the seed? In other words, does God just make some people too stubborn to hear the Gospel. In other words, do we have to accept double predestination? I don’t know, I intuitively have trouble with that, but I’m not going to solve a five-hundred-year-old theological debate in the next five minutes.
My suspicion, in all events, is that maybe even the rockiest or weediest soil/soul may have some deeply buried system of groundwater or earthworms or something that can through disruption make it seed-ready. A strict Calvinist would disagree with me, but I’m not one so there you have my tentative, perhaps overly-hopeful, opinion.
The one thing that may lend some credence to my optimism is that the sower seems to spread the seed so injudiciously and Jesus certainly leaves an opening for those sitting by the sea of Galilee to reconsider their presumed lack of receptiveness. Why spread the seed, why tell the parable, if there weren’t reason to hope for that?
Now, I think the sower in the parable is certainly the Holy Spirit, but maybe it’s the evangelist, too, and we’re all called to be evangelists. So, perhaps we should be just as indiscriminate in how we broadcast the seed of faith as God is. One thing I’m relatively sure of is that none of us is as good at assessing whether or not another soul may be receptive as an experienced sower is at judging soil conditions, but the latter seemed prepared to lose a little of his seed in hopes of harvesting even in terrain that didn’t look promising.
And to push the agricultural metaphor one step further, I hope not into absurdity, God is not like the general store. He’s more like Monsanto, just not evil. He owns the seed. We’re more like tenant farmers. So if the landlord says “spread the seed willy-nilly”, who are we to argue?
In all events, the promise we get in this morning’s lesson from the Prophet Isaiah is that God’s word accomplishes the thing for which it is sent, it reaps a harvest of souls, whether or not we understand God’s planting strategy. Ours is to stop being backseat drivers in his tractor and get on with it.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.