The Parable of the Sower

Preaching on Matthew 13:1-9 &18-23

On the face of it, the story of the Parable of the Sower is quite simple. A crowd gathers around Jesus while he has gone to a quiet place, and he tells them a story about someone sowing seeds with mixed results.

The disciples ask why he persists in using parables as a method of teaching, and he explains that spiritual truths ought only to be available to a select few. He explains to them that the seeds in the parable, in fact, are those truths, and that only the soil of some people’s soul will ever be actually receptive to hearing them.

This clearly seems to suggest that the intrinsic truths of the Christian tradition ought only to be accessible to a select few.

I would reject that claim. Let us assume, for the sake of our sermon this week at least, that the parable itself is one that we can attribute to Jesus, but its interpretation is Matthew’s. It is worth remembering the experience of the gospel-writers.

Surely, the person we know as ‘Matthew’ must have felt frustration at the limited uptake of what they experienced as transforming and world-shaking truths.

And it is the case that Matthew lived out an extreme version of Christian praxis – sharing their goods, living itinerantly, healing the sick, and risking persecution.

Certainly also, there had always been the looming threat of the political repercussions of Jesus’ teachings. Matthew knows that Christ was crucified, and they’ve likely seen friends go the same way. There is a violent institutional resistance to Jesus’ words.

While there are threats in their world, and ours, I struggle to cohere this anti-world theology with Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom of God, the vision of renewing this world by attending to the Spirit’s healing and nurturing presence in our midst.

It says something peculiar about our tradition, that the only truth discernable in a story about sowing seeds is to use their relationships to the ecosystem as a set of simple symbols for the ways in which human minds are receptive to ideas.

It says something peculiar that we represent our minds as empty and waiting to be filled with ideas from a transcendent source, that we represent the earth as empty and waiting to be filled with useful seeds, that we represent the divine as categorically distinct from both.

What might be possible if we conceptualized the Spirit as already present, working through the intricacies of the minds and ecosystems that are already here.

*

We have inherited a world, in my experience, where a walk in the woods should be experienced as an encounter with sophisticated machinery – chloroplasts churning carbon dioxide and sunlight into adenosine triphosphate – upon which any beauty of those green leaves is projected there by our eager souls.

We have inherited a worldview in which we – the subjective human self – are set against the background of an objective world. We have consciousness, and agency, and self-determination, and the earth is mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity.

Meaning and purpose are only to be found deep within us. Our spirituality is an internal quest towards psychological fulfilment.

Our spirituality is complicit in that split. Our forebears claimed that ‘Man was made in the image of God.’ If God, then, transcends the universe – is other and better than the world – and we’re associated with God, we can be other and better than the world too. If the Great Subject, creates the world as a set of objects, but separates Man as having a unique subjectivity as well, that split becomes easy to make. Our relationship with God, the transcendent subject, seems to depend on us abandoning materiality.

While there are religious roots to the split between ourselves as subjects, and the things of the world as objects, it has also been foundational to the epistemology of the scientific method. There are facts to be found about the knowable world ‘out there,’ while attempts at meaning-making are to be done ‘in here.’

The ‘self-as-subject’ model has been liberating – it allows us to define our own systems of meaning and reject those we have inherited. Being able to render an objective world intelligible has imbued us with a vast and unconquerable power.

It also means we experience the natural world as something exclusively to be used for our own benefit, the meaning and purpose we might find within us as dwarfed by a great external empty sea, that power easily turning against us and our world, that objectifying lens revealing our own seemingly mechanistic impulses such even our claim to subjectivity seems to erode, such that the virtue of consumption seems to reign supreme.

Without losing the liberatory or empowering, I wonder if there are plausible ways to encounter the world where we wouldn’t be so alone.

*

On Canada Day, I went for a hike in the woods with my beloved friend Paul.

It was more of a meander, really. Paul knows the vast majority of the wildflowers and a solid portion of the birdcalls, and he stops to admire each of them. He’s got a field-guide for those he hasn’t met yet. We move slowly, follow no paths, pause frequently.

Spending time in nature with Paul feels like how I imagine it is to be the guest of honour at a socialite’s party, being whisked about to be introduced to all of their other friends and acquaintances.

‘Look at your magnificent petals,’ I say, turning to Paul and giving him the opportunity to sweep in and make the requisite introductions, and then I turn to say ‘oh, and is that you, Celandine?’ giving him the opportunity to correct me on names and details.

I am entranced by his comprehensive knowledge and the depth of its intimacy. He seems to know who is good for your rheumatism or your depression, who is a diaretic and and who the bees are fond of, and who is to be avoided altogether.

When I am with him, it is easy to experience myself situated in the thrum of the other-than-human world, greeting those other beings as potential friends, calling out to them, and quieting the soul in order to become attentive to a potential response.

There is dignity in the slow agency of questing through horizons of earth for an available aquifer or turning towards the everpresent glory of the sun, and there is mutuality in the mycelial communication and sharing of resources of underground fungus networks linking root to root.

It is easy to experience the interiority behind that agency and mutuality, to empathize with the selves present in that world, and to recognize them reaching out to communicate through whatever means are at their disposal.

While those of us in the west have earnestly rejected this, Indigenous Elders across Turtle Island have continuously advocated for this perspective. We cannot grapple with it without offering them thanks.

From a Christian theological perspective, if, ultimately, all things have their being in God, and it is from the wellspring of that divine source that soulfulness ascends, it seems unnecessary to assume that it only pools within human heads and discourses.

While I am in the woods, perhaps the divine within me communes with the divine already present there.

*

I wonder, that is, about how we might hear the Parable of the Sower from the perspective of the seeds.

Those callously spread on paths and on rocky places must surely have wondered why they hadn’t at least been offered some soil. Perhaps some of those eaten by birds were lucky, even, to be spread to a far place where they might have the chance to thrive, and those fully digested, perhaps, aware that their sacrifice might have protected some of their friends in the long run when the birds hungers turned towards the pesky bugs infesting their leaves.

Those scorched by the sun might mourn the loss of trees protecting them from the worst of its heat, ensuring that precious rainfall didn’t evaporate or run-off. Those placed amidst thorns might wonder whether berries could be harvested for food or medicine, or wood for firewood, or the bush simply left alone to prevent erosion or encourage pollinators or conserve water for the poor seeds left to be scorched.

That good soil, producing a hundred-fold yield: how long will its nutrients last?

Maintaining a seeds-as-metaphors-for ideas understanding of the parable, this perspective teaches a lot. Are the birds only ‘the evil one’? How might we support the person whose soul is ‘rocky ground’? How might we use the thorny ‘worries of this life’? How long can we depend on the reliability of the person of ‘good soil’ without giving them some manure?

Without simply taking them as symbols, though, what else might thinking with those seeds teach us? The virtue of unlikely allies, the necessity of support and protection, the complexity of identity, the limits of even seemingly dependable resources?

If we didn’t render their teaching into the language of the human mind, I wonder how they might express their teaching in service of the Spirit’s nurturing work?

Perhaps a tree for the healing of the nations, on the bank of a river in a holy garden. Perhaps the marigolds (‘Mary’s Gold’) trying to ease the poverty of the Holy Family.

Maybe they would be like nard poured out to wash the feet of a beloved teacher, or frankincense for a deity nigh & myrrh breathing a life of gathering gloom.

Maybe we can see it in communion – where wheat and berry and yeast come together to fill us with the warmth of Christ’s presence. I wonder what it is that those seeds experience.