Canter Bridge

Jesus’ parable of the sower stands out from similar stories transmitted to us in the four gospels. It is unusually allegorical. Elements of the story point to real-world referents in an almost one-for-one fashion that is extraordinary when compared to the body of Jesus’ signature teaching style.

There is tragedy in this tale of seeds, soil, and a sower. For multiple reasons, seed is wasted. The promise of life and harvest turns out to have been betrayed. Rocks, hard-packed earth, and thorns are for the most part the unattractive victors in this story of long odds.

Yet that seed that falls upon good ground is exponentially productive, producing grain in the lavish proportions of ‘a hundredfold … sixty-fold … and thirty-fold’.

Jesus carefully balances tragedy and blessing. Both are extreme. The logic and outcomes of both clamor for his hearers’ consideration. Deep finality is at stake. Death is terminal. Harvest is irrevocable.

Both depend, in part, upon a decision to understand. Both depend, in part, upon the enigmatic, ear-closing, consciousness-awakening work of God himself. The latter is underscored in the unlikely calculus of revelation:

For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.

Jesus evokes an ancient saying from the book of Isaiah about the closing of an entire people’s eyes and ears. As eight centuries before in the diagnostic rhetoric of a most famous prophet, so now Jesus finds Israel wanting in its capacity to discern the privilege of truth in the brief opportunity of its articulation.

Yet the point of the parable is not fatalism. It is rather a summons to hear, to understand, to discern that something is happening in the teaching of Jesus that trumps all other priorities and exercises a most absolute claim upon our powers of perception.

It would be, we are taught, irretrievably painful to have become the kind of people who respond like rocky soil or thorn-covered bush country. Their hope diminishes to the vanishing point.

On the other hand, blessing gives birth not only to harvest. It engenders still further blessing. And then some more.