Hilton Head Island, SC – December 2, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 13:1-9; Matthew 13:18-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he told them many things in parables, saying, “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.” – Mt. 13:3 RSV
It was an odd place which Jesus chose to use as a platform for some serious teaching. He was standing beside the Sea of Galilee, the large lake that is part of the northern Jordan Valley. The Jordan River flows from the north into this very deep natural body of water, and then again out of the lake to the south. A crowd had gathered to hear Jesus, and so, in order to be able better to view all of them, and keep good eye contact with everyone, he got into a boat and went offshore. Then, it says in the introductory verses, he began to teach them by means of parables.
We need to note two things at the outset. First, Jesus no longer visited the synagogues as often for his teaching and preaching. He had not yet been completely ostracized from the traditional Jewish houses of worship, but he was fast finding himself frozen out. He was too unorthodox, too radical, too too for most religious authorities to allow him to use their facilities. It is in the nature of most religious officials to be unusually cautious.
Secondly, by this point in his ministry, Jesus began to use parables as a primary tool of his teaching method. Parables are stories. They have a way of making the abstract concrete. They are easily remembered, simply because they are stories. Parables help people who may be incapable of deep thoughts to understand truths which otherwise might elude them.
The kind of people who attended the synagogues in the first century are the same kind who likely attend Bible study classes or other classes in synagogues or churches in the 21st century. They are the eager learners, the ones who love to study and ponder and cogitate. But the folks who would follow a rabbi along the shores of the Galilean lake were probably not the most studious of types, the kind of people who love the intellectual rigor of discussion and debate. Jesus knew the mindset of his audiences, and he decided the bunch on the lakeshore were a parable bunch, and not systematic theology graduates of the best-known yeshivas in the region.
Before turning to the parable itself, let me make a few observations about agriculture and fields in Israel. Today there are places in the state of Israel where the most up-to-date methods of farming are used. There they have modern machinery, a variety of crops, and fields as large as those of the American Midwest. But in other places farming is little different from what it was twenty centuries ago. The fields are very small, sometimes only perhaps 20X40 feet or 10X25 yards. Furthermore, most of the fields are not located on plains, but on the sides of mountains. When that is the case, terraces are constructed up the side of the mountain, so that the whole mountain looks like those toys they used to have for children with a large round base with a strong peg rising up in the middle. The child is supposed to put wooden or plastic circles with holes in the middle in order onto the peg, from the largest circle on the bottom to the smallest circle on top. Thus the terraced Middle Eastern mountain looks like the Step-Pyramid of Saqqara, a few miles south of Cairo, Egypt, except that Djoser’s pyramid is square, and the terraced mountains of Israel are more or less naturally round. I hope you’re following all this.
Because I have been on the shores of the Sea of Galilee several times, I visualize where Jesus was when he told the parable of the sower and the seed. He was, at least in my mind’s eye, on the western shore of the lake, where the city of Tiberias now stands. It wasn’t there when Jesus lived, although it was built very shortly afterward, and it has been there ever since. Tiberias is unlike any other city in the world, because it rises from the surface of the lake, which is 650 feet below sea level, and goes up a steep mountainside to an upper altitude of about 2000 feet above sea level. It is one of the most perpendicular of municipalities on the planet. So Jesus was in a small fishing boat, anchored a few feet out into the water before it drops off into the depths, and the crowd was standing somewhere along the shoreline where Tiberias is now located. Or so says I. As Jesus sat there in the boat, he glanced up at a farmer, scattering seed over his terraced fields.
Some of the terraces are only four or five feet wide, and they are divided up into mini-fields perhaps thirty or forty feet long, in the shape of crescents of macaroni. In order effectively to scatter the seed on the newly plowed ground, the farmer would presumably stand on the terrace wall above the small plot of land, and fling the seed in as even an arc as possible, hoping to cast the seed onto ever tillable inch of his miniature fields.
Now suppose I am the farmer, and suppose below me, in front of the pulpit, is the plowed plot of ground. The mountain goes up behind me this way, and down in front of me that way. The place where no seed will profitably grow is along the path at the top of the little field, because the ground there is packed rock-hard from everyone who walks along the path. Nor will it grow along the path on the far side of the mini-field, because there also is a path at the top of the rocks holding up the next terrace down. The thinnest soil is at the upper side of the terrace, and the deepest soil is at the lower side of the terrace. If weeds or thorn bushes will grow, which they will, they will grow along the edges of this little hillside field, and no wheat or barley or oats will be able to grow above the weeds which shall relentlessly choke out their growth.
In addition, when it rains, various parts of these small plots will retain moisture better than others. The thin soil will dry out faster, and the deep soil slower. The weeds will suck up the rain faster than the grain does, because it is the nature of weeds to be entirely self-centered, and the paths won’t allow any rain to penetrate, because they are almost like concrete.
Now, at last, we non-farmers are ready to hear this messianic parable about the hard realities of 1st-century agriculture in Judea. “A sower went out to sow,” said Jesus, perhaps glancing up at the pre-Tiberian farmer flinging his seeds across his terraced fields. “And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path.” No doubt. Not even the most skilled seed-slinger could throw every seed exactly where he wanted it to fall. When the birds saw the seeds on the path, they flew down to devour them, just as a I saw farmers tilling their fields in the Midwest the week before last, and sea gulls swept down to eat the grubs which the sharp discs turned up. I remember hearing that birds have to eat five times their body-weight each day, just in order to be able to expend the energy necessary to fly. Everybody, including birds, has to make a living.
“Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they had not much soil.” There are thousands upon thousands of flat rocks utilized in making these terrace walls. Because that is so, there is very little depth of soil immediately beside the rock walls. A seed might quickly sprout there, but because there is so little actual soil, it soon withers and dies.
“Other seeds fell upon thorns.” Anyone who ever had a vegetable garden knows you have to keep it weeded, or the weeds will prevent the vegetables from getting enough sun or rain. When I moved to Hilton Head Island over 33 years ago, I made the mistake of thinking I would have time to be a successful vegetable gardener. I rented half a plot, planted my seeds at the proper time in the spring, and then went away to Nantucket Island for two and a half weeks at the end of June. When I returned, my previously manicured half-garden, with its multitude of pristine plants, had disappeared beneath a jungle of the most noxious and resistant weeds ever seen by human eyes. Small pine and oak trees had sprung up to four or five feet, more or less, and my experiment in happy horticulture came to a sudden and ignominious halt. I borrowed a roto-tiller and consigned the whole jungle back to the earth from which it cameth. Thus was my potentially green thumb amputated, never to be seen again.
“Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
We all have ears, but what do we hear? What are we to make of this parable?
That’s what the twelve disciples wanted to know. None of them appears ever to have been the brightest bulb in the box. “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” they asked Jesus. He said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom. I have spent a lot of time with you, gentlemen. We have spent many hours on many days going over the deep things of biblical history and theology, and we have debated the meaning of the kingdom of God up one side and down the other. But I don’t have the luxury of that amount of time with the masses. For them I have no choice other than to use parables,” Jesus told the twelve.
A parable is the Gospel in miniature. It is the kingdom of God in a quick glimpse. A parable cannot be everything, but it is one important thing. Parables are not extended truth; by their very nature, they are attenuated truth, kernels of truth, snippets of truth. But true they are.
You are fortunate beyond your ability to comprehend, Jesus told his inner circle. “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (Mt. 13:16-17). Only a very small number of people knew exactly what happened the night of the attack in Benghazi, if anyone ever knew everything. Only a very small number of people knew what all the intelligence reports declared about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, if indeed anyone knew everything. When Bill Gates figured out what would become Microsoft, or Steve Jobs conjured up the Apple of his eye, they didn’t tell the world; they only divulged the secrets to a very small number of the chosen few. Most of us will never know all the inner workings of government or religion or business or anything else. So we must rely on parables or something similar to get even a fleeting glimpse of the Big Picture.
So to his less-than-swift-on-the-uptake inner circle, Jesus took the time to explain the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. This is the only time in any of the Gospels where he did this, and that in itself is telling. Otherwise, they, like we, were forced to try to figure it out on our own.
“When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it,” said Jesus, “the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in his heart; this is what was sown along the path.” For now don’t fret about whether there is an actual devil; just go along with the story. The point is this: Some people never get it, because they are too theologically thick. The meaning of God’s kingdom cannot penetrate through their hard heads. That’s just the way it is. Don’t lose sleep over it. Our job is to get on with our part of the whole program.
“As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with great joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.” There are people who are constantly being converted and re-converted and then reconverted from their most recent conversion. In them the Gospel never seems to take hold, the kingdom doesn’t come. I know someone who has, in turn, chosen many great ways to serve God, only to cast them all aside by choosing yet another one. It would be ever so much better if such folks stuck with one thing, as imperfect as that might be. But then, all things in this world are imperfect, aren’t they?
“As for what was sown among thorns, this is he who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the delight in riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.” Some people never give themselves fully to God because life has granted them so many toys that they suppose their toys provide the meaning of life. However, the purpose of toys is to expand the mind and the imagination, so that we may grow into spiritual maturity, thereby setting aside our toys.
“As for what was sown on good soil, this is he who hears the word and understands it; he indeed bears fruit, and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” In all of this, I suspect Jesus was teaching himself, just as he was trying to teach his disciples. No matter how wisely or how effectively anyone preaches God’s word, it will never meet with 100% productivity or enthusiasm in everyone. Some people are much more disposed to respond to God and His grace, and some are much less disposed. It cannot be otherwise, much as we might wish it. But everyone has at least some capacity to respond positively to God’s Gospel. In my ministry I have known a handful of people who seemed to be transported to the seventh heaven by every word I said, as though I were the very voice of God (which I am not), and I have known others who looked so continuously bored almost to dastardly death every time I opened my mouth by the apparent utter banality of it all. Not even Jesus succeeded with everyone, so who am I to imagine that I shall ever do that?
Thus the parable of the sower and the seed is not only for hearers of God’s word, but also preachers of the word. Inevitably, people vary in the level of their response to God. So no one should be either overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. It will be what it will be.
In his commentary on Matthew 13, William Barclay tells about old Thomas, a lonely, elderly man who died. An author named H.L. Gee decided that no one likely would go to his funeral, and indeed no one did. So the author went. Afterward, on the way to the cemetery, H.L. Gee and the minister trudged through the rain and biting wind. There they met a stranger who was an army officer standing by the open grave. After the minister said the final words of committal, the stranger stood at attention, and gave a sharp, heartfelt salute. H.L. Gee shook the man’s hand, and introduced himself. He noted that the soldier was a brigadier general. The general said, “You will perhaps be wondering what I am doing here. Years ago Thomas was my Sunday school teacher; I was a wild lad and a sore trial to him. He never knew what he did for me, but I owe everything I am or will be to old Thomas, and today I have come to salute him at the end.”
One of the great benefits of being in a seed-sowing vocation is that one never knows what positive effect he may have on people, even the most unlikely ones. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. I deduce from this parable that one of the purposes of the preacher is to cast the seed, and to let God bring whatever level of harvest He chooses.
So what kind of Messiah do we want? Do we want one who says, “Don’t worry; in this world everyone will finally get it”? Or do we want one who says, “In this world there will be some who never get it. Therefore leave it up to God, both in this world and the next.” Do we want a warm-fuzzy Messiah, or a courageously candid one? And which kind is Jesus?