Mark 4:1-20, the third soil is the most dangerous of the three that fail, because it does not look like failure at all, the seed falls among thorns and here the seed actually grows, it takes root, it rises, there is a real plant, but the thorns were already in that ground and they grow, too and they grow faster and slowly they crowd in around the wheat until they choke it. The plant does not die in a dramatic moment, it just gets squeezed, quietly over a whole season until there is no room left to bear grain, it uses up its strength surviving, instead of producing.
Pay attention to the two words Jesus uses for the thorns, because they are sharp. The first is the Greek word merimnai, it means the cares, the anxieties, the thousand small worries of life, the mental weight of a hundred things pulling at once. The second Greek word is apate, the deceitfulness of riches. Deceitfulness, because money makes a promise it never keeps, it whispers that a little more will finally make you secure and then a little more after that and the promise always moves.
Together, the worries and the false promises grow up around the word and strangle it, this is the soil for people whose lives are not bad, that is what makes it so easy to miss. The thorn-choked heart is not the heart of someone running from God, it is the heart of someone who said yes to the word and then let the cares and the wealth and the endless wanting of other things grow up around it until there was no daylight left for it. Full life, no fruit, the most respectable way to lose a harvest and it is worth sitting with how slow this one is, because the other two failures are quick and visible.
The path rejects the seed immediately, the rocky ground withers in a single hot stretch, but the thorns take a whole season, nothing dramatic ever happens, there is no moment of rejection, no obvious collapse, the plant is there the whole time. The plant just never gets the light and the room it needs, because something else was always growing a little faster, demanding a little more, filling the space the grain needed. By harvest, there is a tangle of green where a crop should have been and not a single head of wheat to show for the season, the thorns did not attack, they just crowded and crowding, it turns out, is enough.
Pay attention to the two words Jesus uses for the thorns, because they are sharp. The first is the Greek word merimnai, it means the cares, the anxieties, the thousand small worries of life, the mental weight of a hundred things pulling at once. The second Greek word is apate, the deceitfulness of riches. Deceitfulness, because money makes a promise it never keeps, it whispers that a little more will finally make you secure and then a little more after that and the promise always moves.
Together, the worries and the false promises grow up around the word and strangle it, this is the soil for people whose lives are not bad, that is what makes it so easy to miss. The thorn-choked heart is not the heart of someone running from God, it is the heart of someone who said yes to the word and then let the cares and the wealth and the endless wanting of other things grow up around it until there was no daylight left for it. Full life, no fruit, the most respectable way to lose a harvest and it is worth sitting with how slow this one is, because the other two failures are quick and visible.
The path rejects the seed immediately, the rocky ground withers in a single hot stretch, but the thorns take a whole season, nothing dramatic ever happens, there is no moment of rejection, no obvious collapse, the plant is there the whole time. The plant just never gets the light and the room it needs, because something else was always growing a little faster, demanding a little more, filling the space the grain needed. By harvest, there is a tangle of green where a crop should have been and not a single head of wheat to show for the season, the thorns did not attack, they just crowded and crowding, it turns out, is enough.