Mark 4:1-20, here is where the original setting matters, because the way they farm is not the way you farm and the difference changes how you hear the whole thing. In 1st century Galilee, the farmer often scattered his seed before he plowed the field, this is backwards from what you would expect, you picture neat rows and prepared ground, they did it the other way. The sower walked across unworked land, broadcasting seed by hand in wide arcs and then came back through with the plow to turn the soil and bury what he had thrown, which means the seed was landing on ground that had not been prepared yet.
Some of the seed fell on a footpath work hard across the field, some on a patch where limestone bedrock sat just under a thin skin of dirt, some where thorn bushes had their roots still in the ground waiting. The farmer was not being careless, he was farming the way everyone farmed, the seed went everywhere, because that was the method, you sowed first generously across the whole field and dealt with the ground after. So, when the people heard Jesus describe seed falling on a path and on rocks and among thorns, nobody in that crowd thought, what a clumsy farmer, they thought, yes, that is exactly how it goes.
Some of the seed always lands where it cannot grow, that is the cost of scattering wide and behind all of this sits an older promise that the crowd may not have caught, but the disciples eventually would. Centuries earlier, through the prophet Isaiah, God had compared his word to rain and snow that come down from heaven and do not go back empty, they water the earth, they make it bring forth and bud. Isaiah 55:11, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please. The word, like seed, like rain, goes out and it does its work, that is the soil Jesus is planting this parable in.
Not just dirt, the ancient conviction that what God speaks does not come back with nothing to show for it, every Israelite who knew their scriptures carried that promise somewhere in the back of their mind. So, when Jesus stands up and tells a parable about seed that goes out and in three cases out of four seems to come back empty, he is doing something bold, he is holding the promise and the hard reality in the same hand. The word does not fail and yet, look at the field, most of it produced nothing, both things are true at once and the parable is built to hold the tension, the failure is never in the seed, it is always in the ground.
Some of the seed fell on a footpath work hard across the field, some on a patch where limestone bedrock sat just under a thin skin of dirt, some where thorn bushes had their roots still in the ground waiting. The farmer was not being careless, he was farming the way everyone farmed, the seed went everywhere, because that was the method, you sowed first generously across the whole field and dealt with the ground after. So, when the people heard Jesus describe seed falling on a path and on rocks and among thorns, nobody in that crowd thought, what a clumsy farmer, they thought, yes, that is exactly how it goes.
Some of the seed always lands where it cannot grow, that is the cost of scattering wide and behind all of this sits an older promise that the crowd may not have caught, but the disciples eventually would. Centuries earlier, through the prophet Isaiah, God had compared his word to rain and snow that come down from heaven and do not go back empty, they water the earth, they make it bring forth and bud. Isaiah 55:11, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please. The word, like seed, like rain, goes out and it does its work, that is the soil Jesus is planting this parable in.
Not just dirt, the ancient conviction that what God speaks does not come back with nothing to show for it, every Israelite who knew their scriptures carried that promise somewhere in the back of their mind. So, when Jesus stands up and tells a parable about seed that goes out and in three cases out of four seems to come back empty, he is doing something bold, he is holding the promise and the hard reality in the same hand. The word does not fail and yet, look at the field, most of it produced nothing, both things are true at once and the parable is built to hold the tension, the failure is never in the seed, it is always in the ground.
