Mark 4:1-20, there is a tenderness waiting just a few verses later, because Jesus is not finished with the seed, in the same chapter, he tells another short parable, Mark 4:26-29. A man scatters seed, then sleeps and rises night after night and the seed sprouts and grows and he does not know how, the earth produces by itself. The point lands gently on anyone discouraged by all that wasted seed in the first parable, you scatter, you cannot make it grow. The growing is God’s work, hidden in the ground, happening in the dark while you sleep, your job is to sow and to be good soil, the harvest is his business.
There is one more place this parable points and it comes into focus when you remember who is telling it, Jesus is the sower, he is the one going out, scattering the word freely across every kind of ground, holding nothing back from the path or the rocks or the thorns. Jesus sows generously, knowing most of it will look wasted, because that is what the word does, it goes out wide. But later, on the way to the cross, Jesus took the image of the seed and did something startling with it, John 12:24, he said, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit, Jesus was talking about himself.
The sower became the seed, Jesus went down into the ground of death, alone, buried and out of that single buried grain came a harvest no one could count. The same logic as the field, something has to go into the dark before anything rises. Hold the two images together, in the parable, the seed that fell and seemed to die in three out of four soils looked like loss, wasted grain, a careless throw, but the whole parable turns on the truth that what goes into the ground and disappears is not gone, it is doing the one thing seed is made to do and the greatest proof to that came when the sower himself lay down in the earth and rose with a harvest. The principle Jesus taught from a boat, he proved with his own body, the seed that is buried is the seed that multiplies. So, what do you do with a parable whose whole point is the dirt, you let it ask you the question it was built to ask, which soil am I right now in this season?
There is one more place this parable points and it comes into focus when you remember who is telling it, Jesus is the sower, he is the one going out, scattering the word freely across every kind of ground, holding nothing back from the path or the rocks or the thorns. Jesus sows generously, knowing most of it will look wasted, because that is what the word does, it goes out wide. But later, on the way to the cross, Jesus took the image of the seed and did something startling with it, John 12:24, he said, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit, Jesus was talking about himself.
The sower became the seed, Jesus went down into the ground of death, alone, buried and out of that single buried grain came a harvest no one could count. The same logic as the field, something has to go into the dark before anything rises. Hold the two images together, in the parable, the seed that fell and seemed to die in three out of four soils looked like loss, wasted grain, a careless throw, but the whole parable turns on the truth that what goes into the ground and disappears is not gone, it is doing the one thing seed is made to do and the greatest proof to that came when the sower himself lay down in the earth and rose with a harvest. The principle Jesus taught from a boat, he proved with his own body, the seed that is buried is the seed that multiplies. So, what do you do with a parable whose whole point is the dirt, you let it ask you the question it was built to ask, which soil am I right now in this season?