The Sower and the Seed - Part I

Luke 8:5-8

When I was a little tyke, I visited the Abbott farm during planting season. They let me work right along with Mr. Abbott as he planted his Jersey corn. He went down each row, poking holes, I crouching along beyond, dropping three seeds in each hole. I guess I must have covered the seeds with dirt as I went along or else Mr. Abbott went back behind me to finish up. I don't really remember. All I know is, that day I learned how to plant.

Years later, I traveled to a remote area in Northwest China, up into the deeply eroded hills of Gansu. Much of China's uneven terrain has been tamed into terraced hills, but in this arid, windswept wilderness, the hills were too rough even for terracing. And yet I saw fields of grain growing on land so steep it seemed impossible for a person to climb up let alone cultivate it.

How did they sow those fields, I asked my local guide? He said, "They call those plots 'leaving-it-up-to-the-gods' fields." The farmers, desperate to plant any land they could, simply tossed extra seed onto nearly vertical slopes in the hope that even in that scrappy soil, they could reap a harvest. I have no idea how they gleaned those fields, but I have no doubt that whatever came up was indeed harvested.

That Gansu sort of farming is very much like the kind of farming we find spoken of in this parable. No digging holes and dropping in three seeds here. You simply scattered the seed and waited to see what the harvest would bring.

The agricultural revolution was still many centuries in the future. Yet the laws of the harvest instilled at the beginnings of the earth applied as much back then as they do now. What you plant is what you harvest, as Jesus says elsewhere. Then as now all farmers acknowledged a multiplication effect in farming, that any farmer anticipated to reap much more than he sowed. It is the sowing technique, as much as anything, that has changed.

In the planting style of that ancient day, Jesus explained spiritual principles to his listeners. They all knew that at planting time, the person who sowed went out and scattered seed wherever he could. Hopefully most of that seed was going to fall on good soil, places where the ground had been cultivated, either by hand or with oxen.

"A farmer went to sow his seed," Jesus told his listeners all equally hungry for a good story and starving for something more than what life had offered so far. Jesus gestured with his arm like he himself was scattering seed and they watched his hand move through the air, as he said, "That farmer simply tossed that seed into the wind. And as he did, some of that seed fell on his own pathway, where he and others stepped on it and the birds flew down to snatch it up. Some fell among the rocks where it had no chance to take root, and so it quickly withered and died. Other seed fell among thorns where the seeds could grow, but where the little plants were later chocked by the thorns.

"And then there was the seed that landed on the good soil, soil that was freshly dug up, loose and cleared of thorns and weeds. When this seed came up, it produced a huge crop, as many as one hundred seeds of grain for every seed planted."

That was his story. Like most parables, this one was short and to point, something even the simplest of folks could remember long after. The point of the story was something Jesus generally left up to his listeners to sort out. That was the thing about parables. They stuck with you like a thick noodle-mutton-and-bread soup, stirring around inside you for days until, like the seed itself, they started to sprout into new thoughts and ideas. And you came up with the point yourself.

So it was that Jesus left them with this challenge, "If you can hear, then listen to what I am saying." In other words, think about it.