GOSPEL PARABLES 5 THE SOWER AND THE SEED

GOSPEL PARABLES 5 THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER 

We have come again to the place where the three Gospels all write about the same parable and it is about Jesus teaching the parable of the Sower. (Matthew 13:3 Mark 4:1–9 Luke 8:4).
Matthew 13:2 Great multitudes had gathered to Jesus, so that He got into a boat and sat down and the whole multitude stood on the shore. Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

Jesus then explains that last statement about having ears to hear which is found many times in many books in the Bible. He does this because the disciples interrupt him to ask him why he has to speak to the people in parables. He then says ‘Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. Jesus then speaks that challenging riddle - For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled. (will look at that in a minute)

God has blessed them even more than the prophets of the past and had given them the grace to understand the hidden or deeper meaning of what Jesus said about the Kingdom of God because of the yielded state of their hearts. Jesus then explains that challenging riddle – It is that that their attitude of submission brings even more grace for them to receive even more understanding. That is entering into the ‘more for more’ equation of grace - as the Bible says ‘For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace (John 1:16). The grace that Jesus brings into the world crosses the Divine Spirit to human spirit barrier and allows the Divine nature to supersede what our human nature is able to understand and to do. But to the others who do not have hearts of submission to God, they will have their understanding taken from them because of the resistance in their hearts that stops them from ‘hearing’. 
Jesus then goes back to what Isaiah prophesied in the past about Israel not hearing, to explain what is happening with those who were not hearing Jesus then and that includes us now. 
‘And in them the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled - hearing you will hear and not understand and seeing you will see and not perceive, for the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, otherwise they would see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and they would understand…
Isaiah then asks God ‘Until how long Lord? – until the cities are laid waste and the land is made desolate.’ In other words – until there is disorder and disarray everywhere - the world coming undone. 

Those who do not ‘hear’ God end up with wrong perceptions, wrong logic, wrong reasoning, wrong conclusions, and wrong ideologies and belief systems - as is happening today. This lack of hearing accumulates and it is currently accumulating, and only harsh reality can put a dent in that kind of delusion. Driving on that highway results in nasty bumps and dents, and there are many people on that highway today and there are more bumps and dents to come.

The word in the Greek that Jesus uses for ‘hearing’ is akouo which in its simplest sense is to physically hear something that is said and to pay attention to it. A further intended sense of ‘to hear’ in the words of Jesus here is to understand what is said. But the ultimate intended sense in what Jesus is saying is for something to happen in our hearts when we do understand, and to turn towards God and to do what he says. It is interesting to note that the word for ‘obey’ in the Greek is hypakouo, and hypo means ‘under’ which explains the meaning of the word ‘to obey’ which means that we ‘hear under’ – or rather that what we hear is over our life like a banner or a flag that says that our heart has chosen to yield to what Jesus says to us.

Jesus then goes on to interpret the parable. He explains the meaning of the four different types of soil as representing four different states of the heart which are heart resistance, heart resilience, heart anxiety or heart submission. The seed sown by the wayside that the birds pluck out of the mind describes the state of a resistant heart that hears the word of the Kingdom and allows the Wicked One to take away any perception of its truth - because of a heart of inattention or indifference. 
The seed of the word might be fine, but the wayside attitude is one of being on one’s own personal self-absorbed journey that wanders wherever its own self-serving ideas want to take it. This would make up probably the bulk of today’s society with little or no interest in understanding God’s Word. But I believe God is finding ways of getting peoples’ attention like never before – the Bible says Where sin abounds grace does much more abound (Romans 5:20)

The seed sown on stony ground, where the root cannot take hold because of a lack of soil for any roots to go down, describes the state of the heart as one of lacking resilience or staying power when life gets difficult, testing our faith in what we have heard. The parable says that he receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself but endures only for a while. This describes an impulsive or emotional heart that is enthusiastic and fascinated by something that sounds new and helpful but who can’t hang on to the truth of what he has heard deep within himself. 

There is something deep within that he does not understand about himself which is fearful of suffering too much loss or disappointment and so he ‘endures’ for only a while. He thinks within himself ‘can I really trust God to be with me and for me in this situation?’ The Greek word for ‘endures’ here is eimi which means ‘I am’ – that is our sense of identity - so this person does not know the depth of his ‘I am’ with God and can only feel okay about his ‘I am’ with God for a little while. God can redeem this state of the heart by digging around that shallow rocky place and enriching the soil and letting him know that his ‘I am’ by the grace of God which crosses the human/Divine Spirit barrier allows him to be found within the ‘I am’ of Jesus. I believe that God is dealing with all of us graciously in these days in this way.

The seed sown on thorny ground where the thorns choke off the word describes the state of a heart that is distracted and anxious concerning the things of the world. Heart anxiety is not about resilience or resistance or even submission to God. It is just a state of not finding the place of inner stillness that allows us to ‘be still and know that I am God’. There is too much that has to be done and there’s just not enough time to ‘be still’ because something is likely to go wrong when it shouldn’t and that will make me more anxious. So I’ll just have to complain or protest even though that makes me even more anxious but at least I feel I’m doing something and that’s what counts. 
But God can unchoke us. Jesus says Come to Me, all you who labour and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy (elathro in the Greek), and my burden is light (elathro).”  (Matthew 11:28). both those elathro words mean ‘easy’ which means that he wants to make it easy for us to be joined to him as he walks beside us (yoked to him). Jesus lifts from us the feelings of loss and failure that we bring to him in our burdened souls and we can now find rest for our souls, now yoked with Jesus instead of yoked to our anxiety.

The seed sown on good ground describes the state of a heart which is in submission to God and hears the word and understands it and obeys it (hypakouo- to hear under). We can be that person who ‘hears under’ – so that what we hear is over our life like a banner that says that our heart has chosen to yield to what Jesus says to us – we choose to yield and we produce the yield that God brings forth in us. 
Remember in the parable Jesus said that some would yield a hundredfold, some sixty and some thirtyfold. But yielding only thirtyfold with a submissive and trusting heart does not mean we will miss out on becoming a hundredfold, because we enter into the ‘more for more’ equation of grace which I mentioned before ‘For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace (John 1:16). Crossing the human/Divine Spirit barrier by faith allows the Divine nature to supersede what our human nature is capable of understanding and doing, so that if we yield thirtyfold, we will get grace upon grace to yield sixtyfold, and then even more grace upon grace to yield one hundredfold, and as we read that in the parable - ‘For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance’. You have come that we may have life, and have it more abundantly (John 10.10). 
Let us enter into the abundant life that is on offer from God today. 
Thank you lord we all know the experience of each one of those four states of the heart, either too resistant, or not resilient enough, or too anxious, or getting stuck and not growing, and we all go through those seasons of feeling we are not yielding what we could or how we could. But our faith is in you as you bring us through that human/Divine barrier - so that you are the being and doing within us and we can understand who we are and what we can do - Amen.