Sowing the back forty

“‘A sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some fell along the path and was trampled underfoot, and the birds of the air devoured it. And some fell on the rock, and as it grew up, it withered away, because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up with it and choked it. And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.’ As he said these things, he called out, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’” (Luke 8:5–8 ESV)

Twenty years ago conservationists colonized Mana island, off the coast of New Zealand, with a flock of concrete birds made to look like gannets. The birds had left the island and scientists hoped to draw them back by decoy though none came. Recently one bird finally fell for the ruse, a bird they named Nigel. He sought without success to woo one of the gannets for himself. He worked the plot of concrete birds but remained alone. Nigel knew what so many of us discover in the living of our everyday lives: that sometimes hard work doesn’t pay off and the opportunity is missed. Sometimes the relationship ends and sometimes the crop fails. The parable of the Sower is Mana on a grander scale with heavy odds against success. Jesus fully consents to heartbreak, not merely hard work. He cries out but the vast majority of the people who hear him are unresponsive. He's spreading seed on a parking lot in the hopes that it finds a crack. This is the determination of a God who is willing to woo the asphalt for the ground beneath it. 

Nigel died recently next to the unresponsive concrete partner he loved. It’s a hard world for sowers of all kinds. This is not a particularly optimistic parable. 

Jesus sows seed, the Word of God, even in places He knows will not bear fruit. Only one of the soils grow up into something significant. The others are non-starters or choked to death by the other things that need their attention. The soil from whom Satan steals the seed fails for apathy. Because anything can be swiped when it sits out in the open like an afterthought. In truth seeds reach the surface only with single-minded maniacal effort. Every biological function but digging for the surface ceases. Cotyledons activate roots that improve water uptake. A tiny shoot reaches for warmer, brighter soil. If the seed is buried too deeply it will expend all of its food before it can engage photosynthesis. If it tries to produce chlorophyl before it surfaces it will die from a lack of food. The typical seed germination rate is 1/3 at best. At best most fail. The one with a heart to sow seed accepts that their work will be one of constant rejection. The sower simply hopes to overwhelm the soil by their sheer willingness to try again and again. The gospel of overwhelming force.

Why does the sower do it? Why does Jesus toil in fields that will never bear fruit? Because he loves the soil. And I think he knows that we need to see Him rejected. God is willing to sow even to the bad fields - the back forty - because as it relates to salvation there’s no easy soil and all of us are hard of hearing. To give up on the hard soil is to give up on all of us.  

We need to see the God who wears out the bad soil with seed. We need to see him cry out and to know that across the street from a howling prophet from nowhere with the raggedy band of disciples, the merchants of wineskins and clay pots look up from their work. They watch the Nazarene preacher preach. They hear Him talk about soils and sowing and long promises and they shrug. On to the next customer and the next prophet. Narrow is the way, we hear Jesus say over again in the Gospels. Narrow is the way but broad is the rejection. Narrow is the way but broad is the heart of the Sower.

There’s nowhere else to plant but the places of unexpected harvest. Every soil is odds-against. The God who would cry out instead of receiving the cry due him is the God that does not reject the slow, unlikely sprig. He does not reject the disciple who comes from the wrong corner of the field. And you and I who may at best be half-hearted followers can be encouraged that the Sower loves even the dogs of the harvest, the weak shoots and bruised reeds. If the Sower lingers in bad fields then maybe the Sower is for us. Maybe the seed is for us. Maybe the Word of this particular preacher is more than a shot in the dark. Ecclesiastes says good for all is the King who cultivates his own fields. The God who removes the impediments, tears up the soil, makes all things new. Our slowness to embrace Him is key to His holiness and to our following Him. 

We are the soils at the heart of Jesus’ message. We have received the promise: happiness of home, a career with advancement, a spouse who would love us — in sickness and in health — and before it could take root it died for lack of water. Or for a lack of depth in us, it hardly matters which. As a soil we are sometimes dust at best. We are Shelley’s Ozymandias, a crumbled visage buried in sand. Or we are that soil caught among the thorns, and very little at all makes it out of our briar. The fears, worries, anxieties grow faster than even a good word of deliverance. So we read this little parable and we find that we can’t summon hope. We suspect, if we’re honest, that the time for Sowers on our path is long since passed. 

But Jesus stops in the middle of things, crowds pressing in, coming from all places. They are looking for the show or looking for a sign, or looking like we often are, for just a little something to get them through the week. The preacher walks up the pulpit and readies his sowing bag while a teenager leans back with his knees up and a woman about to lose her job drifts in the second pew. So what is the seed? What is the Word?

Blood rituals are a common practice among the deeply religious, particularly in agrarian cultures. Instinctively we know that the ground stays closed unless blood opens it. Those first tenders of the field, Adam and Eve, are told that only by toil, by sweat and blood, will the ground produce fruit. In Christianity that sacrifice is direct, from the Sower of the fields Himself. It is the Cross of Jesus, a sign of our rejection of Him, by which God ultimately plows the field and sows the seed. In each of those problematic soils it is the dogged kindness of the Sower that enriches the soil. The endurance of Jesus is the endurance that endures us. 

Every sower at heart, all of us who have experienced fallow ground and hope deferred ought to rehearse this parable in our hearts. It is Jesus’ willingness to continue in this ministry of redemption, feeding us with bread and wine, that allows us to understand and receive the good news. God’s dirty fingernails, his mucking boots; only by those signs and seals can we know that his call is one we should hear. Only then is the seed of the Gospel the truth we want buried deeply in our hearts. Oh to find among the concrete some flesh and blood. To see a shoot of hope and walk in fields up to our necks! The stone the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. The Sower the soil rejects becomes the Harvester a hundred times over.

(Harvest Scene, 1873, Winslow Homer)