An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Jesus Fails Business School

A sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23 by Nathan Nettleton

Jesus delivered much of his teaching in the form of parables, and because parables are always a bit ambiguous and have unexpected twists, there is always room for some doubt as to exactly what he meant or exactly what the main point was. Parables seem to be intended to provoke questions and ongoing wondering rather than to close of the discussion with a definitive answer. The parable of the sower that we heard tonight is one of the only ones where Jesus is recorded as explaining it to anyone afterwards. But even with this one, he doesn’t give a definitive explanation. He tells us what some of the components of the story symbolise, but he doesn’t actually nail down what the full flow of the story therefore means. And I suspect that we still mostly miss his main point.

But before I go there, let me also note something else about the explanation. Most biblical scholars think that the bit where Jesus explains what the four soils symbolise is not even something that Jesus actually said, but that it is something that has been added later by those who were passing on the story. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or helpful. The process of inspiration and revelation continues as the stories are passed on and written into the gospels. But what it does mean is that we shouldn’t assume that reading the explanation exhausts the possible meanings that Jesus had in mind when he told this parable to the crowd. Even if the explanation does come from Jesus himself, it is given in private to the disciples, and not to the crowd to whom he told the parable, so we can still try to listen to the parable the way the crowd would have, without the explanation.

One of the reasons the scholars think that the explanation probably doesn’t come from Jesus is that it tends to reduce the story to an allegory instead of a parable, and Jesus pretty much always spoke in parables rather than allegories. Allegories are fairly straight forward comparisons. Everything corresponds to something else, and the total effect is to simply explain something. Parables on the other hand are never quite so obvious. They usually have a discomforting twist of some sort, and they provoke more questions rather than resolve everything in a neat and obvious way.

Most of us, perhaps due to the explanation, respond to this one at its simple allegorical level whenever we hear it. I know I do. I go straight to thinking about those four types of soil and applying them to myself. How much am I behaving like the path, totally impenetrable, where God’s word doesn’t stand a chance? When am I that resistant? How much am I like rocky soil, where God’s word makes a start but is unable to take root? When am I that shallow? How much am I being like the overgrown soil where concerns about money, status or lifestyle simply crowd out the word so that it gets nowhere? Have I failed to simplify my lifestyle and been seduced into deceiving myself that I’m not a slave to my privileges. And how often do I manage to be the good and productive soil? So I begin examining and perhaps chastising myself, and trying to work out how I can make some positive changes so that I might become more consistently like that good productive soil.

Now, usually that is about as far as I get with this parable, and I suspect that I’m not alone in that. Am I right in thinking that most of you also hear it and respond to it in pretty much that same way?

There is another way of responding to it that is also very common, although most of us are a bit more reluctant to ‘fess up to how much we do this. This other response is to apply the same questions to other people rather than to ourselves. Actually, this is probably even more common. I hear the parable and I look around at the people I know and make judgements about them and what types of soil they seem to be. Of course, in truth, what I’m doing is comparing them to myself. Usually unfavourably. By judging other people as being like the poorer quality soils, I feel a bit better about myself. I might not be quite producing the hundred-fold harvest, but I’m doing better than those people, so I’m okay really. This is the same thing I spoke about last week, so I won’t hammer it too much, but it is almost a universal pattern in our culture that we reassure ourselves of our own goodness and acceptability by pointing the finger at others. If they are the bad ones, then obviously we are the good ones. We must be, because we know evil when we see it and it is them over there, not us. And if you start with the assumption that Christianity is all about being good and avoiding being bad, then when you hear this parable and its explanation, it will slot right into that system and provide an excellent set of criteria for judging ourselves and other people. And just before I move on, there is of course another kind of response. There are some people who judge and condemn both themselves and other people negatively with these categories, either both at the same time or in a violent swinging from one extreme to the other.

Now, I am not about to refute the explanation that Jesus is said to provide for this parable. As an allegory, it does work well to describe the different ways I respond to the word of God at different times, and asking those questions of myself is no bad thing as far as it goes. But I do think that if that is as far as we go, we are probably still missing the main point, or possibly even a couple of main points, that Jesus was trying to provoke us to consider. Think about it for a moment. What name has traditionally been given to this parable? The parable of the sower, yes? And who is the one character in the story who hasn’t had a single mention in all that self examination or judgement of others? The sower. We don’t call this the parable of the four soils, so why do we automatically think that the four soils are the main point?

In parables, unlike in simple allegories, there is usually some kind of twist – a feature of the story that is a bit bizarre or perplexing. And the twist is usually integral to what Jesus is trying to provoke us to think about. There are no weird twists in the descriptions of the soil. They are all perfectly normal and straightforward. There are, however, two notable quirks in the story as a whole. The more obvious one is the final line. The harvest of the grain in the good soil is reported as being “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” Those figures would have been unimaginable to farmers in that era. They’d be pretty special even with today’s mechanised farming with hybrid seeds and irrigation and pest control. But for that era, Jesus is using figures that far exceed any possible normal realistic expectation.

The other twist would have perhaps jumped out more at the peasant farmers among the crowd to whom Jesus first spoke. Is this sower an idiot? He has apparently made no attempt at all to prepare the soil before going out to sow. What a waste! He hasn’t pulled out the rocks or the weeds or ploughed up the soil, and he doesn’t even take care to avoid wasting good seed by dropping on the pathways where the birds will feed on it. No more than 25% of his seed is ending up in the right place. This farmer is going to bankrupt himself quick smart.

Now perhaps you are beginning to see where Jesus is going with this. One of the things that parables often do is leave themselves capable of being read at a level that just reinforces what everyone already thinks and does, but if you pursue the provocative twist, then it undermines this status-quo reading and takes us off in a new direction. So if you only think about the four soils, then this story just reinforces the ways we usually go about things, and religion continues to be about judging ourselves and others and grouping us all into categories of good people and bad people, or with this parable you can even have four categories in a spectrum of good and bad. But it is all no surprise. We just continue dividing ourselves up and expecting that God is going to reward the good for their goodness and make the bad pay for their failure to be good. Status quo maintained. No surprises here. Move along. Move along.

But pursue the provocative twist, and a very different picture emerges. Look what we have now. Sure, we still have a world in which people are very different and can be grouped into different categories ranging from those who are very receptive to the word of God through to those who are resolutely resistant. But when we focus on the sower, on this reckless farmer, we have a God who seems to takes no notice whatsoever of our merits or our receptivity, but who showers blessings on everybody alike, the worthy and the unworthy, the receptive and the unreceptive, the responsive and the unresponsive, the productive and the unproductive, and even the loving and the unloving, the gracious and the ungracious. This is a long way from a picture of a God who is constantly judging us and giving us what we deserve. It’s a long way from a picture of a God who invests carefully and gives most attention and care to those who will productively bear fruit. This God would be a total failure in business school or agricultural college, or even in law school. This is a God who clearly has no fear that there might be a shortage of blessings and that they must be conserved and distributed wisely and carefully. This is a God who gives and gives and gives, lavishly, recklessly, and indiscriminately.

So now we have a true parable again. A story that subverts and upends the expected conclusions and the status quo assumptions. We have a story that acknowledges and highlights our tendency to divide ourselves up and judge one another, but which highlights that for the sole purpose of showing us that God responds to those divisions in completely opposite ways to the ways that we respond to them. We have a God who responds to them by completely disregarding them, by treating them as though they were utterly irrelevant. A God whose extravagant grace defies all our divisions and boundaries and floods over them with scandalous generosity.

And of course, once we hear that subversive message, then the personal application changes radically too. Instead of asking ourselves which soil we are modelling ourselves on, the question becomes “how much am I modelling myself on the extravagant sower?” How much am I loving everybody with the same generosity, regardless of my perceptions of their responsiveness or worthiness? How much am I pouring out myself and my blessings lavishly for others, without discriminating on the basis of the perceived likelihood of a productive return? In short, how much am I modelling myself on Jesus?

The final twist in Jesus’s parable is a mind-boggling promise. The apparent foolishness of this careless sower is rewarded with a productive return that bursts the boundaries of anything that could reasonably have been expected, “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” So Jesus is telling us that the productiveness of our investment in the life of the culture of God will not be determined by making sound judgements about people and focussing our attention on those who return our love, or strategically targeting the areas most likely to produce a return, but by refusing to discriminate at all and pouring ourselves out for others with the sort of extravagant non-judgemental abandon that is constantly exhibited by the God made known to us in Christ. You won’t do too well in business school with that approach, but you may well become part of the outrageous growth of the kingdom of God.

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