“1 Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge. 2 He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: 3 “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. 8 Still other seed fell on good
soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.” 9 Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
10 When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11 He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that, “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
13 Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? 14 The farmer sows the word. 15 Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. 16 Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. 17 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. 18 Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; 19 but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. 20 Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.””
“It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person… [but] it’s… near impossible to win an argument with a [fool].” That’s wisdom from one of the wits of our culture, and he’s right. Wise people are quite difficult to convince because they’ve already thought much of it out. Fools, however, are impossible to convince because they know so little that they think they know. It’s part of what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The least competent tend to be most confident and it is this very confidence that keeps them from seeing that they have nothing to be confident about. They are so blind they can’t see they are blind and so “It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person [but] it’s… near impossible to win an argument with a [fool].”
Spiritually speaking, that’s my native state. We humans are by fleshly nature absurdly confident in our spiritual idiocy, which makes us nearly impossible to convince. This is why Jesus tells parables—to surprise us into understanding. The question before us in every one of these parables we will study is whether I am surprisable, whether you are convincible. “Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong,” as one song put it. Parables, illustrations, analogies, metaphors are Jesus’ means of lovingly surprising us into understanding. Spiritually speaking, receptivity is key. That’s the claim of this sermon: spiritually speaking, receptivity is key.
We will study this in three points. First, beginning to teach. Second, inhospitable soil. Third, receptive soil. First, in verses 1-2, we see beginning to each. Second, in verses 3-7 and 14-19, we see inhospitable soil, and finally in verses 8-9 and verse 20, we see receptive soil.
We see Jesus’ delight in surprising us for our good in our first point: beginning to teach. Jesus saw himself as a teacher. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” as he explained his purpose in explaining. We see how habitual this teaching was in verse 1, “Again Jesus began to teach…” That word “again” so early in the gospel shows us how characteristic teaching was for Jesus. The question is whether learning is characteristic for me and for you. Are we convincible? Are we disciples? Jesus doesn’t teach so he gets to speak. He teaches so that we might learn.
One of Jesus’ favorite methods of teaching was parables. “He taught them many things by parables,” as verse 2 puts it. Parables are purposefully startling. They are often unsettling. They “tend to puzzle as much as enlighten, and are designed to shock and challenge rather than to offer reassuring explanations,” as France explains. In his teaching, Jesus was and is seeking to open our by nature closed minds to the reality of who God is and who we are. Jesus does so with unexpected illustrations and analogies and so there isn’t much religious language in any of parables. They are about seeds and soils, banquets and clothes, coins and sheep, fathers and sons. He comes at us unexpectedly so that we grasp his meaning and then realize that he, by grace, is grasping us.
This first parable is the master parable. We will see next week that Jesus believes that if you refuse to accept this one, you won’t accept any of them. It is the first substantial parable in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—John focuses on different creative teaching methods of Lord. The evangelists prioritization of this parable means that we would do well to put it first, and so we are. We are seeking to live out Jesus’ life and we do that first by receiving his teaching.
The question now, as then, is whether we are open—whether we are convincible by this teaching and only you can answer today for you. You within God’s providence can refuse His word. As Snodgrass explains, “[Jesus] aims to explain the paradoxical fact that a proclamation of such ultimate importance can be ignored or even opposed by some who hear it.” The word is going forth just as the word went forth at creation but you and I, unlike the light and water, can be foolish enough to refuse the word. Genesis 1 was, “Let there be… and it was so.” The question is whether it will be so in you.
Some will refuse. Some do refuse. You see that in Mark’s use of the word “crowd” in verse 1, “the crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge.” Mark uses this word “crowd” to refer to the mixed multitude—some are against Jesus, some are for him, some are just there for the show, some are there to check their religious box, and so it is today. They all hear, but only some are willing to change. Let’s be that sort of people. We see the alternative in our second point: inhospitable soil.
The first three types don’t welcome Jesus’ words. They are inhospitable to it. His words and the changes he wants to bring are not welcome in the home of who they are. As we head into these types, it’s necessary to recognize that Jesus isn’t predicting percentages. He isn’t saying, as some have taught, that about a quarter of the people are rocky soil or that a quarter are good soil. He’s just laying out categories for you to use to examine yourself and understand what is happening in the life of any church.
He is urging self-inspection; so, are you the first inhospitable soil? “Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up… The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.” Do you regularly formulate objection to the way God describes life? Do you listen politely while all the while disagreeing? Are you sadly secure in what Jesus would consider spiritual ignorance—unwilling to change because that would imply that you were somehow wrong? “Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong.”
Barclay says that this first soil, ‘stands for the shut mind. We sometimes say of a person, “we might as well talk to a brick wall as to him.”’ This path soil was likely the common ground between people’s plots on which farmers and others walked—hard as a rock. The Pharisees would be in this category—impossible to convince because they already know better. They are so right that they can’t be wrong. People who for whatever reason can’t bring themselves to accept their wrongness and so accept grace are of this soil. None of them would say that this is Satan at work in them, but that—according to Jesus—is what’s happening. This is part of why we pray before we hear God’s word; we pray not to become this sort of soil.
It’s worth noting that these people hear. If you are this type of soil tonight, you are hearing the same word everyone else. It is just somehow irrelevant to you. It’s a terrifying state for grace to be irrelevant to you. Dallas Willard was right in saying, “We are not going to understand God in His word by being clever, intelligent, and scholarly, or even by studying very hard because the interaction of God with us through His word is a personal matter. It depends on the condition of our hearts, our minds, and our lives.” Jesus’ message is to be receptive, to be convincible. Don’t be closed minded because you are so very right. Be convincible.
The second type of soil is rocky. “Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root…” As Jesus later explains it, “Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.”
Unlike the first soil, these people do let the word in. They are, for a time, hospitable to grace and God, but it doesn’t last. It’s like a seed growing in a slight layer of dirt on top of a rock. It will not develop roots. It will not grow. “It has no depth,” as Barclay explains and that describes this response—no depth.
You see a similar dynamic in sports fans. How many people cheering on the Lions last season were that wild about them when they were 0 and 16? How many had depth of conviction for the Lions and how many were jumping on the bandwagon? Many will jump on the Jesus bandwagon and jump off just as quickly. “[T]heir hearts are not so properly and thoroughly subdued as to have the softness necessary for their continued nourishment,” as Calvin explains. These people are only interested in having their own way and as long Jesus’ way aligns with theirs, they are all for him. When his purposes sufficiently cross theirs, or when the cross crosses their path, they dump him. That’s different from the first type but, in the end, it’s just as inhospitable, just as inconvincible, just as arrogant in its own ignorance. Don’t be like that.
The third type of soil is full of thorns. “Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain…” Jesus explains this later saying, “Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.”
These people do have concern for what Jesus says but that concern is strangled by other concerns. “This stands for the life so crowded with other things that Christ gets crowded out,” as Barclay puts it. They would say and even convince themselves that Jesus matters to them, but he isn’t the substance of their lives and his grace has no effect on their substance. He is like a revered painting on the mantle of their fireplace which has no meaningful impact on anything that happens in the life of that family.
This is, in the end, just as inhospitable as the other types. It doesn’t produce any fruit—love, joy, peace, patience. It’s as much faith as an apple tree that won’t produce is apples is an apple tree; it’s name only and anything name only isn’t worthy of the name. This response is just as closed minded too. It will judge the other bad soils. It will judge the good soils. Full of care but devoid of Christ. Please don’t respond that way. It’s inhospitable to God. Describing these first three soils, France writes, “The first never started, the second started but died, the third survived but could not produce grain. But in the end none is of any value to the farmer, since he is looking for grain.”
We need to be open to the fact that this might be us. Years ago, I taught on this parable in a Christian school urging myself, the children, and teachers to consider our response. When I was done, the principal, who did much good for that school, stood up and assured the children that they were all good soil. Maybe they were. I don’t know, but neither did she. The call was for them to test the soil of themselves. Wedel’s will test the pH of the soil for free. Jesus will be testing the soil of us by these parables. You can tell what type of soil you are by how your respond to his surprises. The key is to be receptive. “These are the ones I look on with favor,” as the Lord said through Isaiah, “those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word.” Let’s consider this receptive response in our final point: receptive soil.
Receptivity is the key to relationships. A genuine willingness to engage is the key to mutual understanding. So it is in all relationships and God knows that what you most need is relationship with Him. By means of the parables Jesus opens his people up into continuing to realize their deepest need is him, and so this master parable makes this pre-condition clear by calling us to be receptive. Rather than self-justifying how you currently are and what you currently think, the call is to be continually open to anything Jesus says, anything God says. This is an ongoing experience. It leaves no place for thinking that we have arrived. That is the rigid opposite of receptivity and receptivity is what Jesus wants. “Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times,” as Jesus said in verse 8 and later explained in verse 20 saying, “Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown.”
The key is to be continually more open to the way Jesus describes reality—to believe that his Father really is as good as Jesus says, to believe that sin is really as bad as Jesus describes, that you can be found no matter how lost you are, to believe that humility rather than pride is the way forward, and all the rest of the parables. The key is to welcome these truths into the home of who you are not merely as guests but as part of the family.
God’s word will then do its work in you just as surely as it separated light from darkness and water from dry land. Our part is to receive. The question for us is whether we will live in the world Jesus describes and creates or remain confident in our native lostness. You see the centrality of this call to receptivity in Jesus’ prioritization of this parable in verse 13, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?” He’s not saying, “you didn’t get that thorns were cares of the world? Well, then you aren’t smart enough to guess that you are like a lost coin.” He’s saying that if you refuse to be hospitable to his words, the rest of the parables will be lost on you no matter how well might be able to parse them out. The key is to be convincible, to be happy to find that you can change, to learn that you were wrong. That’s what Jesus is also after in his epilogue to this parable included in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
“The word of God is always good,” as Barclay explains this, “but that the outcome of it depends on the heart and the mind into which it falls.” We can spend our lives judging it all or we can accept God as He is and find in these parables that He is better than we thought.
Being good soil isn’t about arriving. Jesus makes that clear with the variants—thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. The matter, and what matters, is increasing abundance. The message is “strive to be more receptive.” You can always be more receptive to what God is up to in your life and in the world just as you can always be more receptive to beauty, to wonder, to your family. This prevents the receptive from falling back into confident ignorance. There is no room here for, “I’m receptive, check.” That’s why the great danger with the parables is being bored with them because you already understand them. That’s a sign you don’t understand as Jesus intends. To think that you’ve ever mastered the parable of the lost sons or the parable of the growing seed because you know this or that fact or interpretation is to miss the point as badly as thinking that you’ve mastered friendship because you know your friend’s birthday. It’s this blindness too which Jesus is seeking to remedy.
This continued openness is what is to keep us from reading this parable and considering ourselves the hundredfold person and looking down on a thirty-folder. “We have no right,” as Calvin explains, “to despise those who occupy a lower degree of excellence for the master of the house himself, though he gives to one the preference above another on account of more abundant produce, yet bestows the general designation good even on inferior soils.”
A thirty yield of patience in your spouse or in yourself is something to celebrate. It’s something for which to give thanks to the Giver as is a tenfold yield or any-fold yield. It’s all gift. Jesus is teaching us that it’s all grace and that our role is to receive such gifts. Our role is to be receptive. So be surprisable. Be convincible. That matters more than any human other than Jesus knows. Continue to be more trusting in him. Amen.