The Patient Farmer with Good Seed and Bad Soil

Jesus’s favorite way to teach about the arrival of God’s kingdom was through parables - short stories that are equal parts analogy and riddle. In Mark, the Parable of the Sower is Jesus’s first parable and the one he uses give his disciples a clue about how parables work: a sower casting his seed onto good and bad soil alike. Often, we focus on the quality of the “soil” in the parable, asking how we can make ourselves “good” soil in which Jesus’s message can take root and bear fruit. This is good! But Erik suggested that we focus on the power of the seed. The final image of the parable is of each seed that takes root producing “thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times” the seed that was sown. Here is part of Erik’s conclusion:

In other words, you—everyone in whom the Word of God has taken root—are God’s answer to bad soil. Not because it’s your job to make up for God the careless farmer and farm yourself. But because of what God the good farmer can do through the seed that has sprouted in you. God knows that most who hear the announcement that his kingdom has arrived won’t respond with faith and obedience and experience new life. But God’s response to hard, rocky, weedy soil, hostile to life, is generosity and patience. Our job, as God’s harvest, is to imitate that generosity and patience, so that like Jesus we become living parables whose words and deeds challenge people to wonder if a new a life, in a new kingdom, under a new king is possible.