01.02 The seed is the word
I. THE SEED IS THE WORD
WE begin with the great Parable of the Sower. It is the story with which Jesus Himself seems to have ushered His parabolic method of teaching. It is the one which He gave as a type of all the rest, and concerning which He laid down the reasons which led Him to choose this way of reaching the hearts and consciences of His hearers. It is easy for us to imagine the scene of its first telling. Around the Master were the blue waters of the lake; before Him, on the fringe of bright yellow sand, stood the crowd of Eastern peasants, eager to hear the new Teacher, so unlike the formal and precise Rabbis to whom they were accustomed, as He sat there in the freshness and freedom of the open air. It may be that as he raised His glance, it fell upon some countryman on the slope of the hill behind the beach, sowing his seed, the birds flying around and behind him. That sight interpreted to Jesus with swift vivid reality His own immediate situation His presence there, meeting His brother men, with the message of their Father on His lips, the love of their Father in His heart; these faces before Him, each of them representing some separate story of toil, of love, of hope, of need, of sorrow. “Behold! the sower went forth to sow.”
How could He make the words which came from His own very life become the germs of new and satisfying life in all these waiting folk? He knew that all depended upon the receptivity of the soil on the disposition of the heart and mind. At the outset of our study of the parables, let us lay to heart that first and essential lesson. We shall make no progress in this or any other branch of Christian learning until we have grasped it. The Divine Teacher requires the right correspondence of heart and will.
Truth cannot be known, grace cannot be received, without the fitting response of character. The message of Christian truth will never prove itself, the gift of Christian grace will never fulfil itself. To understand the first and to use the second really and vitally, a man must put and keep himself in the right attitude of mind and will. The object of the parable is to tell us what that right attitude is. The seed is “the word,” “the word of God,” “the word of the Kingdom.” The sower is the Living Spirit of God who breathes the word. The Spirit, like the wind, blows where He lists; and every I breath of that Divine Spirit is a word of God. The language in which He speaks is manifold, unexpected, all-pervading as Himself. Whenever the spirit of a man is touched and aroused, a word of God has been spoken. Sometimes it is spoken through Nature in the glory of the setting sun, in the plash of the waters upon the shore, in the shapes and shadows of great mountains, in the multitude and silence of the stars, in the stillness of the “huge and thoughtful night.” Sometimes the word is spoken through human lives as when the example of a true man or woman warms the heart and fires the will, or when some spectacle of suffering quickens the instinct of compassion. Sometimes the word is spoken through memories of days and faces gone, through old associations rousing remorse, or reviving forgotten hopes. Sometimes it is spoken when some chord of music stirs strange yearnings in the soul and inarticulate “thoughts too deep for tears.” Sometimes it speaks again to our own spirits with some echo of the power or pleading with which centuries ago it first sounded in the spirit of God’s chosen men, when we read and hear the venerable words of the Bible. Has the inner spirit of a man at any time and in any way been reached and drawn towards good and God? Then and there God has been speaking to him. Once indeed the Spirit of God expressed Himself in a Perfect Word in the Word of God incarnate; and still the surest sign which a man can have that God Himself is speaking to Him is when the thought of Jesus moves him to grateful reverence, the example of Jesus inspires him to the service of his fellows, the Spirit of Jesus gives him the ardour of hope, and the strength of life. In all these manifold ways the Spirit of God is ceaselessly speaking divine words the Sower is ever going forth to sow.
Whether or not these words of God enter within us as life-giving seeds, springing up in healthy and progressive life, and bearing fruit, depends upon the quality of the soil.
It is this which we have to examine and prepare. This is the essential “spade work” of the Christian life.
TAGS: [Parables]