08 - Chapter 08

CHAPTER VIII THE SOWER Mark 4:1-9, Mark 4:13-20; Mat 13:1-9, Mat 13:18-23; Luk 8:4-8, Luk 8:11-15.

ATTEMPTS to classify the parables do not seem to have met with much success. They were preserved, not only because they were recognized as genuine words of Jesus, but because they supplied the answer to questions which bulked largely in the minds of the early Christian teachers. Perhaps as good a way as any is to group them according to the questions to which they supplied the answer. The Sower deals with the unresponsiveness of the people to the Christian message. One of the great problems of the early Church was the rejection of Jesus by his own people, and especially by their leaders. If Jesus was indeed the King of the Jews, and it was his claim to be so that was the legal pretext for his crucifixion, why did not his natural subjects acknowledge his sovereignty? The preaching of the early chapters of Acts emphasizes that the moral responsibility for the death of Jesus rested not with the Romans but with his own countrymen (Acts 2:23; Acts 3:13). As far as their own faith was concerned, the Christians could not believe that God’s purpose had gone awry (Acts 2:23; Acts 3:15); yet when they preached to Jews, these would naturally ask, “ Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him? “; while, when they were dealing with Gentiles, the question was pertinent, ’ If you claim that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, why did the Jews have him put to death? ’ So far as the Jews were concerned, the famous passage in the epistle to the Romans (Rom 9:1-33; Rom 10:1-21; Rom 11:1-36) shows how deeply Paul was moved by their rejection of Jesus. From the beginning of his second chapter Mark deals with this question, and in incident after incident shows the features in the life and teaching of Jesus which estranged from him the leaders of his people. The Sower must have made a strong appeal to the first evangelists in another way. Fresh from the experience of Pentecost they felt the powers of the unseen world pulsing within them.

Like the lame man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, they had been crippled, by sin and doubt, by fear and diffidence; and now all that was gone, their shackles broken, their fears forgotten. For the first time, they could now stand erect on their own feet, and walk and leap and praise God. It was inconceivable, they felt, that to a message like theirs from men who had come face to face with the divine, people would not listen. The early chapters of Acts dwell far more on the successes of the Christian preachers than on their failures. Still, even from Acts it is clear that in Jerusalem there was nothing like a wholesale movement of the people into the fellowship of the followers of Jesus. It is equally clear that, so far as the leaders are concerned, the events that followed the crucifixion of Jesus made very little difference in their attitude to the movement of which Jesus was the centre. Paul and the others had the same experience when they began to preach to the Jews of the Dispersion and to the Gentiles, an enthusiastic welcome of their message from a few, and, from the many, indifference or active hostility.

It is easy to see, then, why the Sower occupies a position of such prominence in the Gospel records. (As a matter of fact there is no good reason to suppose it was the first parable spoken.

It is not the first given either by Matthew or by Luke, who tell us far more of the teaching of Jesus than does Mark.) It is round this parable in all three Synoptists that the whole question of the parable method is discussed, and it has played a prominent part in the thought of the Church. Our Lord spoke this parable out of his own distress at the careless or even hostile way in which men received his message. After his marvellous experience at his baptism and in the Temptation, believing that men would thrill with joy at his announcement that the Kingdom of God was at hand, he bade them prepare for the new era, forsake their sins, believe in the Good News. A few did accept his message, left all, and became his disciples. For a time great crowds, apparently largely under a misapprehension of what he had come to say or do, followed him, hanging on his lips and giving God thanks for his wondrous deeds. In the capital, so far as we have any record, his movement made little headway; the leaders were critical when they were not hostile. What is more surprising is his rejection in the towns of Galilee, in Bethsaida, in Nazareth, in Chorazin, in Capernaum (Luk 4:28-30, Mat 11:20-24). For a time he seems to have left Palestine altogether, presumably under some compulsion (Mark 7:24 ff.). Herod, too, was or became his bitter enemy.

What could it all mean? We can picture Jesus watching a farmer at work in the spring time. Most of the seed he sows will come to maturity, but not all of it. The seed sown is all of the same kind; clearly the fault does not lie with the seed or the farmer. Why, then, in some cases is there failure? Part of the seed never enters the ground at all; part of it does get in, but not deeply enough; another part gets in and takes deep root, but encounters the opposition of a rival and hurtful growth, which turns out to be stronger. Our Lord, then, had the same experience as the Christian preacher has had from his day till our own: his message often fell on deaf ears, and, so far as any impression was concerned, might never have been delivered at all. There was no need to bring Satan into the business; the plain fact was that the preaching fell on unreceptive ears. This might be due to prejudice, as Paul found when he preached the Gospel in Greece (1Co 1:23); prejudice created by Greek absorption in philosophical speculation, which made the Christian Gospel seem absurd, or by Jewish preconceptions which revolted against the thought of a crucified Messiah. In our day, a greater or less degree of knowledge of the supposed teaching of science closes many a mind to the message of Jesus. Again, as the Gospels show, it was often the moral demands of Jesus, or the realisation that acceptance of his claims would interfere with their power and prestige, that made it impossible for his message to penetrate beneath the surface. Perhaps most often, then as now, it was sheer worldliness, in the narrowest sense of the word, absorption in the world of sense experience, that made men Gallios in the things of the spirit.

There were others who felt attracted by the message, but their zeal was short-lived. There is no need to interpret too precisely the sun that burnt up their enthusiasm. It was natural that the preachers of the first and second Christian generations should emphasize the effect of persecution, which may have played a less important part in our Lord’s own life-time. Perhaps in many cases it was the gradual realisation of all that citizenship in the Kingdom meant that quenched their zeal, of the sacrifices it called for and the lofty demands it made. There are many, too, who cannot be enthusiastic long about anything.

There were yet other hearers whose response to the call of Jesus was intelligent, genuine and willing; men of deep natures who, if they had been whole-hearted, could have held out. But for them devotion to the ideals of Jesus was only one of the interests of their lives. In competition with these other interests, without any conscious decision on their part or perhaps any conscious struggle, their religious zeal gradually weakened till it perished. The pleasure-seeking, the money-making and the worldly anxieties that the Gospel writers find in the thorns are doubtless included among, though they do not exhaust the list of, these dangerous and too often successful rivals of enthusiasm for God. This is all that the Gospel writers tell us about the matter: it is difficult to think that this is all that Jesus saw in it, or all that he wants us to see in it. We want more than an analysis, however skilful, of the causes of our failure.

Whatever may be said of the spiritual problem, at least the farmer’s problem was capable of solution. If he wanted grain to grow on his by-path, all he had to do was to plough it. If in patches the ground was too shallow, more earth could be brought or the stones could be taken out. One has often looked with wonder and admiration at the boulders that have been, at the cost of infinite labour, dug out of an Ontario field, and now form a boundary dyke.

If thorns are choking the grain, they can be weeded out. In other words, by a course of preparation, unproductive soil can be made fertile. What is the counterpart of this in the spiritual world? The attitude of men and women to the things of the spirit depends not only on their nature and their voluntary choices, but also on their experience and their environment. Hardness of heart and blindness of mind are not necessarily congenital but can be induced. Where there is intense poverty, a state of semi-starvation may become a second nature, so that a natural hunger practically ceases to function; and, when better times come, people have to be taught to eat. A long course of insult and oppression may embitter even a gentle nature, and harden a heart that is naturally tender. Constant intercourse with people of base instincts and trivial ideals may lower the whole standard of a life. Engaged in a constant and often unsuccessful struggle for the elementary necessities of life, one may have so little time and energy for the cultivation of the nobler faculties that, if they do not perish of degeneration, at least they are so quiescent that one ceases to be conscious of their existence. Physical pain, bodily weakness, failure in cherished undertakings may, though they need not, so absorb all one’s energies that there is no room for God; just as, at the opposite extreme, there are those whose lives are so full of pleasing activities that God is shut out. People whose souls have been steeped in an atmosphere of idolatry, with the moral outlook it so often connotes, cannot all at once learn to breathe the air of the Kingdom of God. Is there no means of softening hard hearts, or giving depth to superficial hearts? Cannot he who opened the eyes of the blind man prevent such people from dying? The attitude of Paul and Barnabas to the recalcitrant Jews, at Pisidian Antioch and Iconium, for example, according to the account in Acts, suggests that, when they found the ground hard, in their judgment the Christian attitude was to pass on and plant the seed in more responsive soil (though Paul’s own treatment of the Jewish problem in Rom 9:1-33; Rom 10:1-21; Rom 11:1-36 suggests a far more patient and optimistic outlook, while the urgency of his mission, in view of the expected imminent return of Jesus, must have influenced his judgment). But one lesson of the Sower is that, for multitudes, preaching does not by itself provide a pathway to the Kingdom. Our Lord’s healing ministry to the distressed in body and in mind, his invitations to the rich to help the poor (intended to remove spiritual obstacles from the rich even more than from the poor), his attempts to free the people from the intolerable burdens imposed on them by the religious lawyers, his efforts to open the eyes of the Pharisees to the true nature of their religious code, were all by way of preparation, of ploughing and removing stones and weeds. In the West, until lately and in a measure still, in dealing with those sections of the population that seem to feel least need of the Church and all that the Church stands for, we have gone on mechanically offering them a Gospel which obviously means nothing to the vast majority of them; often sending to them our youngest and least experienced workers, imperfectly trained and with little equipment of any kind.

We have at last learned that souls are not to be captured with less ingenuity than any other object of the chase, and that in his work God wants the dedication of brain as well as heart. The varieties of social and educational activities that now accompany our evangelistic efforts are a recognition of the fact that the soil counts for something as well as the seed. But the Church alone can never plough up all the hard ground, can never root out all the thorns that choke the growth of all good. It needs the Church and the State and the school all working together; and perhaps God alone, through the experiences of life, can give depth to the shallow soul. On the mission field also, the crust of age-long superstition, pride, contempt and unbrotherliness has to be broken down before the seed can enter in with any hope of bearing fruit. Here too there are thorns of abject poverty, arrogant wealth, painful and often loathsome disease, ignorance, fear of all kinds, class and national conceit to be extirpated if the seed, when it does take root, is not to be stifled at its birth.

Hence the varieties of Mission work that sometimes puzzle so much the observer at home, the hospitals and dispensaries, the schools and colleges, the homes and hostels, the trainingschools, industrial institutions and printing presses, the co-operative societies and farm colonies. This preparatory stage may continue for generations before the Gospel gets an opportunity to show its real power. This parable is a piece of splendid optimism. Where there is failure, it is failure of a kind which can be traced to its sources and dealt with. But when the seed falls on suitable soil that has been carefully prepared and protected from hostile influences, God sends fruit out of all proportion to the seed that has been sown or the labour that has been expended.