Matthew 13:1-23
18 “Hear then the parable of the sower: 19 When anyone hears the Word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what was shown along the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, 21 yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. 23 As for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
Imagine you are a 1st-century Jew living in northern Palestine around the Sea of Galilee during Jesus’ ministry. You have heard amazing things about the former day-laborer-turned-Rabbi. He healed your uncle’s withered hand. You’ve seen the hand, before and after. You have heard several of your neighbors talk about the poor widow’s son Jesus raised from the dead.
You have begun to follow this man around and you have watched as he has restored sight to the blind, made the crippled walk, and cast out evil spirits. These are things only Messiah was foretold to do. Is this Messiah? How could this unimpressive-looking fellow be Messiah? The scholars from Jerusalem sure don’t think so.
You have watched the learned holy men sneer and smirk at Jesus. “How could anything good come from the backwater of Nazareth?” they say. “Messiah will be strong and handsome, a fierce warrior as his father David; and he will come to Jerusalem to rule. He would not waste his time in these tiny little villages with all these losers.”
So you and some fellow onlookers ask these learned scholars how can this man and his students possibly heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons if he is NOT Messiah? “Because” they snarl, “he has the devil’s power. Even his own family has come looking for him because they know he’s a madman; and he’s a Sabbath-breaker and a blasphemer.”
If this IS Messiah, you wonder, why is he not yet ruling Israel? Why don’t the learned scholars recognize him? Yes, he’s performed miracles; but if Jesus is a holy man, why won’t he demonstrate his power directly to the teachers of Israel when THEY ask him to perform signs from heaven.
Why is this Jesus only healing people who are clearly under the punishment of God for their or their family’s sins? After all, the learned scholars teach that sickness and disease is a punishment from God. God has made all these people unfit to enter the temple or live near it. But this Jesus is cleansing them.
If this man is Messiah, why hasn’t he set free God’s prophet John the Baptizer from Herod’s dungeon? Isn’t Messiah foretold to set the captives free? Why had he not begun to restore Israel to its rightful place in the world? Why hasn’t the desert become fertile farmland now as the prophets said? Why aren’t the Gentiles streaming into Jerusalem to convert to Judaism and fill the holy Temple?
You want to hear more from this Jesus so you can decide for yourself about him. You follow with a large crowd as Jesus walks down to the Sea of Galilee. You sit down with the crowd on a horseshoe-shaped slope facing the water as Jesus climbs into a boat. His disciples row him out a few feet from the shore. Everybody grows silent as the Rabbi is about to speak. What will he tell us about himself, about God, about the future of Israel?
But the Rabbi begins to tell a story about scattering seeds. He doesn’t even say WHY he’s telling this story. You can see that even his closest students look puzzled. The burley fisherman, Peter, casts a glance at his young cousin John as they sit behind Jesus in the boat. Peter is shrugging his shoulders and young John looks dazed and confused. What does this story about plants and seeds have to do with Israel and Messiah? If this IS Messiah, why has he started speaking in riddles?
You cast a backwards glance to the top of the hill where the learned scholars are standing in a group. They are whispering to one another, turning purple with rage and insult that this would-be messiah has begun to cloak his teaching behind riddles about seeds, plants, and harvest. They can’t quite put their finger on it; but they know this parable is subversive. It just “smells” wrong to them.
ACTUALLY PRESENT
Universal and Spiritual
This parable is about a King and his Kingdom. The Kingdom has certain characteristics: universal/catholic (not confined to the borders of Israel or the circumcised of Abraham), mysterious/spiritual (left-handed, indirect power), already present in their midst and it produces hostility while demanding their response.
Last week we noted that the Seed being sown is the Word. Jesus is the Word sown (Jn. 1:1 ff.); the Sower is the great Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who sows the Word everywhere. Jesus is teaching the universality, or catholicity, of his Kingdom by describing how the Seed is sown everywhere. His parables teach that membership in the Kingdom rests entirely upon a relationship with Messiah Jesus.
The parables show Jesus asserting that in his death, resurrection, and ascension everything necessary for the fullness of the Kingdom has been accomplished solely and simply by what he has done.
If a right relationship with Messiah is what brings citizenship in Messiah’s Kingdom, then this Kingdom is NOT exclusively for ethnic Jews, it is a catholic/universal kingdom. Second, we saw law week how Jesus is teaching that his Kingdom is mysterious – not unknowable or irrational, but spiritual. It works mostly by left-handed power (indirect, behind-the-scenes power) not direct and flashy and obvious right-handed power the world sees and respects.
Can you see from the introduction how even an ordinary Galilean Jew would have very honest and fundamental questions about Jesus’ Kingship? Everything about him is so completely different from what even the average human being would expect of any king. A Kingdom of predominately spiritual power has to be discerned spiritually. That is why Messiah Jesus flatly proclaims, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (Jn. 6:44).
But we can’t make the mistake of confusing a kingdom exercising predominately left-handed, spiritual power with a merely virtual kingdom – one that only promises something in the future based upon certain conditions, while offering nothing real in the present.
Actuality
Not only is Jesus’ Kingdom universal and spiritual, but he teaches that it is actually present with him at that moment in time, as it is for us now. If we have difficulty adjusting to the Word of God working minimally and mysteriously as a seed, we will struggle with the concept that seeds actually DO work out of their own power.
The sower in this parable is not sitting in a comfy chair reading seed catalogs; he’s not down at the feed store shooting the breeze about what he might plant; and, above all, he’s not standing in the garden with a pile of unopened seed packets thinking about planting. If that were the picture Jesus painted, we would rightly wonder if the power of the Word – like the power of the unplanted seeds – was only virtually present in the world. We would assume the Word could only achieve actual effectiveness at the point some further steps were taken.
But in Jesus’ picture, the Seed/Word (Gen. 3:15; Jn. 1:1 ff.) is fully in action at every step of his story. Everything necessary for its perfect work happens right from the start. Even the seeds eaten by birds or choked out by the thorns and thistles (Gen. 3:18) do so because the Sower sowed them there. The Sower, like the Word himself, works on his own terms. The seed does what it does in its own power; it springs up wherever it is sown. That means is the operative power of the Word of God is not dependent upon circumstantial cooperation.
Historically, though, the Church has frequently treated God’s power as virtual, not actual. We have treated forgiveness of sin as requiring any number of things from us other than what the Spirit gives when he works repentance and trust. The Church has required sacrificial masses, acts of penance, specific modes of baptism, dramatic and weepy testimonies, and extra-biblical forms of moralism (“don’t drink, don’t chew, and don’t go with girls that do”) – as if the Word were not present everywhere in all His life-giving forgiving power. This actually-present power of Messiah and his Kingdom comes through in every one of Jesus’ parables – particularly when they involve seed imagery. The kingdom is universal/catholic, mysterious/spiritual, actually (not virtually) present and, finally, it demands and receives response.
HOSTILITY AND RESPONSE
Hostility: One Who Has Not
The largest and most natural response to the Word planted is hostility. The idea that the Good News of the kingdom is proclaimed in a hostile environment is written all over the New Testament. Whether we look at the demons who recognize Jesus or at the religious establishment that refuses to, it is clear antagonism is every bit as much the soil of the Word as repentance and trust.
Remember, the supreme act by which the Word declares his kingdom in all its power is by death on the cross inflicted upon him by his enemies. That means that all the antagonism the world has to offer has already been spent UPON Jesus and used with left-handed power BY Jesus for his glorious purposes.
He did not overcome hostility by force – by direct, right-handed power that beat down all opposition into submission. He finessed and tricked hostile opposition into doing God’s bidding when THEY thought they were doing their own thing. The devil and all his forces were deceived and beaten by Jesus’ willing death and resurrection. Think of the seeds scattered on the path and eaten by birds. Most seeds pass through birds’ bodies unharmed; that’s how many seeds are planted in the wild.
Just like the humble tomato seed that passes through the grackle only to take root somewhere else, the devil has no real power against the Word of God, Messiah. Whatever warfare that was necessary against the devil has been fought and won. So Jesus can say, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand” (Jn. 10:27-29).
The snatching of the Word by the devil, the eventual rejection of it by the shallow, and the choking of it by the thorns of the sin-cursed world ALL TAKE PLACE WITHIN THE WORKING OF THE KINGDOM – not prior to it and not outside of it. The King brings judgment. The King brings blessing.
Trust: The One Who Has
What finally counts is the Word alone, not the attempted interference with Him. The Seed works where the Sower wills. Even the yield of the plants – some 30-fold and some 60-fold and some 100 – is all a result of the Seed, the Word at work. The plants do not fertilize their own soil or strain over the quality of their production; they produce because the Seed, the Word, was planted. It is the Word, and the Word alone, that does all the work.
So, the ultimate point of Jesus’ first parable is NOT “What kind of soil are you” or even “What are YOU doing to increase your yield at harvest time?” Every parable Messiah Jesus tells is about himself and his kingdom and its promise of grace or judgment. They are not us-focused; they are Jesus-focused.
Jesus’ constant theme is Israel’s rejection of God’s one-way love (his grace, accessed by trust) as they cling to a grace + meritorious human works scheme. Even their definition of “grace” involves their sense of entitlement to God as physical descendants of Abraham and Isaac and keepers of Moses’ Law.
Jesus is prophesying to Israel that they have rejected the Abrahamic Covenant where righteousness comes only through trust in God’s promise of uninterrupted, one-way love (grace). They have instead sought salvation in the Mosaic Covenant, which they repeatedly break as did their father Adam. Israel has missed the fact that God himself kept the terms of his covenant with Abraham while Abraham was asleep. It’s the work of the Promised Seed that has power.
The teaching of this parable is that God incarnate, the Second Person of the Trinity has arrived on the scene of history to reveal the mystery of the in-breaking Kingdom of God to those whom God the Father has chosen to receive a new heart, into which trust in the Word is implanted by the work of God the Spirit. God scatters the Promised Seed where he wills and the Seed does the work he intends to do, producing the result he desires. Those results of the Word’s work are either judgment or salvation from judgment by means of God’s one-way love.
Jesus’ parables are descriptive, not prescriptive (not “what to do”). Jesus is portraying for humanity what we miss if we reject Him, the Promised Seed, the Word of God, and the Kingdom he brings back into the thorn-cursed world. We do not simply get ourselves into trouble by rejecting the Word; rather, we fail to become ourselves at all. Where the Word is rejected, there is death. Where the Word is sovereignly planted there is life.
The Lord Jesus, the Second Person of the Triune God, has entered into time and space to reunite God and man, heaven, and earth. He is transforming a new people, creating a new race, from sons of the old Adam into brothers of the Last Adam. He is transforming a world choked with thorns and thistles into a world of fertile soil where his people can dwell with him for all eternity; this new trust-based race shares the glory he alone has earned for himself and graciously gives to them.
If you are trusting into the perfect works and sacrificial death of the Messiah Jesus to cleanse the sin into which you were born, you have that glory now. One day, when Messiah brings down the new heaven and new earth, you will have that glory fully and eternally.
Matthew uses a particular literary form called “inclusion.” He begins and ends sections of his gospel account with a statement that forms a theme. So Matthew begins and ends his complete collection of Jesus’s parables with this statement:
For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away (13:12; 25:29).
O dear hearts, may the Holy Spirit grant you ears to hear this morning! The one who trusts into the person and work of the Promised Seed, Messiah Jesus, the Eternal Word of God, has life (he is finally becoming himself). The one who trusts her own goodness, her own performance, or her own good intentions has nothing except weeping and gnashing of teeth in outer darkness (25:30); she is not herself at all, but only an object of God’s eternal wrath.
Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life (1 Jn. 5:12).
