A sower went out to sow. How many times have we heard this? When I was in seminary, one of my professors was fond of citing that fact to show how we have become so accustomed to hearing certain parables that, when we hear a familiar line like that, we already know what follows and how it is going to end, and so our tendency is to start to tune out – which, of course, is one of the very things the parable may be warning us not to do!
To us here in midtown Manhattan, where there hasn’t been a functioning farm now in over a century, parables about famers sowing seed sound exotic – and, in this particular case, somewhat strange. What, we efficient modern city-dwellers, want to ask, is the farmer doing? Why does he sow his seed in such a helter-skelter way? Of course, Jesus’ actual hearers – the original audience for this parable – would have understood. Israel’s rocky soil is not very farming friendly. Finding in advance the pockets of good fertile soil, with the limited technology available to traditional agriculture, would have been difficult. Throwing the seed all over the place may mean that some will be wasted, but it also guarantees that at least some will fall on good soil and take root and produce fruit. What may seem like inefficiency to us turns out to be really quite efficient indeed!
When I was a pastor, I used to take some comfort from this story’s recognition that not every effort will succeed. Jesus uses this familiar fact to say something about how God reaches out to us with extravagant generosity. He recognizes that maybe not everyone will respond – or persevere. Even so, God reveals himself as widely as possible, in many and various ways. He does that because that is who God is and how God acts. And that is how he expects his Church – all of us – to behave in imitation of him. God’s extravagant generosity towards us invites us on our part to respond in such an extravagantly faithful fashion – and hopefully, eventually, producing fruit as much as a hundred-fold.
Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 16, 2023.
Image: The Parable of the Sower, hand-colored woodcut, by Hans Schäufelein, 1517, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
