Sometimes our very familiarity with a passage is our greatest enemy to grasping its meaning. Especially if that familiarity is skewed by our rendering it as a children’s story! We have a tendency to do this: to take the Bible’s most combative and challenging material, and deflect it by rendering it in child-friendly terms. That usually means we strip it of everything we find disturbing.
Think of the story of Noah’s Ark. It’s a global flood, articulating unmitigated Divine wrath and judgment against human sin. It’s warning us of the terrible reality of Jesus’ return in glory to judge the living and the dead. And we turn it into a ‘learn to count’ story, or a moralistic crusade on looking after our pets. Something similar happens with passages like ‘the Parable of the Sower’.
As Jesus’ parables go, this is one of the more disturbing, but we managed to inoculate ourselves against it by turning into a children’s story about a silly farmer who doesn’t know how to sow his seed very well... and maybe about how important it is to listen well to Jesus’ words. It might be about that, but when we reduce everything about the parable to that, we are losing some important insights Jesus wants us to confront.
The first one is that parables are not designed to reveal truth, they are designed to conceal it. Like the story of Noah’s Ark, this is a story about God’s judgment. This is the most fundamental thing we need to understand about the parable of the sower (or the parable of the soils as it is increasingly referred to). In fact, this is the parable that explains all parables. And all parables contain this same dynamic. Jesus is far more reticent than we are about holding out the deep and precious things of the Gospel to those who will only respond with contempt and disregard. The parables sift and sort those who – for a multitude of reasons, and not all of them good – find themselves listening to Jesus. The ‘secrets of the kingdom’ are not for general consumption. They are for the disciples, for those in relationship with Jesus. The Kingdom cannot be entered apart from him; it cannot even be understood apart from Him. In fact, there is no Kingdom apart from Him.
Only in relationship with Jesus are the secrets to be revealed. Only to those who prize Him above all the riches and pleasures this world has to offer; only to those who prize Him sufficiently to suffer with Him and for Him; only to those who refuse to be robbed of something so precious as His Word; only to those will the secrets of the Kingdom be revealed. All others may see, but they will not see; they may hear, but they will not understand. Such are already under God’s judgement.
Not so much of a story for little kids...
Questions:
If the secrets of the Kingdom aren’t for everyone (v.10), why is Word of God (v.11) sown without discrimination? What do you think the ‘secrets of the Kingdom’ are?
Why would Jesus want to conceal those ‘secrets’ from the crowds that are following Him? Doesn’t God want ‘all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth’ (I Tim.2:4)?
How do you feel about the idea that Satan can in some sense be present wherever the Word of God is preached (v.12)? Do you think he is sometimes present in MIE? What would that look like?
What constitutes a ‘time of testing’ (v.13)? Is testing always a bad thing (see e.g. James 1:12)? Why does such testing result in a falling away in Jesus’ parable?
How would you recognise someone who was ‘choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures’ (v.14)? What might their ‘Christianity’ look like?
Do you think there is any hope for those whose faith has no root, or is growing among thorns (have a look at Heb.6:4-8)?
If ‘every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart is only evil all the time’ (Gen.6:5, 8:21); and if ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure’ (Jer.17:9), then how can Jesus talk here about ‘those with a noble and good heart’ (v.15)?
How can we retain the Word of God and persevere in it?
Does it surprise or trouble you that our response to the Word of God is so determinative of our spirituality?
What does Jesus envisage the crop produced in His disciples’ life being?
