Hilton Head Island, SC – October 10, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 8:4-8; Luke 8:9-18
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.” – Luke 8:11 (RSV)
In all three of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), it is recorded that Jesus often told parables. There are no parables in the Gospel of John. Why I don’t know, but there are many things about John which have always mystified me. A parable is a made-up story with a few or several literary features. It is meant to convey a truth about something other than the story itself. For example, the point of the parable of the tortoise and the hare is not told to suggest that rabbits can move much faster than turtles. Its point is to suggest that steady plodders can do better in life than those who leap from one thing to another with no sense of purpose or direction.
William Barclay has had the greatest influence on my understanding of the New Testament throughout my life. He was a professor at Trinity College of the University of Glasgow, and he etched his imprint into Scottish and many other kinds of preachers for at least two or three generations through his New Testament commentaries. However, his greatest influence in Britain was his weekly Bible study program on the BBC. For years it was watched every week by countless Britons. With his gravelly voice and his Coke-bottle-thick glasses, he was the Great Popularizer of New Testament studies. He was basically self-taught, but he had a great gift for understanding the Greek language in which the New Testament was written, and he had read innumerable books from the New Testament period and beyond, whose contents his photographic mind was able to absorb and store for future reference in his commentaries and his televised lectures.
William Barclay said that the parables of Jesus were stories which had only one essential point. He insisted that parables are not like allegories, in which the many features in the story represented many different points.
The Gospel of Luke contains more parables than either of the other Synoptics, and a few of them are found only in Luke, as we shall see on later Sundays. Today’s parable, the one about the sower and the seed, is included in all three Synoptic Gospels.
Most of the Holy Land is either mountainous or desert. There are just two big fertile and flat places. The larger is the coastal plain, which straddles the narrow strip between the Mediterranean shore and the ridge of mountains which runs north and south from Lebanon down into the Negev Desert in the south. The other flat place is the Jordan River Valley to the east of the mountains.
Farmers’ fields in Israel were and are narrow and not very long. Terraces have been dug on the sides of the mountains, and those tiny terraces have thick soil on the downside of the mountain, and thin soil on the upside. With all that as background, let us now consider the parable of the sower and the seed.
A farmer prepared his field for sowing by digging or plowing it so that the soil was loosened correctly to receive the seeds. Taking seeds from his seed-bag, the farmer would fling the seeds from a path in a circular motion, until the whole field had been planted. Jesus noted that there were narrow footpaths beside every field. Rocks would be thrown into the corners of the fields, and weeds and thorns would grow there. So Jesus explained that the footpaths were so hard no seed could sprout there, and the seeds that fell on the thin soil at the tops of the terraces or in the field’s corners might sprout, but they would not mature into grain that could be harvested. But, said Jesus, the seeds that fell into good soil sprouted a hundredfold. In Matthew and Mark, it says the return was thirty, forty, or a hundredfold, which is what I am quite sure Jesus said, in order further to explain the parable to the disciples, as we shall hear. But I am using Luke because Luke was the parable writer par excellence, even if his recollection of this story may have been slightly flawed.
When Jesus had finished the story, he said (in all three Gospels), “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (8:8). Well, apparently the twelve disciples must not have been listening very carefully, because they asked Jesus what the parable meant. In all three accounts, Jesus says something that to us makes little or no sense. “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.” Something seems to be missing in the recollection of the parable, because it implies that Jesus told such parables so that people would not understand what he meant, and that makes no sense.
Barkley’s commentary noted the difficulty of the way these verses are written, and he says that he thinks Jesus intended to say that when some people hear God’s word, their minds have become so dull or inflexible that they refuse to respond to it, but somehow the Gospel writers got it wrong. That certainly could be true. Some people are so constitutionally opposed to the possibility that God might have anything to say to them that they would reject it if He were to clap them on the cranium with it. Thus they see but do not see and hear but do not understand.
The point of the parable is that for those who do respond positively, their lives may be thirty or forty or a hundred times more fruitful than they were before God’s word entered their lives. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, and the spirit of God within us is the most profound influence any of us can ever encounter.
But is it necessary for someone to recognize the word of God when it enters their mind and heart? Might people be changed by God without realizing that it is God who has transformed them? Could Oscar the Grouch become more kind and thoughtful and never know that God had moved within him to change his ways? Would Ebenezer Scrooge have perceived his Christmas morning personality-overhaul was due to God’s entry into his life, or did he change because of the terrors he saw in his visions of the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future? Do we have to be aware that God is speaking to us for God to speak to us?
I presume that nearly everyone who attends The Chapel Without Walls who had children raised them in some church or churches somewhere. I also am aware that some of you who brought up your children in church saw them drift away in their early adulthood, because you have told me so. And because they drifted, their own children, your grandchildren, never became connected to the family of God known generically as the Church of Jesus Christ.
If your offspring bailed out of religion, does that make them irreligious? Does it make them automatically bad people? Or might the lessons about altruism and kindness and compassion that they received in their religious training from you and the Church still live within with them? Your grandchildren might not be learning those lessons in church, because they have not been introduced to church by your children, but might Christian values have been inculcated in them anyway, without their even consciously knowing they are Christian values? Is it possible for the seeds of the Gospel to sprout in people who do not recognize it as the Gospel?
If you or your family members or your best friends are not hundred-fold followers of God and Jesus Christ, or even forty- or thirty-fold folks, might twenty-fold be all they --- or you --- are capable of producing? Furthermore, might someone who is a complete bust to someone else be a hundred-fold producer in the minds, hearts, and lives of other people?
Seeds are sneaky. We might never be able to see how fully they develop, but God knows their capabilities in terms of the environments of their earlier years. He is the best judge of how fully or how incompletely His word within us matures. We all have our own thoughts on that, but God alone truly understands how much anyone actually produces on the basis of the maximum of which he or she is capable.
Jesus explained that notion to the disciples when they asked the meaning of the parable of the sower and the seed. “The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, that they may not be saved” (8:12). It will not be a surprise to most of you to know that I am not a devotee of the devil, so I wish Jesus had not put it that way, if indeed he ever said anything remotely like that. But we all get the idea. Some people have what appears to be a natural opposition to matters spiritual or religious, and they seem never to affirm any of it. That doesn’t mean they can’t produce at prodigious levels, but they may never produce the exact kind of fruit we, personally, would like them to produce.
“The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy, but these have no root; they believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away” (8:13). Have you ever known anyone who jumped from one extreme to another with a predictability that makes your head spin? They have tried every form of religion or politics or profession that ever existed, but they never seem to settle down to any permanent thing. Seeds have a hard time taking deep root and bringing forth much grain in folks like that. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t very deep.
“As for what fell among the thorns, they are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (8:14). Have you ever run across people who seems to “get it,” but who never seem to “act on it”? They understand God’s message, but they are too involved with life to create a new life for themselves. They dwell “in between, on the misty flats, where the rest go to and fro.” That’s a shame, because so many of them have so much to offer.
“As for (the seeds) in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience” (8:15). God comes to us wherever we are, and He bids us come to Him in whatever circumstances in which He finds us, whether along the hard-trodden path, or on the very thin soil above the solid layer of rock, or among the thorns. We may have had a tough childhood, or early adulthood, or we may even be going through a realty tough patch right now. But do we respond to God as best we can, or do we make excuses over where He happened to find us, presuming that we might be only five-fold folks?
Jane Goodall is a naturalist and primatologist who studied chimpanzees in Africa for over fifty years. In her later years, before the pandemic descended upon us, she was on the road 300 days per year, speaking to all manner of people and groups about her research into the lives and behaviors of chimpanzees, and how all that does, or does not, relate to human behavior. Now she is 87 years old, and she is moderately content to stay put in her family home in England
She has just published the latest of her many books, this one called The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. I read a fairly short and then quite a long review of her life and of the book. It took Dr. Goodall years to get close enough to the chimps that she could touch them and interact freely with them. She got to know them by both name and personality, and she has made fascinating notes through the years which, via playful primates, tell us volumes about ourselves. The New Yorker review said this: “Hope, she argues, is not merely ‘passive wishful thinking’ but ‘a crucial survival trait.’” It went on to say, “She noted, ‘If you don’t have hope that your action is going to make a difference, why bother to do anything? You just become a zombie.’”
Jane Goodall is Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, singing, “But I’m just a dope/ With a thing called hope,/ and I can’t get it out of my heart.” Both of them are Emilie Dickinson, saying,
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest I the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That would abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
What kind of a producer are you? A twenty-folder? A forty-folder? A hundred-folder? At a fairly advanced age, might you be able to produce more? Might Jane Goodall’s and Nellie Forbush’s and Emily Dickinson’s hope become enlarged because of you?
Jesus, the sower, keeps flinging the seeds everywhere as he goes along, hoping that they will take root. For most of us our seeds were sewn long ago. But some seeds take a surprisingly long time to germinate, in order for us to take flight. And after all, hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.