Seeding [Sexagesima; St. Luke 8:4-15]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

Jesus speaks to you today, saying,

“A Sower went out to sow His Seed.”

In sowing the seed, the Sower does what is natural to his station in life. Indeed, all three of these words have the same root, so we could read it “the seeder went out to seed his seed”, if we wanted to. It is natural for seeds to be planted. It is natural for seeds to grow. It is natural for someone to plant them. 

In fact, it is natural for us in our sin to do a great disservice to this parable whenever we make the main point about us, instead of the Seed. Because whenever we read about “descendants” or “offspring” in the Old Testament, the word translated is the same in both cases, and that word is “seed”.

It is the seed of Eve that will be the one to crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). It is the seed of all the animals that is the target of preservation when everyone boards and exits the Ark (Gen. 7:3). It is Abram’s seed Who receives the promise of being more numerous than the sand and the stars (Gen. 15:5). We also sing of this seed in our beloved canticle, the Magnificat, in which we declare that the Lord has helped Israel by speaking to our fathers, to Abraham, and to His Seed forever.

So the seed is important because it is the Word of God, Who is a man, as verse 11 from the Gospel tells us. What about the soil and the sowing? Adam and Noah continue to help us out in this respect and it has to do with unfamiliar soil.

After the eden of Eden, what do you think the earth looked like to the fresh sinners, Adam and Eve? Coming from the lush, green, easy-to-care-for Garden of Eden, the thorns, rocks, and desert of the cursed world was like an alien planet to them. Is this still the same world? Will food still grow? Will we even survive?

In the same fashion, Noah and his family exited the Ark after over 150 days of flooded earth. When they entered the Ark, the world was full of people, commerce, and agriculture. Coming out of the Ark, all of that was gone. Who knew if the world was the same or worked in the way we knew it. Will we still be able to have children? Will we still be able to support our family? Will we still be able to find food?

In order to comfort Adam, Eve, and Noah’s family, God gives the Genesis command again; the command to be fruitful and multiply. The command to go out into all the earth. And the promise to be with them and that everything works the same way they as it did before. 

God says: “While the earth remains, seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). The Lord takes the time to assure them over and over again that everything is as it once was and that His wrath lasts only a moment (Ps. 30:5), but His favor is forever.

So what we see in the Parable of the Sower is that 3/4 of the earth are not doing what they were made to do and have fallen completely to the corruption of sin. The soils failing and the seeds being unfruitful should, for us, be a dire warning against sin. Even though Adam was promised a working earth, it still brought him thorns and hardship. Even though Noah was promised “life as usual”, he still got drunk and cursed his own son, as a result.

Our sin has resulted in the fruitlessness and division of our world. It has dried up the soil which should be producing just as much as the good soil. The Church that the Lord Himself planted, should be producing more in her community than a mere fraction of the population. There is something wrong and so Jesus condemns us in our sin saying, “…the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption…” (Gal. 6:8).

And: “whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully” (2 Cor. 9:6). 

The parable is also this: The Sower is the Word of God. Jesus’ promise to Adam, Noah, and us is not just a working earth, but a working God. A God Who Works not for His own benefit, but for the benefit of His baptized believers. A God Who works even when the soil into which He plants His Word produces nothing.

Because His Word will never produce nothing. Our Old Testament teaches that “…my word …that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” (Isa. 55:11)

“Whoever sows sparingly”. The “sparingly” word there, means abstaining from doing something, as in letting the soil go and doing nothing. This is the work of sin, leaving the field fallow so that birds can eat the seeds, sun can scorch, and thorns and weeds can choke. The unnaturalness of sin makes the rest of the world unnatural, as in, not fruitful and not multiplying.

Now the solution, “whoever sows bountifully”, is not what you think. The word for “bountifully” is the word we know as “eulogy”, which literally means “good word”. So it is that in sowing bountifully, in sowing the Good Word, we reap what the Good Word produces, which of course are the fruits of the Spirit.

Jesus, knowing His hour had come, said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn. 12:24). Here, now the only Good Word suffers, dies, and is buried in the ground, in the tomb. In His three day slumber, the Lord of all nourishes the earth, corrupted by sin and death, from the ground up. The only solution to a sinful world is Jesus.

The foot-packed, walking path receives the Good Word of God. The inhospitable, gravel-pit receives the bountiful Word of God. The hostile, brier patch receives the dead Word, which only dies to live again and give life to the most lifeless of places: us.

Indeed, the Lord promises in Psalm 126, “He who sows in tears, will reap in joy” (v.5). Jesus sheds tears, even tears of blood, for us. The work of the Sowing God is now not upon soils, but upon hearts. He says in Ezekiel 36, “But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel, for they will soon come home. ⁹ For behold, I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown. ¹⁰ And I will multiply people on you, the whole house of Israel, all of it. The cities shall be inhabited and the waste places rebuilt. ¹¹ And I will multiply on you man and beast, and they shall multiply and be fruitful. And I will cause you to be inhabited as in your former times, and will do more good to you than ever before. Then you will know that I am the Lord” (v.8-11).

Though our reality we live in is the barren, fruitless soil, the Lord still comes to plant His Word in us, producing faith. Though our path moves us through the season of Lent, where we feel more keenly our own sin of barrenness, the Lord does not leave us. Even though the Baptized of the Lord must go through periods of drought of faith even in the church, the Word doesn’t change and produces the most Good in the Divine Service.

So we repeat the cycle, year in and year out. Constantly moving through the rows of the Word, springing up in the Lord’s Garden; His new Eden, the Church. The parts we see as fallow and barren are actually brimming with God’s Word, ripe for the harvest. Faith only lets us see bounty and fruit in the Gospel and in His Sacraments. 

We present ourselves to the Lord, not in our own merit, but in what His Word has produced in us. We take the time, such a short amount of time, to lament our sins, weep over the world, and the Lord takes eternity to comfort us, tend us, and sow in us that which will never die in order that we will live with Him.

For as we hear from Jesus, “the Will of God is food” (Jn. 4:34) and the “…[food] of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (Jn. 6:33). And Jesus produces this food for us any time and in any place the Gospel is preached in its purity and the Sacraments are administered according to it.