The Parable of the Sower

All of us (I guess) want to be wildly successful at whatever we do.  When we use the gifts we have been given, we want to "sow the seeds" to the world around us, and we naturally want people to receive and appreciate the things we have to give.  We hate to have the gifts we love and nourish despised by others, and discredited as "of no account."  That is the reason we hang our kindergartener's drawings on the refrigerator, why my dad once wore a varnished popsicle-stick tie tack with "Dad" spelled out in noodles to church one day.  We want our children to know we value the gifts they have to give us.

I think the reason the 3rd temptation of Christ in the wilderness actually WAS so tempting to Him is that He desired with all His heart and soul to possess "the kingdoms of this world" offered to Him by Satan.  He did not want to possess the kingdoms for Himself, to rule as king --- that much is pretty obvious.  But He yearned with everything in Him to "gather them under His wings as a mother hen with her chicks," and He was grieved at the realization that so many would walk away to their own destruction.  He came to make the Father's love incarnate, palpable, receivable --- but men would still choose not to become "children of God."  That suffering had to be intense for the Christ who knew the consequences of man's choices.

To choose God's slow, invisible, and agonizing way instead of the short-cut offered by Satan had to be tempting to Jesus.  Later, He was to teach the Parable of the Sower.  As He was 'scattering the seed,' the Word of God, the devil was robbing some of the hearers, "so they cannot believe and be saved" (Luke 8).  Some, He knew, loved to hear the Word as He was teaching, but, having no root, the word would fail to grow within them.  [This is why He once said, "Blessed are they who hear the Word and keep it.]  Some would hear the word and believe for awhile, but the word in them would eventually be choked out by life's worries, riches, and pleasures, so it would not mature in them.  But there would be a few who would "receive the word, retain it, and produce a crop, a hundred times more than was sown."

It takes faith and trust for us to 'sow our seed' without visible results.  We want to be successful and are always tempted to give up if we fail to see results of our labor.  It is hard to trust that we are not sowing seeds in vain.  But as the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote:  As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.  / Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening, let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.

As a gardener, I have faith that when I sow seeds, something will eventually come up.  Not every seed will bear fruit, and some that do will be eaten by birds, caterpillars, and slugs.  But I would not even begin to sow unless I thought the earth would yield the product I had hoped for in some degree.  All I can do is to carefully prepare the soil and water the invisible seeds until I begin to see signs of growth.  Then I have to protect the young seedlings until they are strong enough to withstand threats on their own. 

Many of Jesus' parables had to do with the hiddenness of the kingdom of God -- the yeast buried in dough, the seed in the ground that sprouts and grows, "though the farmer does not know how," the mustard seed, "the smallest seed you can plant in the ground."  Sometimes I wonder if He learned all these things by planting seeds with His mother in her garden or by watching her bake bread.

When we share with others the gifts we have been given, I think we have to trust that God is working with us in some mysterious way  -- "My kingdom is not of this world," said Jesus.  I think that while we work in the flesh, the Holy Spirit is working in His own realm.  We may not see the results today of what we plant today, but that does not mean we should not plant -- or let our light shine:

Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed?  Instead, don't you put it on its stand?  For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open....Consider carefully what you hear...with the measure you use, it will be measured to you -- and even more.  Who has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.

Going back to Ecclesiastes, we find this:  Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap (11:4).  Jesus said to Peter: If you love Me, feed my sheep.  I think we just have to begin somehow with the little we have, and trust the Lord that our work is not in vain, that somehow, some seed will fall upon good soil and eventually produce a hundredfold.