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For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, God’s Redemption in Our Family Histories (2023); Debie Thomas, The Extravagant Sower (2020); and Dan Clendenin, The Spirit and the Flesh (2017) and Between Despair and Presumption: Flannery O'Connor's Christian Realism (2014).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.  

Matthew 13:3: “Listen! A sower went out to sow.”  

In Octavia Butler’s profound and painfully prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, the main character, Lauren, is in the process of inventing a new religion as she maneuvers the increasingly horrific conditions of the world around her. Instead of focusing on all of the endings, she concentrates her attention on all of the possible new beginnings. 

She calls her new religion Earthseed, and it worships a God whose very essence is change. As Lauren sees it, we are the sowers, and as such, we have the constant opportunity to shape the forces of change, to shape God. 

Butler’s novel evokes this week’s lectionary text and offers a parable within a parable. She invites us into the very kind of thinking that might be helpful in our own collective moment of uncertainty, climate disasters, and radical change. This is a kind of thinking that is at once metaphoric, empathetic, and participatory.

In the biblical Parable of the Sower, Jesus seems to leave the parable intentionally unfinished. (Perhaps this is why Matthew felt the need to “explain” the parable in Matthew 18–23. Even he was uncomfortable with the number of directions that Jesus’ story might take us.) Gary Nabhan writes that Jesus uses “colorful but cryptic symbols, curious riddles, and circular plots” to engage his listeners and ask them to help make the story whole. Participation is the only way for the parable’s healing work to take place. 

Metaphoric and participatory thinking allow us to enter this particular parable through many different doorways. We can enter through the person of the sower, but also through the seed and through the soil. We can be a bird, a thorn, a rock. As we inhabit different locations in the parable, we see in new ways. 

Sadao Watanabe, Parable of the Sower and the Seed (1965).

From the perspective of the sower, we see that the sower’s enterprise has a high degree of chance and uncertainty. The sower is scattering seed with no guarantees . Will anything grow? Will the conditions be right? Will there be disease, pests, or catastrophes that will take the crop? While farming has always involved a high degree of uncertainty, in our own time climate change has increased this reality. Weather patterns are more unpredictable; temperatures are more extreme; the environment as a whole is less secure. Uncertainty is the name of the game. 

Jesus’ parables always link a literal sense with a spiritual sense. We are always asked to think and to feel in multiple ways and on multiple levels. As we think about farming, we are simultaneously invited to think about what is cultivated in our societies, in our politics, and in our own souls. Even if we are sowers of almost nothing else, we are always sowing seeds in our own souls and in the lives of those around us. What kind of seeds are they? What will we reap?

Like the sower in this parable and like Lauren in Butler’s novel, we have to become adept in what Alan Watts called the “wisdom of insecurity.” In other words, we must hone our skills in not knowing, and then we must act anyway.

In this parable, to demonstrate the “wisdom of insecurity,” the sower uses a surprising method. Instead of carefully calculating how each and every seed is going to be planted and cultivated, the sower just scatters the seed on all kinds of different terrain. I can almost imagine the people around Jesus, many farmers themselves, all dependent on whatever the earth produces, puzzled and even laughing at Jesus’ depiction of the sower. What is this crazy person doing, scattering seed on ground that he knows won’t yield a harvest? Why bother? 

Really, why bother? Why bother cultivating hard ground? Why bother if you know the results ahead of time? Shouldn’t you check first, make all your calculations, and then proceed? 

Corita Kent, Seeds (1981–1986).

But what if God really was like that with us? What if God only planted when a harvest was assured? Perhaps God would never plant at all. Maybe the wisdom of insecurity invites us to sow regardless, to cast out the seeds without guarantees. Maybe we need to cultivate a willingness to be surprised, to invite response even if response is not likely to be forthcoming. Maybe the invitation is more important than the end result. 

The seeds the sower scatters are probably a variety of different kinds. When you can’t be certain about conditions, you need heterogeneity — different seeds might be more drought tolerant, some will survive if there is too much rain, some do better in colder or hotter conditions, and so on.

Nabhan writes that when Syrian farmers sow barley seeds in their dry environment, they use this kind of heterogeneous mix. This is because different seeds respond to different conditions. Resilience, adaptability, and diversity are the vital factors. 

But the parable invites other perspectives — not only that of the sower. If we pause to consider the position of the seed in each of these environments, we might notice the precarity of the rocky ground, how hard it is to grow when the conditions are set against you. Maybe the seed is trampled on or plucked up suddenly by a bird. 

We can feel — and maybe we’ve even known this in our own lives — what it’s like to have shallow roots and not be able to sink into the soil. We can also feel the good ground, the rich earth, the possibility of sinking in and being able to grow.

I think I’ve also been these different kinds of ground myself — rocky, thorny, and depthless — while at other times fertile and receptive. Sometimes spiritual growth is a question of external circumstances and sometimes it is a question of internal capacities. 

If I am a bird plucking that seed from the rocky ground, I’m not at all sorry that the seed didn’t go into the ground and yield a harvest. That harvest is in me. If I’m a thorn, then I am just doing what I was meant to do — protect the plant. 

Antoni Kaminski, Throwing Seeds for Wheat (1990s).

And now I imagine being the harvest. I’ve yielded a hundredfold. Or maybe just sixty…or thirty. But any yield at all feels like a victory in these conditions. 

The point is that these organic metaphors, this kind of storytelling, exercises our human capacity to empathize — to extend our experience into the experience of someone or something else. As we empathize, we also see ourselves in new ways. As we enter into many aspects of our own experience as human beings, we can begin to intuit how we might have “ears to hear.” 

In Butler’s novel, Lauren is writing a sacred text for her new religion. She calls it Earthseed: The Books of the Living. New verses for her book come to her throughout the novel. This one comes as she decides to leave the gated, but crumbling, community in which she was raised, and to set out on a road north using old maps left to her by her parents. In her journal, she writes, “I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy my neighborhood. Instead things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.” As she contemplates this, she writes an Earthseed verse, “All successful life is adaptable, opportunistic, tenacious, interconnected, and fecund.” 

In the biblical parable, perhaps there is a similar perception. In the midst of uncertainty, confronted with rocky, thorny, hard terrain within and without, can we be as wildly opportunistic and openhearted as the sower, as adaptable as the seed, as tenacious as the earth itself? Can we let insecurity sow wisdom in us?

Weekly Prayer

Wendell Berry (b.1934)

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

Poet, essayist, farmer, and novelist Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934 in Newcastle, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington and is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and novels. Among his honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, a Lannan Foundation Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives on a farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. 

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Sacred Art Pilgrim; (2) Chairish; and (3) Etsy.