Proper 10: Isaiah 55.10-13; Psalm 65.(1-7) 8-13; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-9,18-23

JESUS has quite a lot to say about sowing and reaping, but not in terms of truisms about wasted investment of labour (Deuteronomy 20.6, Job 31.8), or warnings about unrighteousness (Micah 6.15). Matthew 13 records the parable of the sower and its exegesis. It is also found in Mark and Luke — but not in John.

John is not uninterested in sowing and reaping. Like the Synoptics, he sees it as work that embraces an eschatological dimension. Matthew’s parable of the sower so mystifies Jesus’s hearers that he has to explain the meaning. In John, though, Jesus gives a Samaritan woman (John 4.35-38) a simple instruction: “Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” His message is one of “realised eschatology”. The harvest is happening now, and Jesus is the reaper: “The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life.” The reaping is a harvest of human souls.

At first, John’s Jesus seems to see God as the sower and himself as the reaper. But it can be difficult to identify consistent one-to-one correspondences in parables. That is one reason that some scholars argue that Matthew 13.19-23 is reflecting a later view of Jesus’s teaching among the first Christians. In John 4.38, Jesus is the lord who sends out his servants to reap: “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour. Others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.” This evokes another proverbial dimension of sowing and reaping: namely, the unfairness of life, exemplified by one person doing the work, while another then (in the language of harvest which we still use today) “reaps the benefit”.

This, too, reappears later in Matthew’s Gospel, where the eschatological dimension is even clearer: “Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid” (25.24-25). That later parable is not directly about sowing or reaping. But it reminds us to add in another element to the picture given in the parable of the sower: the importance for all of us, in between being good sowers and good reapers, to be good growers.

Seed needs sowing, but not carelessly or at random. Expertise and focus are required. Why would the sower in Matthew’s parable scatter seed on poor soil, or rock, or paths? One cannot prevent some wastage if sowing “broadcast”, but this does not fit with the sower’s being God as we want him to be: a God of infinite carefulness. It looks more like wastefulness, lack of proper attention to detail. I do not grow crops, but, by growing orchids, I have learned that to make any plant flourish you must understand how it grows in the wild, before it has been hybridised and mass-produced. The basics are the same for any plant: sunlight, water, fertiliser. The skill is in the placing and timing. Some plants like a winter rest, or cannot tolerate frost. Others need high humidity, or indirect sunlight.

The easiest way to make any plant flourish is to give it what it needs, but not too much. Sun, but not too much sun. Water, but not drowning the roots. We think of neglect as the withholding of life’s necessities, but it can just as easily be “killing with kindness” — too much food and water, too much sun. I tell people who ask how to care for their orchid that orchids thrive on “benign neglect”, a form of studied restraint from over-tending. If this idea is present in the parable of the sower (as, perhaps, indicated in the profuse scattering of the seeds), it allows me to hope that, among the many other messages of the parable, there is a hint that God is content to set us free to grow up under a form of “benign neglect” — not choking us with nurture, or smothering us with attention, but letting us make our own decisions and choices, including even the freedom to ignore the fact that we are his sowing.

Sowing and reaping go together. They are part of a single purpose of generating what is wholesome, while keeping at bay everything that is not. Where there is sowing, there must be reaping. And what we yield needs (Matthew 25.24 again) to be more than ourselves as still-ungerminated seed.