The Sower, and the Smallest Seed

By now he could not go anywhere quietly. He had been healing people all over Galilee, and word about him had run out through the whole country, so that wherever he stopped, a crowd came out of the villages to find him. People were walking in from town after town to hear him, and he could not teach anywhere without a crowd. One day he went out of the house and came down to the lake again, and sat by the water. And so many people came that there was nowhere left to stand. So he got into a fishing boat and pushed out a little way from the shore, and sat down in it, and taught them off the water — with the whole crowd on the beach in front of him, right down to the water’s edge. Water carries a voice. Sitting out there, he could be heard all the way to the back. And he taught them many things in parables. A parable is a story: a short one, about ordinary things — seed and lamps, sheep and money, fathers and sons. He told a great many of them. The first one he told them that day was about a man sowing seed. A field there was not a tidy square. A hard path ran across it where everybody walked; in places there was a shelf of rock a hand’s depth under the soil; and thorn bushes grew along the edges, with the stones the plough turned up piled at the corners. And the man sowing did not plant seeds one by one. He walked up and down with a bag of barley or wheat at his hip, throwing handfuls as he went, in the autumn, after the first rains had softened the ground. Every single person sitting on that beach had watched it done.

And he said: “Listen! Look — the sower went out to sow his seed. And as he sowed, some of the seed fell along the path. People walked on it and trod it down, and the birds of the sky came and ate it all up. And some fell on the rocky ground, where there was not much soil. It came up straight away, because the soil was not deep. But when the sun came up it was scorched; and because it had no root, and no water, it dried up and withered away. And some fell in among the thorns. And the thorns came up along with it and choked it, and it gave no fruit at all. And some fell on the good ground. And it came up, and grew, and gave fruit — some of it thirty times as much as was sown, and some sixty times, and some a hundred.” And as he said these things, he called out loud: “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Everybody on that beach knew those four places. The path was beaten hard by people’s feet, so seed that fell on it lay on top and could not get into the ground; and birds came down behind any man who was sowing, hopping along the path after him to pick up what he dropped. Where the rock lay close under the soil, the ground held only a little water, and it was the first place to dry out when the hot days came. And thorns came back along the edges of a field year after year, however often they were cut down. And the good ground gave back thirty, and sixty, and a hundred times what was thrown into it. One bag of seed sown on ground like that would come back at harvest as thirty bags of grain, or sixty, or a hundred.

Later, when he was alone, the twelve and the others who stayed close to him came and asked him about the parables. They said, “Why do you talk to the people in parables? And what does this one mean?” And he said to them, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God. But to the ones outside it has not been given, and to them everything comes in parables — so that they may look and look, and not see, and listen and listen, and not understand; or else they would turn back, and be forgiven. For whoever has, more will be given to him, and he will have more than enough. But whoever has not, even what he has will be taken away from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: because they look, and do not see; and they listen, and do not hear, and do not understand. And the words the prophet Isaiah spoke are coming true in them: ‘You will hear and hear, and never understand. You will look and look, and never see. For the heart of this people has grown dull. Their ears have gone hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes — so that they will not see with their eyes, or hear with their ears, or understand with their heart, and turn back, and I would heal them.’” Isaiah had lived more than seven hundred years before. He had seen the Lord sitting on a high throne, and heard the Lord ask whom he should send, and who would go to his people. And Isaiah had said: here I am — send me. Those were the words the Lord gave him to take to them. And he went on: “But your eyes are blessed, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. I tell you the truth: a great many prophets, and a great many people who did what was right, longed to see what you are seeing, and never saw it — and to hear what you are hearing, and never heard it.” And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any of them? So listen to what the story of the sower means. The seed is the word of God. The sower sows the word. The seed that fell along the path is like the people who hear the word about the kingdom and do not understand it. As soon as they have heard it, Satan — the evil one — comes and snatches away the word that was sown in their hearts, so that they will not trust it and be saved. The seed that fell on the rocky ground is like the people who hear the word and take it in straight away, gladly, with joy. But they have no root in themselves. They trust for a while, and they last only a season. And when trouble comes, or people treat them cruelly because of the word — when the time of testing comes — they trip, and fall away at once. The seed that fell among the thorns is like the people who hear the word; but as they go on their way, the worries of this life, and the lie that riches tell, and the pleasures of life, and wanting all sorts of other things, come in and choke the word. And it grows nothing, and nothing in them ever ripens. And the seed that fell on the good ground is like the people who hear the word and understand it, and welcome it, and hold on to it with a fine and good heart. And they bear fruit, and keep on bearing it — thirty times as much, and sixty, and a hundred.”

A lamp then was a little dish of clay with a lip at one end, small enough to sit in your hand, with a wick floating in olive oil. One of them lit a whole room. It was set up high, on a stand or a ledge in the wall, so that the light fell over everything. You did not light it and then put something over the top of it. And he said to them, “Does anybody bring in a lamp to put it under a measuring bowl, or under the bed? No — he puts it up on the lampstand, so that the people who come in can see the light. For nothing is hidden except so that it may be shown, and nothing is covered up except so that it may be known and come out into the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” At the market, grain and flour and beans were sold by the measure: a wooden measuring bowl of a fixed size, scooped full and tipped out into the buyer’s bag. And he said, “Watch what you hear, and take care how you listen. The measure you measure with is the measure that will be measured back to you — and more will be added to you besides. For whoever has, more will be given to him; and whoever has not, even what he seems to have will be taken away from him.”

And he said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. It is as if a man should throw seed on the ground, and then sleep at night and get up in the morning, night after night and day after day. And the seed sprouts, and grows tall — and how it does it, he himself does not know. The ground grows the fruit all by itself: first the green blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And as soon as the grain is ripe and lets him, he sends in the sickle at once, because the harvest has come.” The seed went into the ground in the autumn, and the harvest came in the spring: the barley first, and the wheat a few weeks after it. A sickle was a curved iron blade on a short wooden handle. At harvest the reapers went into the field with them, bent over, cutting the stalks an armful at a time. Nobody waited about once the grain was ready, because ripe grain left standing too long dropped out of the ears onto the ground.

And he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like? What parable shall we put it in? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field. When it is sown in the ground, it is smaller than all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it comes up, and grows bigger than all the garden plants, and becomes a tree. It puts out great branches, so that the birds of the sky come and make their nests in its branches, and in its shade.” Farmers there grew mustard on purpose, for the seed, to crush and eat with their food. And a mustard seed is a speck. You could hold a hundred of them in the palm of your hand and hardly feel that they were there. And the plant it turns into stands taller than a man by the end of the season, with branches strong enough for the birds of the sky to sit in and build in.

He spoke the word to them in a great many stories like these, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to the crowds without a story. But afterwards, when he was alone with his own followers, he explained everything to them.