Even though I grew up in a farm state in the Midwest, I know very little about growing things. But you don’t need to know very much at all about gardening or agriculture or anything to know that the way Jesus describes the sower here in the famous parable of the sower is someone planting things in a way that literally makes no sense at all. No one who cared about actual farming would just throw seed around everywhere without regard to what kind of condition the soil was in. At the very least, it makes no economic sense, planting seed in places that it clearly has a low to zero chance of doing anything. Why is the sower just throwing this seed around where seemingly nothing has been done to get the ground ready?
But this sower of seeds in the parable, of course, is God. And Jesus who is telling this story is telling us something about God, which is why it’s called the parable of the sower. God’s apparent foolish wastefulness here only looks like that to us, because we have a great tendency to be ungenerous people, and we don’t see that what this is about is God’s generosity and self-giving. This is a picture of how God is with us. This is also a picture of how Jesus lived, offering his presence and healing to people who were ready for it as well as people who had not prepared themselves for it at all, and in Jesus’s life this always scandalized people who were used to picturing God as much more careful handing out signs of his presence. When Jesus fed the hungry without regard to who was in the crowd, there were baskets and baskets of leftovers. Foolish generosity. And of course in the end Jesus gave his life for everyone in a humiliating death, seemingly gave everything away for no good reason, and for a lot of people who did not deserve it, and still now it is hard to see that he was giving it away for all of us.
Sometimes if we are listening to this parable we think that the point of it is for us to hear it and wonder, OK, which of the different kinds of soil that Jesus is describing here, which one am I? And I think the answer is, maybe, that all of us are all of them, either at different times or maybe all at the same time. Sometimes we are receptive to God’s grace and presence and we notice it and embrace it. We see the signs of God and we want to find some way to respond to them. But sometimes we are that soil all tangled up by thorns and weeds, and maybe these weeds are other projects and pursuits that we think are going to make us happy, some of them harmless, but some of them that gradually center our lives on goals that are not worthy of us. And sometimes we are the soil that is hard and filled with rocks, we are angry at how life has treated us or the unfairness of it all, we become hostile to everyone we think has something they don’t deserve.
So yes, our soil is not always in perfectly ready condition. But this sower works with what is, and with what we are. This sower does not handle the human condition like we humans would, we would be cautious and stingy with these priceless seeds, only giving them to people who are worthy of them, or who have prepared themselves properly. But that is not how this God the sower works.
We have a God who loves planting seeds, these little pieces of grace and new life that often look like nothing. He plants near us constantly, whether we have trained our eyes and ears and hearts to be aware or not, whether or not we can see a seed of God’s presence inside ourselves, or in some other person we encounter, or in some momentary vision we have of the way our lives could be. All seeds.
It takes a long time, sometimes a lifetime, to adjust our vision so that this God of all these seeds is the God we are picturing, a God who does not worry overmuch about the condition of the fields and who is not stingy with his seed, who is not cautious or even very practical or logical, but who is trying to offer himself to everyone constantly. Creation is groaning for this new life, says Saint Paul in that second reading, and the beginnings of that new life are all around us.
If you find prayer difficult, if you are struggling to see what is next for you, if you want a refreshed relationship with God, maybe just begin by picturing this God who is so eager to begin new things everywhere, at every moment, in every person. Picture the sower, and realize that is who you are praying to. That is a God who does not need to come closer to you. You just need to be aware of what small but powerful beginnings have been planted in you already.