Matthew 13:3

“A farmer went out to sow his seed.”

I learned a lesson from the subsistence farmers in East Africa. “Always, without fail, put the best seed aside for planting in the next season.” The temptation to use those seeds is great, especially if the harvest is not plentiful. The farmer must resist all arguments that says it is permissible to eat some of the seed. That special seed must be kept for planting the following season. Every successful farmer knows that!

We might expect that this is the case with the Gospel seed, the seed of grace, that is in the hand of God, the Lord of the Harvest. Not so!  One of the most startling features of the story is that the sower had an abundance of good seed and was seemingly willing to sow that seed on almost every kind of soil, well aware of the fact that probably most of the seed will be, in a sense, wasted, because the people who receive the seed are so reluctant to receive it no matter how precious it is, they simply refuse to let it grow in the soil of their lives.

The story makes it clear that the farmer in the story does not withhold sowing the seed just because some of the soils are not prepared to receive it.

The sower knows that many fields will welcome the seed and produce abundantly, thus making the sowing worthwhile.

So the story is a combination of what might be expected when a farmer sows seed but what seems like unfounded hope that all seeds will produce. No matter, the sower is extravagant and completely generous – full of hope, no matter what. So he flings out his precious seed on all kinds of soil.