The Parable of the Sower and the Four Soils (23 of 26)

This is the parable Jesus explains, which makes it the most important one in the collection.

Everywhere else the reader is left to work out the meaning. Here the method is demonstrated, and what that demonstration shows about how parables function is more uncomfortable than the soils themselves.

What Do the Four Soils Represent?

Four responses to the word, and Jesus assigns each one.

The seed is God’s word. The focus of the story falls on the soils and their yields rather than on the sower or the seed, which is worth noticing before any application is made.

Seed on the path is taken by Satan before it can do anything. Seed on rocky ground is received with joy and has no root, so it fails when persecution comes. Seed among thorns is heard and then choked by worldly cares. Seed on good ground hears, retains, and bears fruit with patience.

The interpretation converts an agricultural story into an allegory, where soil conditions stand for human receptivity. That is unusual. Most parables have one point of comparison, and this one is decoded item by item.^[1]

What Is the Parable of the Sower About in Israel’s Story?

The first version never asked. Wright does, in Jesus and the Victory of God, and his reading is the backbone I was missing.

Wright reads the parable as the story of Israel’s return from exile, with Jesus’s ministry as its fulfilment. The hinge is the word seed. In the Judaism of the period, he argues, seed was shorthand for the remnant who would return when the exile ended, and he traces the usage to Isa 6:13, where the tree of Israel is felled and the line ends with “the holy seed is its stump.” To announce the kingdom with a story about sowing was to say the remnant was now returning. The exile was over.

Jesus says the seed is the word, not a people, and Wright’s answer is Isa 55:10-11, where God’s word goes out like rain, gives seed to the sower, and does not come back empty. Snodgrass, who thinks Wright at times reads too much into the parables, says his instincts on the Sower are correct: it is by sowing the word that the end-time people is planted.

On Wright’s terms the sower is God himself, the default for a cryptic Jewish story of this kind, and Jesus stands where Isaiah stood: the prophet through whom the word is sown, sowing on the path, the rock and the thorns, and rejected like the prophets. The parable is not a sequence, though. It describes simultaneous sowings with different results, so much of the seed sown now would stay, in his phrase, in the exilic condition.

Was the Sower Farming Badly?

That is a real question and the answer is contested.

The traditional objection is that no farmer throws seed on a path, on rock, and into thorn bushes. The traditional answer is that sowing sometimes preceded ploughing, so seed was broadcast first and turned under afterward, and a temporary path across a field would be ploughed up and would produce.

Scholars disagree about whether sowing preceded ploughing or followed it, and the answer determines whether the sower’s method was ordinary.

The middle assessment is probably right. The work is not bizarre, and it can hardly be called standard practice either. There is a lavishness in it, an indiscriminate scattering that borders on carelessness.

The setting itself is realistic. Rocky Galilee and Judea had tramped paths through fields, thin soil over limestone, and thorn bushes on the hillsides, and seed loss was predictable. What looks exaggerated is the willingness to keep throwing.

Snodgrass thinks more ink has been spilled on this than it deserves. Wright calls it beside the point, and notes that sowing among thorns is what Jer 4:3 forbids Israel to do. If the field is exilic Israel, seed among thorns is not bad farming. It is the prophet’s picture of the ground.

Why Does Jesus Quote Isaiah 6?

Because he is asked why he speaks in parables, and the answer he gives is not the comfortable one.

The expected answer is that stories make truth accessible. That is not what he says. He says he speaks this way because people see without seeing and hear without understanding, and then quotes Isa 6:9-10.

That passage describes a hardening, a lack of perception, and the New Testament reaches for it in several places to account for why most people did not follow Jesus.

So parables function in two directions at once. They reveal to insiders and conceal from outsiders, and the concealment is not an unfortunate side effect.^[2]

This is the part most treatments skip on the way to the soils, and it should not be skipped. The passage says plainly that the form of the teaching is doing something other than aiding comprehension.

I left the difficulty standing in the first version without saying how anyone has answered it. Three answers, and they do not agree.

Wright’s answer is that Isaiah 6 is a seed text. The hardening in verses 9 and 10 runs on until the cities lie waste, and verse 13 ends the commission with the holy seed hidden in the burned stump. Isaiah was sent to a people who would not hear, judgment followed, and mercy came the other side of it as a seed. Jesus is not explaining a teaching technique. His ministry recapitulates Isaiah’s commission, failure to be heard included. Wright adds a plainer reason for the code: if too many understood too well, the prophet’s life might be cut short, so the stories had to get past the censor.

Chrysostom’s answer, in his forty-fifth homily on Matthew, is the one the church leaned on for centuries. The blindness was voluntary and self-chosen, which is why Jesus says not “they see not” but “seeing, they see not.” Jesus, he says, was implying that they were the authors of all their own evils. His sharpest line is a piece of logic: if it had not been God’s will that they should hear and be saved, he ought to have been silent, not to have spoken in parables. The veil is a provocation to inquire, not a door being shut.

The ESV Study Bible takes the harder line and leaves a door open: God sovereignly uses the parables either to harden a heart or to draw a person to come and ask, and there is still room for repentance. Snodgrass lands near Chrysostom. He refuses to soften the grammar, then reads Mark 4:21-25 as the parable’s own commentary: nothing is hidden except in order to be made clear. Parables hide in order to reveal, and neither Isaiah nor Mark, he says, is about predestination. My sentence above stands. The concealment is deliberate, and most of the people I have read think it is aimed at producing hearers rather than excluding them.

What Do the Yields Mean?

Abundance, and the question of whether it is realistic turns out to have an answer.

Thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. The ESV Study Bible gives the figures: typical yields ran from about fivefold to fifteenfold, tenfold was a good crop, and a hundredfold is Isaac’s field in Gen 26:12, named there as the blessing of God. Snodgrass calls it a prosperous harvest, not an exaggerated one, since texts about the end-time harvest use numbers like a thousandfold. Wright says the debate should be regarded as settled: substantial, much better than average, not miraculous.

Either way the structure is the same, and the structure is the argument. Three sowings fail and one succeeds, and the one that succeeds produces on a scale that swamps the losses.

One correction to how I put that. Snodgrass warns against concluding, as some commentators do, that three-fourths of the seed was lost. The amount of seed is never specified. The parable counts kinds of ground, not bushels.

That is the reassurance the parable delivers to people watching most of the ministry fail. The waste is real. The harvest is larger.

Why Is This the Control Case?

Because it shows the method being used correctly, and by extension what misusing it looks like.

Jesus decodes this parable element by element, which licenses allegorical reading here. What it does not do is license that everywhere. Most parables make one comparison and collapse when every detail is assigned a meaning, which is how the church spent centuries finding sacraments in the Good Samaritan’s inn.

The lesson of the Sower for reading the rest is narrower than it looks. It shows that Jesus could interpret his own stories, that he did so when asked privately, and that he expected the crowd to be left with the story alone.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the mustard seed and the yeast, which follow it in Matt 13.

Footnotes2

1. That this parable is decoded element by element while most are not is the single most useful observation for reading the rest of the collection. It establishes that allegorical reading is sometimes right and demonstrates, by contrast, how rarely the other parables invite it.
2. The Isaiah 6 answer has been softened in preaching for a very long time, usually by treating the quotation as a description of what unfortunately happened rather than as an account of purpose. The grammar of the passage does not cooperate with that reading, and a treatment that does not at least register the difficulty has not dealt with the text.

Sources

Anthony J. Saldarini, "Matthew," in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, ed. James D. G. Dunn and John W. Rogerson (Eerdmans, 2003), 1030. Supports the focus on the soils rather than the sower, the realistic agricultural setting of rocky Galilee and Judea, and the account of the Isa 6 hardening.

M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary, The New Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 2012), 117-118. Supports the point that sowing sometimes preceded ploughing, and the assessment that the sower's method is not bizarre but is not standard practice either.

Ernest van Eck and John S. Kloppenborg, The Parables of Jesus the Galilean: Stories of a Social Prophet (Cascade Books, 2016). Supports the scholarly disagreement over sowing and ploughing order and over whether the yields are realistic or hyperbolic.

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), ch. 6, "Stories of Israel's Paradoxical History," section on the Sower. Supports the whole of the Israel's-story section: seed as shorthand for the returning remnant, Isa 6:13 and Isa 55:10-11 as the texts behind it, the sower as YHWH, Jesus recapitulating Isaiah's commission, simultaneous rather than sequential sowings, the farming debate as "beside the point" with Jer 4:3, the yields debate "regarded as settled," and the stories needing to "get past the censor." In print, and in Logos.

Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), "The Parable of the Sower and the Purpose of Parables." Supports the endorsement of Wright's instincts, the "false antithesis" between sowing the word and sowing a people, the verdict on the farming question, the yield ranges and "a prosperous harvest, not an exaggerated one," the warning against "three-fourths of the seed was lost," and the reading of Mark 4:21-25 as "Parables hide in order to reveal." In print, and in Logos.

John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, NPNF1 vol. 10 (1888), Homily 45 on Matt 13:10-11. Supports the "voluntary and self-chosen" blindness, "the authors of all their own evils," and "He ought to have been silent, not to have spoken in parables." Free in full at ccel.org.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), notes on Matt 13:8, Matt 13:12-13, Mark 4:8 and Mark 4:12. Supports the yield figures (fivefold to fifteenfold typical, tenfold good, Gen 26:12) and the reading of the Isaiah citation as sovereign hardening or drawing, with "still room for repentance." In my Logos library.

The biblical texts cited: Matt 13:1-23, Mark 4:1-25, Luke 8:4-15, Isa 6:9-13, Isa 55:10-11, Jer 4:3, and Gen 26:12.

Where the sourcing stops: the yields question I once left open is now closed on the authority of Wright, Snodgrass and the ESV, and the sowing-and-ploughing question is treated by both Wright and Snodgrass as not worth the ink. What remains contested is the sower's identity: Wright reads the sower as YHWH, the ESV's Mark note reads him as Jesus first and every faithful preacher second, and the interpretation itself never says. The Israel's-story reading is Wright's, endorsed by Snodgrass, and I present it as his rather than as settled. Whether the interpretation goes back to Jesus or reflects later reflection is a long-running critical question this post does not enter, though Snodgrass argues at length that it is his.