The Parable of the Sower, from today’s Gospel, is very well known to us. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record it. It is well adapted to Jesus’ original audience, which must have included many Galilean famers. Yet its meaning or interpretation isn’t immediately obvious to us. Indeed all Jesus’ parables are somewhat mysterious. They need some quiet thought to unravel them.

All the seed of the sower is good and lavishly sown. But the first three sowings are lost, only the seed sown in rich soil produces a harvest. The parable can be understood as Jesus retelling the story of Israel. The first three sowings consists of the word of God as it comes to Israel through the Prophets. But the prophetic word was not obeyed and the harvest was lost. Now Jesus comes preaching the kingdom of God as the climax of Israel’s history, and there is the fresh chance that it will be receive in the soil of people’s hearts.

Why some people persevere in the faith and some do not can ultimately only known by God. But a passage in John’s Gospel can shed some light on it. John is the only Evangelist who does not record the Parable of the Sower, but he does give us these words of Jesus spoken shortly before in his Passion: “Unless a wheat grain falls into the earth dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it does it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it: anyone who hates life in his world will keep it for eternal life”. Jesus is here enunciating an important principle of the spiritual life: only to the degree that we can give up our own preferences, our own way of doing things, and surrender to God’s inscrutable will can we yield a harvest for eternal life, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

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