The Four Soils Are All Yours

I had better say at the outset what I am and am not doing. Our Lord told a story about a man who went out to sow, and then, unusually, he explained it himself. I am not going to improve on the explanation. A layman who sets out to correct the Author of a parable on the meaning of his own parable is in the position of a schoolboy correcting Euclid. What I want to do is something smaller and, I think, permitted: to notice one thing the explanation does not say, and to follow it a little way.

You remember the story. The sower goes out, and the seed falls in four places. Some on the path, where it is trodden and the birds have it. Some on rocky ground with a skin of earth over it, where it springs up at once and dies at the first hot day, having no root. Some among thorns, which grow up with it and choke it. And some on good soil, where it brings forth thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. Then the explanation: the seed is the word; the path is the man who hears and does not understand, and the evil one snatches it; the rocky ground is the man who receives it with joy and falls away under trouble; the thorns are the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches; and the good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it, and holds it fast, and bears fruit with patience.

Now here is the thing I want you to notice. Our Lord speaks of four kinds of ground. He does not say there are four kinds of men. We supply that, and we supply it very quickly, because it is agreeable. There is a certain pleasure in reading the parable as a sorting, with the hard cases and the shallow cases and the worldly cases on one side, and oneself, on a good day, on the other. But I have never in my life seen a field that was all of one kind, and I do not think Our Lord, who had looked at a great many more fields than I have, had seen one either. A real field has a path across one corner where the farmer walks, a shelf of rock under the grass at the top, a tangle of bramble along the hedge, and the good deep stuff in the middle. And the sower, who is not a careful man, broadcasts over the lot.

Suppose, then, that the field is not four men but one. Suppose it is you.

I think you will find this fits the facts better than the sorting does. You know perfectly well that there is a path in you: a worn place where the word has been heard so often, in church or at your mother’s knee, that it bounces off without being understood, and something has it before you have even noticed it was there. You know the rocky shelf: the retreat, the conversion, the fine resolution, the thing you received with joy on a Sunday evening and had lost by Wednesday because it had nowhere to send a root. You know the thorns intimately, because you are paying their mortgage. And you know, if you are honest, that there have been moments, perhaps very few and perhaps very small, when the word went in and stayed. The whole field is yours. Nobody else owns any of it.

A friend who knows Greek better than I do points out that the text itself will not sit still on this point, and I think he is right. In St Matthew the hearer is not the ground at all; he is the seed. “This is the one sown along the path”; “the one sown on rocky ground”; “the one sown on good soil.” In St Luke the hearers are the ground: “those along the path are the ones who hear”; “that in the good soil, these are they who hold it fast.” St Mark does both in the space of two verses. The evangelists, in other words, slide between the seed, the soil and the man without any sign of embarrassment, as if they did not think the man was the sort of thing that stays put. I find this a very great comfort. It means that a man is not, on this showing, a fixed lump of one substance that can be labelled once and filed. He is a creature with distinct hearings in him, and distinct seasons, and distinct soils, and the word comes to each of them separately.

At this point I must say something about the shape of a life, because the sorting-reading goes wrong partly through a bad picture of that shape. We tend to think of a life as a line, like a railway, with the stations in order and the train at one of them. On that picture the question “what kind of soil are you?” means “where is the train now?” and the answer is always a little alarming, because the train seems mostly to be among the thorns. But a life is not a line. The mathematicians have a name for the shape it really is. They call it a directed acyclic graph, which is only a learned way of saying “a web of arrows with no way back.” Every moment you have lived is fed by many earlier moments and feeds many later ones; the arrows run forward and branch and rejoin; and none of them ever loops round to the start. A Tuesday in 1994 still has arrows running out of it into this afternoon. This afternoon will have arrows running into places you cannot see. There is no single station where the train is. There is a whole web, and it is all, in a sense I shall come to, still alive.

Now put the sower over that. The seed does not fall once, on the day you were baptized or the day you were converted, and then wait to see what you make of it. It falls on every node of the web. Every moment is a patch of ground, and each patch has its own kind: this one trodden, that one shallow, this one choked, and here and there, scattered through the whole thing with no pattern that you could have predicted, a patch of good deep earth. Perhaps it was an afternoon in a hospital corridor. Perhaps it was a sentence in a book you have forgotten, or ten minutes with a child, or a confession you nearly did not make. The patch may be tiny. The parable does not say the good soil was large; it says the good soil was good.

And here is the part I find I cannot get over. Look at the arithmetic. Thirty, sixty, a hundredfold. That is the yield of a single seed in a single patch, and it is out of all proportion to the size of the patch. A farmer in Galilee who got tenfold thought he had done well. Our Lord’s figure is not an agricultural estimate; it is a deliberate absurdity, in the way that the mustard seed becoming a tree is an absurdity, put there so that you cannot mistake what kind of thing is being described. One good patch, one seed that goes in and holds, and the harvest from that patch alone is enough to cover the whole field with sheaves. The path did not yield. The rock did not yield. The thorns did not yield. The parable says so plainly and I am not going to soften it. But the parable also does not say that the field is judged by its average. It says the good ground bore fruit, and it says how much.

Someone will object that this is a comfortable doctrine, and comfortable doctrines are usually wrong. I agree with the principle. But I do not think this is comfortable, when you look at it. It does not say the thorns are not thorns. It says the thorns are yours: the choking is going on in your own ground, and you are the one who let the bramble in from the hedge, and there is weeding to be done that nobody else can do. What it denies is something different and, I think, worse than the thorns. It denies that you are the thorns. It denies that the worn path across your corner is your name. The sorting-reading, for all its sternness, is at bottom a way of getting out of the field, of standing at the gate and assigning kinds. The reading I am proposing keeps you in it, with a hoe.

Then there is the question of when the harvest comes, and here the web of arrows earns its keep. If a life were a line, the harvest would come at the end of the line, at death, and you would be reaped as whatever you happened to be at the last station. But the parable of the sower does not say when the harvest is, and to find out I have to borrow from the parable Our Lord told next, about the wheat and the weeds, where he says in so many words: “the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.” The same friend warns me, rightly, that this is a borrowing and must be declared as one. In that second parable Our Lord also says “the field is the world,” and the story is about the growing together of good and evil in the wide world until the end, not about the receptiveness of one heart. The two parables are neighbours, not the same parable, and I do not want to melt them into each other.

But I do not think the borrowing is illegitimate, and the reason is an old one. The rabbis said that whoever saves a single life is as one who has saved a whole world. They did not mean it as a flourish. They meant that a man is not a corner of the world but a world: that the whole of creation, its soil and its thorns and its birds, is gathered up and present in one soul, so that what happens in him is not a small instance of what happens in the world but the world itself happening in small. If that is so, then “the field is the world” and “the field is you” are not two readings but one, seen from the outside and from the inside, and the harvest of the world at the end of the age is also, and without any stretching, the harvest of each of the worlds that each of us is. The reapers who go out over the wide field at his coming go out over your field too, because it is in the wide one, and the wide one is in it.

And in the little parable of the seed growing secretly, the farmer sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how, and “when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle.” The ground does not reap itself. It is not asked to. It is asked to hold the seed and bear fruit with patience, which is the word St Luke uses, and patience is simply the name for what a long arrow feels like from the inside.

Put those together and you get something I can only describe as a very large relief. The good patch in you, however small, however far back along the web, is not finished with. Its arrows are still running forward. What was sown there is still growing, under the whole tangle of path and rock and bramble that you have laid down since, and it will be reaped not by you, on a bad night, but by him, at the end, when he comes to see what the field has done. You do not have to be good soil all over. Nobody is. You have to have been good soil somewhere, and to keep that somewhere from being paved, and to be patient about the rest. The hundredfold is not an average. It is a promise about what one honest patch can do when the Sower is the one who comes to gather.

I will end where I began, by saying what this is not. It is not a doctrine; I have no authority to make doctrines and would be alarmed at anyone who took this for one. It is not an excuse for the thorns, which are real and which I have more of than I like to say. And it is not a claim that the other three soils are safe, which the parable does not say and I do not say. It is only a layman’s observation that the Lord spoke of ground and not of men, that no ground is all of one kind, and that he set the yield of the good part so high that it can only have been meant to astonish us. I think he meant it to astonish you in particular, about yourself, in particular. The field is yours. The seed is his. The harvest is his too, and it has not happened yet.

Texts Mt 13:3–9, 18–23, 36–43; Mk 4:3–9, 13–20, 26–29; Lk 8:4–8, 11–15; Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5. A personal reflection, offered as food for thought; not teaching.