Soil or Seed?

Matthew 13:18-23 Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)

¹⁸ “So listen to what the parable of the sower means. ¹⁹ Whoever hears the message about the Kingdom, but doesn’t understand it, is like the seed sown along the path — the Evil One comes and seizes what was sown in his heart. ²⁰ The seed sown on rocky ground is like a person who hears the message and accepts it with joy at once, ²¹ but has no root in himself. So he stays on for a while; but as soon as some trouble or persecution arises on account of the message, he immediately falls away. ²² Now the seed sown among thorns stands for someone who hears the message, but it is choked by the worries of the world and the deceitful glamor of wealth, so that it produces nothing. ²³ However, what was sown on rich soil is the one who hears the message and understands it; such a person will surely bear fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirty times what was sown.”



Jesus doesn’t often explain a parable like this, and I usually feel as though a parable loses something when it gets deconstructed, but in this case it made me notice something— the phrase “sown in his heart.” Is the message the seed and the person the earth; or is it the other way around? Is it the earth that is the message and the person the seed? So, of course, I went to the Greek.

The Greek keeps on saying “the one who was sown…” which would make the person the seed, but then it implies the opposite with the phrase “has no root in himself”.  Most translations make the person the seed: “the one sown.”

I concluded that it has to be both. The message is both the seed and the earth, and the ‘hearer’ is also both the seed and the earth in the metaphor of the parable.

I also got stuck on the phrase “the evil one” because I know that the concept of the Devil in Christianity bears little or no resemblance to the “adversary” of the Hebrew Tanakh. “Satan” is a Hebrew word that means “opponent”; “obstacle”; “adversary”; “distraction”. Many rabbis have taught that ‘satan’ is another word for the impulse toward evil within us all: “yetzer hara”, the ‘evil inclination’, in Hebrew.

That would give us “— the Distraction comes and seizes what was sown in his heart” as a perfectly acceptable translation.

So this passage isn’t about a message that comes from outside us being sown like a seed,  on different kinds of soil which represents the different ways that human beings might receive this message from outside. No, the parable makes it very clear that humans are the seed being sown, and the earth in which it is sown.

Interpreting the parable this way makes it very clear that this is a picture of the way things are. If we (humans) are both the seed and the soil; and the ‘devil’ is the obstacle of distraction and opposition; that means that this parable is a word-picture for our interior landscape. 




Our habitual attitudes are the hard-beaten paths in our minds

where distractions beat their dusty wings around our heads.



Our enthusiasms are the rocky ground in our hearts

where stumbling-blocks grin and sidestep to check our every move.



Our desires are the briar patch in our spirits

where worries wrap their thorny grips around our throats.



Empty mind is the earth of our wholeness

where there is room for All of it:



Birdbaths for our distractions;

Dance music for our stumbling blocks;

Br’er Rabbit for our worries.