A Mathematical Model for the Questionable Sower

I recently revisited Jesus’ parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-23) and noticed a few things I had never noticed before.  Most of these observations were inspired by Andy Crouch’s interpretation of the story in his Culture Making. I’ll summarize them here in three points:

1.       This sower is rather questionable. On looking at his sowing techniques, one finds that he must be very young, very blind, or very stupid.

2.       This parable of fruitfulness, fruitlessness, and faithfulness applies to our everyday lives, and not just Jesus’ telling of parables or our outright preaching of the gospel.

3.       This may seem anticlimactic, but I think it fleshes out the picture Jesus is painting here: The Sower’s method and result make for a very interesting math modeling problem.

The sower is rather questionable. He is throwing seeds everywhere, including places where, in retrospect, it’s obvious that the seed couldn’t grow. Seeds landing among thorns and rocks are one thing, but can’t this guy exercise just a little care to not let seeds land on the road? Nobody practices agriculture like this (and I’ve spent my share of time around agriculturalists, and they don’t tolerate foolishness)! Picturing this sower scattering seeds carelessly like this, he must be very young, very blind, or very stupid. These are very odd details for Jesus to leave out!

The analogy, of course, is that, in the ministries we feel that God calls us to, we don’t know which endeavors are going to bear fruit and which are going to die on the spot. We can certainly keep developing the areas that look promising, but we can’t know a priori which endeavors are going to succeed or flourish.

This parable of fruitfulness, fruitlessness, and faithfulness applies to our everyday lives. Jesus’ immediate interpretation of this parable is Himself proclaiming the gospel via parables. Only those whose hearts are prepared like good soil, he explains, can receive the parables and understand them such that they bear fruit. “To the one who has [i.e., the good soil], more will be given [i.e., fruit]” (v. 12). He also indicates that this applies when we proclaim the gospel, for which we certainly don’t know when we will see fruit.

But I also think that the parable applies to our everyday lives, as well. Our lives are to be expressions of the gospel—including not just our “moral decisions” and our “conversation,” as a fundamentalist would stress, but the endeavors we pursue. For example, when I teach physics, or when my wife works with her team to prepare a proposal, those pursuits are to be expressions of the gospel. Not that we insert the Four Laws (or Seven Truths for you Piper fans) into our materials, but that we pursue them out of hearts that have tasted the goodness of God and want to see that goodness propagated across creation in as many ways as possible. That is, after all, what we were created for: to spread the image of God across creation (Genesis 1:28-30). We all have a lot of room for creativity in our lives. Even the line cook slaving away at McDonald’s for minimum wage has an opportunity for creativity, in how he treats his fellow employees, or what he volunteers to do, or how he stacks boxes, etc.

In a sense, the seeds of this parable are like seeds of creativity; we don’t know what will come of our endeavors, but (to use the old adage) we won’t find out unless we try.

The Sower’s method and result make for a very interesting math modeling problem. Suppose, for example, that the Sower starts out with 100 seeds (100 is easy to work with percentages). Because the seeds that land on the good soil bear a minimum of a 30-fold return, he only needs 4 out of the 100 seeds to land on the good soil in order to end up with more than he had before—that’s a 4% success rate. In our mindset, that seems unsuccessful, but in God’s mindset, it’s a tremendous success.

What that means is that when I feel discouraged in what I perceive to be a weak progression of the gospel in the world around me, I have to remember that God takes what looks like a few feeble seeds and turns them into a new generation of fruit, beyond what I could have imagined or thought.