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.

Doubly Marginalized, Part 4: The Advantages of Being in the Corner

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

My previous post showed a little of the downsides of life in the corner, but I think the benefits far outweigh the struggles.

1. Christians in the university get to view God's world in detail and trace that view back to Him in praise.
2. We're able to offer a compassion and care to our students that outlasts and outshines that of our colleagues.
3. Each semester, we have the opportunity to serve as Christ's ambassadors to a new generation of developing culture-makers.
4. We can offer unique viewpoints or expressions of Scriptural truths that are often missed by clergy.
5. We can provide logic and insight to help church issues.
6. We can live a unified or non-compartmentalized life.
7. We live out daily the interaction between faith and culture.
8. Our schedules are often very flexible, increasing our availability to God's service and to our families.
9. We develop and present the academic framework through which our society views and responds to reality.
10. We are a prominent public voice for the reasonableness of the Christian faith.

The list could go on. Based on these thoughts, there are two things that I wish would develop in the church.

First, I would like to see local churches utilize their local Christian faculty more. This could mean encouraging college students (current or aspiring) to talk with them, or hosting a discussion panel, or hosting seminars about their thoughts of how their studies relate to their faith, or encouraging the Christian faculty to publish in Christian literature. What kinds of ministry activities have you seen that have successfully brought out the gifts and experiences of Christian faculty?

Second, I would love to see Christians of every vocation develop their own personal list like the one above. Just ask yourself, "How could God use me in my position in the world?" It's not a question of how many co-workers or clients you can share the gospel with in one week; it's not a matter of analyzing the moral quality or "holiness" of what you do; and it's not a matter of how much tithe money you generate each week. It's a matter of asking how God has called you to honor Him by making a difference in the lives of others, what the Old Testament calls "pursuing peace (Hebrew: shalom)." Perhaps if all Christians started looking at life that way, none of us would feel like we were in the corner.