Jesus tells a simple story of four grounds, one farmer and a sack full of seed. The farmer never changes. Neither does the seed. The soil, then, tells the story.
One ground is hard and unresponsive. Trampled on by the weight of the world, it yields no harvest. No better is the ground covered in thorns and thistles, nor the one embedded with stone. Only the good soil welcomes the seed, nurturing and feeding it until it produces much fruit.
Interesting, perhaps, is the soil never mentioned in the story. Jesus never speaks of burlap. He never speaks of dried cloth, presumably because any fool knows no seed planted in burlap will grow. The seed among thorns or stones has a preferable lot to one buried there. Even the seed carried off on the wings of crows stands a better chance. So what is a listening ear to make of the omission?
Seeds were never made to stay in the sack. Better to sow the beaten path than to ruin the seed in silence. So much power in a speck of seed that may grow into a mighty, towering tree, yet it is utterly helpless until it touches ground. Only then is it anything at all. And the simple sower, whose poured-out sweat and blood can make the plant not one inch taller nor shorter, can keep an entire field from growing by doing something so common as nothing at all.
It is a humbling lesson from the story to hope terribly he does not.
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