Genesis 25:19-34
Romans 8:1-11
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
“Broadcast Sowing”
A friend of mine shared recently about a question that his six-year-old daughter asked him. “Who do you love the most, daddy? Me, or mummy, or yourself?”
He was caught off guard by the unexpected question, and he managed to avoid giving her an answer until he could think it through carefully. He asked for some advice from friends on Facebook: How would you answer that question from a child? Who do you love the most in your family?
There were lots of funny answers and some serious ones too. But the ones that seemed the most true to me were the ones that emphasized that you can’t really measure love. Love is infinite. You can never run out of it. There’s no cap on how much you can give. Love grows in a family to include all with no favourites. Love is love expanding day by day.
I don’t know if an answer like that would have satisfied a small child, but it fit with my understanding of the love of God and the love that we are made to embody for one another. Love is meant to be shared freely and abundantly, without any fear of misusing it or of it running out.
I think there are two basic ways that Jesus’ Parable of the Sower can be interpreted. The one that people tend to see first is focused on the soil. We notice that the Sower scatters seeds all over the place, and they land in four different environments. There’s the path, the rocky ground, the weedy part of the garden, and finally the good soil.
We are told in the text that the seeds represent the Word of God, and the various environments represent the people who hear God’s Word of love. The natural question then becomes “What kind of soil am I? What kind of soil are you?”
Pious Christians may assume that they are the good soil that welcomed the “seeds” of God’s Word into our hearts and allowed it to grow and bear fruit. And we might be tempted to judge our less religious neighbours to be “rocky ground,” or “path,” or “weedy soil.”
One of the problems with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that each one of us is either good or bad. And if we’re bad, there really isn’t much point in the Sower scattering seeds our way. It doesn’t matter how much of God’s Word we might hear, there’s very little chance that it will make a difference in our lives.
But we already know enough about Jesus to know that he didn’t go around judging whether the people he met were good or bad. He didn’t write off the people that his society considered to be “bad,” and he didn’t assume that anyone was a hopeless case for having their lives transformed by the Word of Love that he came to preach, and teach, and embody in his ministry.
That’s why I don’t think we should get caught up worrying about the soil too much, and certainly not trying to figure out if we’re good soil or weedy soil.
After all, it’s not called “The Parable of the Soil.” It is called “The Parable of the Sower” because it is a teaching about what God is like, or perhaps what Jesus was like when he came to embody God’s loving presence in the world.
And the way I read the parable, I think I can say that the Sower is not a very good gardener, at least not by modern agricultural standards. I’m neither a farmer nor even a gardener, so I had to look up some terms online. But I learned that the dominant method for planting in modern agriculture is “targeted” or “precision” planting.
Seeds are placed at specific depths, spacing, and soil conditions – by hand or with machinery. Precision planting means that very little seed is wasted. It’s efficient. Plants get optimal spacing, nutrients, and moisture, leading to higher yields. Farmers can manage weeds, pests, and irrigation more effectively. And growth is more uniform and predictable.
In contrast, the Sower in the parable does “broadcast sowing.” This is the oldest planting method – used in ancient Israel, used by Indigenous farmers, and still used today for certain crops and wild restoration. Seeds are scattered by hand or with a spreader over a large area. No attempt is made to place each seed individually.
The benefits of this method are that you can cover large areas quickly and you don’t need a lot of tools. It works well for hardy plants, and the plants that do grow tend to be resilient. The drawbacks are that it’s not very efficient, it wastes a lot of seeds, and may result in uneven, patchy growth.
And yet, it’s exactly what the Sower in the parable does – perhaps not because it’s the most efficient method for planting actual seeds for actual crops – but because it describes what God is like. God is like a Sower who scatters the Word of Life and Love generously, even wastefully, to all because God’s love is not in short supply. It doesn’t need to be measured out precisely and carefully because it’s infinite, and the goal is abundance, not efficiency.
I think there are some principles in this parable that we have adopted in our society in general. We don’t just provide education for the children who are identified as the smartest and most likely to be successful when they are young. We provide education for every child, even though we know that the results will vary.
Likewise, I think most of us would agree that every young person should have the chance to participate in sports, and music, and art, regardless of their natural ability. Not everyone will have the same success, but these are good experiences that should not be reserved for a select few. Our whole society is enriched, and the “crop” of talent is multiplied when everyone is included.
And sometimes, we will be surprised by the “seeds” that will grow, and produce fruit, and be multiplied. By our judgment, that kid might have looked like weed-ridden soil, distracted by so many other things and hardly seeming to pay attention at all. And yet, that’s the one that somehow turned out to be the renowned musician, the famous footballer, or the ground-breaking scientist.
You’re looking at the girl who at 11-years-old was told that I should try to be more outgoing, you-know, say a little more instead of staying quiet and just listening. And look what happened!
Once again, this morning, we listened to another story from the Book of Genesis. Last week, we heard about how Isaac found a wife, Rebekah, so that he could continue the covenant relationship with God, living into the promises of God to his parents Abraham and Sarah – that they would be blessed by God, have many descendants, receive a land to call their own, and become a blessing to all the families of the earth.
In our reading today, Isaac and Rebekah are blessed with two children at once when the twins, Jacob and Esau, are born. They’re quite the pair – seemingly in competition with each other even before they are born, with Jacob gripping Esau’s heel as he emerges from the womb after him.
The two are very different from the start, with Esau becoming a skillful hunter while Jacob is described as a quiet man, living in tents. In this case, their parents wouldn’t have hesitated if they were asked about who they loved the most. Isaac loved Esau because he enjoyed eating the animals Esau hunted, and Rebekah loved Jacob.
But regardless of their parents’ unequal love, neither Jacob nor Esau is the kind of person that we might imagine becoming a key figure in carrying out God’s purposes in the world.
We get a pretty good look at their characters when they are introduced here for the first time. Esau’s flaws cluster around appetite, impulse, and a failure to value what God values. He comes in hungry and says, “I am about to die; what good is a birthright to me?” He trades long‑term blessing for immediate gratification.
The birthright is not just property — it is the covenantal inheritance of Abraham and Isaac. Esau treats it as something trivial. He cannot see beyond the present moment. He is the opposite of the patient, covenant‑minded ancestor God needs.
So, you might think that’s why it was Jacob who ends us carrying on the family line and keeping the covenant with God. But Jacob wasn’t much better. Jacob’s flaws cluster around ambition, manipulation, and deceit — a person who wants God’s promises but tries to secure them by his own cunning.
Jacob’s name itself hints at “heel‑grabbing” — trickery. Later, he deceives Isaac to steal the blessing. And if we keep reading through Genesis, we’ll see that Jacob is always looking for an angle, a way to get ahead. He is strategic, but not always ethical.
And yet, this is the family that God continues to use to maintain and grow the covenant relationship between God-self and the people of the world. This flawed, conflicted, messy family is nonetheless fruitful – becoming the ancestors of so many people who would learn from them to walk with God, and honour God, to give thanks to God’s blessing, and to participate in God’s mission to bless all people.
Many centuries later, the Apostle Paul would write to the early Christian Church in Rome to encourage them in their desire and their struggle to walk with God whom they had met in Jesus Christ. Like their long-ago ancestors, Jacob and Esau, these early Christians were also flawed. Their appetites, their ambitions, their jealousies, and their insecurities threatened to undermine their best intentions to be faithful disciples of Jesus and members of the church.
I don’t think I need to tell you that the same is true for us today. We also get distracted by the cares of this world. We also get our priorities mixed up, choosing pleasure, comfort, or ambition over love, service, or sacrifice more often than we want to admit.
But Paul proclaims that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” He explains that God has set us free from the requirement to follow the law perfectly, which every single one of us would be incapable of doing.
In Jesus Christ, God has come to us to scatter the “seeds” of the Word of Love generously and abundantly into our lives. And regardless of the flaws and imperfections of our “soil,” God is confident that there will be an abundant yield of good fruit – not because we are just right, but because God’s love and forgiveness are infinite.
Which ones of us children does God love the most? God’s love is infinite. We can never run out of it. There’s no cap on how much God give to us. Love grows in God’s family to include all with no favourites. God’s love is love expanding day by day.