The Answer Key

There's a farmer in Matthew 13 who throws seed everywhere. On the path, where birds are waiting. On rock, where nothing has a chance. Into thorns, which will strangle whatever comes up. And onto good soil, where it multiplies past anything a farmer has a right to expect.

Most of us learned this story as a soil inventory. Which one are you? Path, rock, thorn, or good ground? Sunday school handed you the categories and asked you to sort yourself. Some preacher somewhere told you which one to aim for.

Farmers in first-century Galilee plowed a field before they sowed it. They didn't fling seed across a path and hope. So either this sower is genuinely bad at his job, or something else is going on — this isn't a field guide to agriculture, it's a story about a sower who doesn't triage the ground before he starts throwing. Scholars have argued both sides of that for a century, and honestly, the fact that they can't settle it tells you something. The ambiguity might be the point.

What happens next is less contested. Verses 18 through 23 — the tidy explanation, seed equals word, path equals hard heart, thorns equal worry and wealth — almost certainly isn't Jesus. The tradition-critical scholars, going back to Adolf Jülicher, then C.H. Dodd, then Joachim Jeremias in his landmark study of the parables, made the case that this kind of point-by-point allegorizing reflects the early church's habits of interpretation, not Jesus's own way of teaching. Jesus told parables that stayed open. The generation after him, trying to catechize new believers and keep the story straight, went back in and answered the questions Jesus left hanging.

I don't say that to undercut scripture. I say it because it changes what kind of story you're standing in. Without the answer key, the parable doesn't tell you which soil you are. It doesn't resolve. It just describes a sower who keeps throwing seed at ground that, by any sane accounting, is going to fail him three times out of four — and then, when it doesn't fail, it doesn't just succeed. It goes off the charts. A good yield in that region and that era ran somewhere around tenfold. This one comes back thirty, sixty, a hundred. That's not a farming report. That's an economy that doesn't run on scarcity logic, dropped into the middle of a story that otherwise looks like a lesson in loss.

I think we added the allegory because we needed the story to behave. An institution that's just starting to organize itself, trying to hold a movement together after the person who started it is gone, wants categories. It wants to know who's in and who's out, who's good soil and who isn't, so it can plan accordingly. It's also, I'd guess, exactly what Jesus was trying to get his listeners to stop doing — sorting themselves and each other into worthy ground and failed ground — right before somebody handed them a sorting chart anyway.

Maybe the point isn't to figure out which ground you are. Maybe that was never yours to answer. The soil doesn't get a vote on what kind of soil it is. It just receives what's thrown at it, and something happens or it doesn't, and either way the sower keeps walking the field, arm swinging, seed going out into rock and thorn like it might take this time too. That's a strange kind of freedom, if you let it be one. You don't have to spend your life auditing your own heart for hardness, or your neighbor's for shallowness. You just get to be ground, and let something be planted, and see.

I think that's harder than having the answer key, not easier. An answer key tells you where you stand. Its absence asks you to keep living without knowing — to keep receiving whatever gets thrown your way without a verdict attached, trusting that the sower's extravagance was never contingent on you passing inspection first.

Somewhere in this parish there's a person who's been carrying a private verdict on themselves for years — path, or rock, or thorn, take your pick. I can't undo that with a sermon or a blog post. What I can say is that the verdict was never in the text to begin with. Somebody added it later, out of the same anxiety that makes any of us reach for a chart when the truth is just too open to bear. You were handed an answer key you didn't need. You're allowed to put it down.

Sources: Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1972); the tradition-critical line running from Adolf Jülicher through C.H. Dodd to Jeremias is surveyed in Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God (Westminster John Knox); the ongoing scholarly disagreement over whether the sower is inept or historically accurate is summarized in "The Parable of the Sower," Bible Odyssey (bibleodyssey.org); on ancient Galilean yield rates and pre-sowing plowing practice, see the agricultural background collected in Bonfil and Hadas, "Ancient Field-Crop Yields and Land-Carrying Capacity," Israel Antiquities Authority.