Open, Except For. . .

Texts: Isaiah 55:10-13 | Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

This parable has a problem.

Not a theological problem — a structural one. Matthew gives us the parable in verses one through nine, and then nine verses later gives us the interpretation. Most of us, having heard this text before, already know the answers before we've heard the questions. We arrive like someone who has flipped to the back of the crossword and read the answers first.

The interpretation in verses 18-23 was not supplied by Jesus. It was supplied by the early church — scribes uncomfortable with the parable's openness who wanted a tidy, moralistic explanation. But Jesus never gave tidy, moralistic explanations. What he gave were earthquakes.

So let's close the back of the book.

There is a sower. He goes out to sow — not neatly, not selectively, but broadly, lavishly, across an entire field. Here's what we miss when we receive the church's interpretation first: the parable is about a field, not four discrete kinds of soil. A real field is not four separate zones cleanly divided. It is diverse, mixed, shifting — a path trampled through it, rocky areas, a corner thick with thorns, stretches of good open soil. This is not a quiz asking which category you belong to.

This is a mirror. We are the field.

Before we go further, we need to hear what Isaiah is saying underneath it all.

As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout... so shall my word be; it shall not return to me empty.

This is the ground note of the entire discourse. God's word always accomplishes what it is sent to do. The harvest is not in question. Which means this parable is not about whether God succeeds — it's about what happens in us as God's word does its inevitable work. The abundant harvest — thirty, sixty, a hundredfold — is not a reward for the well-prepared. It is the nature of the word itself, extravagantly at work in whatever soil it finds.

With that underneath us, we can hear the parable differently.

The hardpan path represents the unquestioned assumptions we absorbed before we had the capacity to question them — from parents, peer groups, religious formation, culture. We hear, but we have already decided. The word lands and bounces off.

The rocky soil represents the compulsive habits and busy-ness we use to stay safely set in our ways. We receive the word with some openness, but nothing takes root because nothing is allowed to disturb our established order. We want to hear — just not enough to change.

The thorny soil represents the ego's demands: the need for security, control, esteem. Not evil things — deeply human things. But when they crowd the center of our lives, the word of God gets choked before it can grow.

And the good soil — open, loose, receptive — is not a description of a different kind of person. It is a description of a different kind of posture: where we have done the work of loosening, questioned an assumption, released a fear.

Thomas Keating offers a line that stops me every time: there is really only one sin — the refusal to grow.

Not the particular failures we catalogue. Not the moral shortcomings we spend so much energy managing. But the fundamental orientation of the person who has decided they are done becoming. The hardpan, the rocks, the thorns — all forms of that one refusal.

The parable is asking us to hear the question God asked in the garden after the Fall.

Where are you?

Not a gotcha. A loving, searching invitation: where are you, really? What is your hardpan right now? What are the rocks? What are the thorns? Where are you open?

We are open — except for. And everyone fills in that blank differently. Except for that one assumption we won't question. That one habit we won't break. That one fear we keep tending like a plant we've decided we cannot live without.

And here is the grace. Bernard Brandon Scott writes that in failure and everydayness lies the miracle of God's activity.

Seeds germinate in cracks in concrete. Not just in good soil — in the cracks. The word of God is at work even in our resistance, even in our everydayness, even in our most spectacular failures to receive it. This is not permission to stay hard. It is the assurance that the sower has not given up on the field.

The question is not whether you are good soil.

The question is: where are you? And are you willing to grow?