How’s Your Soil?
AM Psalm 140, 142 • PM Psalm 141, 143:1-11(12)
Micah 3:9-4:5 • Acts 24:24-25:12 • Luke 8:1-15
In today’s gospel a farmer broadcasts seed onto a variety of soils. The seed takes root and flourishes on a bit of deep, presumably loamy stuff, but much of the rest comes to nothing. Birds eat it, or folks walk all over it, or it roots in shallow soil and withers, or it’s snarled in tangles of thorns. When the disciples as usual scratch their heads (Jesus seems to have had a fondness for the metaphorically challenged), Jesus explains that the seed is God’s word that God offers lavishly to all, but, alas, it will successfully “take” only in some of the many who receive it.
The “parable of the sower” is a familiar one that I suspect most of us have heard many times. It pops up fairly often in popular culture—I recently read a dystopian novel of that title by Octavia Butler—and it is a particular favorite among Christian commentators. By chance I finished re-reading just yesterday C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. I vaguely remembered its details from, what?, forty or more years ago, and on reading it now, its resonance with today’s parable was obvious.
In Lewis’s short novel/meditation, the narrator boards a bus in a bleak, gray, boundless city of perpetual rain and cranky residents. The bus soars upward and eventually alights in an indescribably beautiful place where the travelers are met by glowing spirits, joyful souls of the departed whom the travelers had known in life. (It’s quickly clear that the bus passengers are themselves dead).
In the encounters that follow, if I read Lewis correctly, the spirits over and over give the bus arrivals a simple message: all you need to do is accept God’s offer of unconditional love, that is: unearned grace (how sweet the sound, that will save wretches like them, and us). Do that, and here you’ll stay.
So simple, and so seemingly irresistible, yet most of the new arrivals apparently choose to take the bus back to the gray city. Why? They just cannot shed the petty sinful accumulations of any life—pride, self-loathing, suspicion, shame, and more. Those encumbrances, the spirits say, are universal, and yet they are also easily dismissed if we choose, like brushing lint off your sleeve.
I’m not so sure about that, but Lewis’s main point, that we are responsible for the type of soil that we make of ourselves, whether ready for the seed of God’s word or hard-baked and weed-choked, is something I will embrace and explore.
Written by Elliott West
Elliott is emeritus professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than thirty years.