Parables are stories that Jesus likely told over and over again to a lot of different audiences and likely with varied intentions.

So, when we have a passage like this one today in which we get the parable itself and then, a few verses later, we get an interpretation of the parable as an allegory, we can imagine that this was probably an explanation that Jesus may have given at some point and that Matthew includes in his Gospel as a helpful one for his early Christian community to hear, but we should also give the parable itself a little room to breathe outside of the allegorical explanation.

Most of the time, anyway, parables aren’t intended to be allegories with tidy little meanings with every figure in the story representing something else. Parables are feral stories – ordinary, domestic images rewilded in the telling so that nothing behaves as you would imagine it to.

There’s always much more to a parable than we initially imagined!

As Amy-Jill Levine says, parables contain a surplus of meaning, and “reducing parables to a single meaning destroys their aesthetic as well as ethical potential.” ¹

And everywhere Jesus went, he told tales like this. Feral little stories with a surplus of meaning that resist easy allegories and single stories with provocations and disturbances and reminders and confrontations that cannot be contained.

It should say something to us about all the ways we try to capture the Holy, the Sacred, the Divine in words and systematic theologies and tidy doctrines, or even our personal “preferences” about how we refer to God, that Jesus’s favorite way to say anything about the Divine was in the form of a mysterious little story. One third of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel of Matthew are in parable form.

They were powerful, memorable, effective, ² and they refuse to be tamed. Yet, they were so simple that anyone could understand them. They used everyday images that were so familiar to the original hearers that now – removed by time and cultural distance and geography – we often have a hard time seeing the often weird and radical nature of the story being spun.

One commentator suggests that a parable has the power of “arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” ³ As much they reveal, they also conceal – bendable, pliable, flexible, nimble, and agile little stories that worm their way into your mind.

So let unbind your imagination from the allegorical interpretation and hear this feral little story again like one of Jesus’s first hearers, caught off guard by a story you doesn’t make immediate sense.

“Listen! A sower sent out to sow.”

And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.

Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

If you have ears, hear!”

Jesus tells seven parables in a row in Matthew 13, all addressing what the “kingdom of heaven,” or the “kingdom of God,” is like.

And if you’re one of the first hearers of this little story, your attention is already arrested. Because everyone knows what a kingdom is like. The rule and reign of the Roman Empire was an ever-present reality in an occupied territory like Palestine. The Roman governor exerted control over the people, the Roman tax system took money out of their threadbare pockets, the benefits of which they may never see, the Roman legions – the deadliest fighting force anyone had ever seen – were a looming threat over any intimations of insurrection. The emperor, who likely no one in this audience had ever laid eyes upon, was the most powerful man on earth.

So when Jesus gathers a crowd – in this case, one so large that he had to get into a boat and push back a bit just to be seen and heard – and he starts to spin a yarn with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like…,” their ears perk up because this might just be the start of a subversive speech against the occupying imperial forces!

They all knew what kingdoms were – real ones – with armies and emperors and wealth and bloody wars and power over their enemies.

“Yeah, Jesus! Tell us what God’s gonna do to the emperor and the legions and the and about the bloody war where our occupying enemies get what they finally deserve! We can’t wait to hear that story!”

This is what the rule and reign of God is like! “A sower went out to sow…”

And that’s the first gut punch of the parable, because a parable should always twist your stomach in knots.

“This is not the imagery of any kingdom we’ve ever known, Jesus. This is just plan ol’ everyday life!”

Astoundingly, Jesus chose over and over again to use these metaphors from nature to talk to folks about the Kingdom of God – yeast and pearls and mustard seeds and a person going out to scatter seeds.

I kind of wonder what metaphor Jesus might use today to talk about what the world would be like if God were in control of things and we were not. We don’t really have many “kingdoms” anymore. Perhaps he would speak in the language of national governments. The Country of God is like… The Nation State of God is like…

Or maybe, with multinational corporations becoming some of the most powerful influences on the face of the earth – swaying even the activity of sovereign nations – maybe Jesus would have drawn upon that imagery and twisted it and turned it and made it suddenly strange to our ears.

So, when you hear the little phrase, “The kingdom of heaven is like…,” or, “The kingdom of God is like…” You can hear what Jesus is saying as something like: “Here is what the world is like when God is in charge and the rule and reign of presidents and kings and billionaires and multinational corporations are not!”

Or, maybe a little more down to our level: “Here is what the world would be like if God were in control of things and we were not.”

And this is what the rule and reign of God is like… “A sower went out to sow…”

For all the planning and precision and persistence it takes to build a kingdom of rule and reign and power and wealth and armies and empire and bloody wars and crushing our enemies to dust, in the Kingdom of God – a dream, a vision, a provocation of something coming into the world – planning and precision and persistence are trumped by surprise and simplicity and sheer possibility.

There is intention in this parable: “A sower went out to sow.” But then…

“And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up.

What a waste! Except if you’re a bird…

And birds often play a role in Jesus’s parables: the mustard seed that grows up into the largest of shrubs “so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matt. 13:32). That parable is coming up soon after this one.

And modern, enlightened Western readers of the text of scripture have, for quite a long time, seen the more-than-human ecological and animal imagery serving only ornamental or metaphorical or poetic roles in the text. But now, with the climate on the brink of collapse and ecological degradation pressing ecosystems across the planet into crisis, we might look at parables like this one again and wonder, “What would the world be like if God were in control of things and we were not?”

And we could read this parable again and see within it the beauty of a seemingly thoughtless act of seeds scattered on a path, as the inclusion of the larger-than-human web of life in the story of Divine intention and care. The very way that Jesus tells parables subverts our tendency to place the human at the center of the Divine drama! Yet, we allegorize it all away when we believe that the only truths these stories hold for us are about us – our morality, our spirituality, our ways of being the church in the world. But the whole creation is caught up in this dream, this vision, this provocation of something coming that is capture in the phrase, “the kingdom of God.”

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.

And at this point, the agriculturally astute folks in the largely rural crowd in the very fertile Galilee must be wondering, “What is this sower doing?”

You might imagine that most of the people gathered at the lakeside that day knew a thing or two about farming. And to their ears, what is happening here might sound like the indiscriminate, haphazard flinging of seeds every which way with no sense of where the grain is likely to take root.

And the precision of war-making legions past and present, and the exacting rule of emperors and authoritarian leaders then and now, and the crushing economic system that everyone is beholden to but that works for only a very few, and the cost-benefits analysis of multi-national corporations, and the leverage and margin of futures markets, and the head-spinning acceleration of technology, social media, and artificial intelligence altering our brains and changing our relational patterns and stealing our creativity and polluting our communities…is countered by the logic of the Kingdom of God, which is hardly a logic at all as far as most people are concerned.

Where goodness and grace is meted out willy-nilly.

And the birds of the air eat as well as the human community.

And while there is intention in the sowing, there isn’t a whole lot of exacting precision.

And still other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

One pound of seed produces a hundred pounds of grain! ⁴ Even when the sower has practiced seed-flinging flagrant abundance and absurd risk-taking, rather than a scrupulous strategy of risk-management, scattering seeds where he know they’re not likely to grow, the parable ends with an harvest image of extravagance – bread enough to feed multitudes, a bounty of goodness, a wild feast of grace for human and animal alike!

If Jesus were talking about it today, he might say, “What the world would be like if God were in control of things and presidents and kings and billionaires and multinational corporations are not is like having a little oasis here and there in the city that isn’t owned by a bank or a real estate developer, that isn’t turning a profit for anyone, but an oasis that provides space for nonprofits to work and pickup basketball games to be played and music to be made and raingardens pollinators.

It’s like two scrappy little congregations facing the decline of every institution we’ve known as a society for the last century – from churches, to the rotary club, to democracy itself – determined to spread a little more goodness and grace around in all the nooks and crannies of their community they can work their way into.

It’s like hundreds of neighbors standing up to the most powerful government in the world when they come to occupy their city, protecting their vulnerable neighbors, armed with nothing more than signs of protest and goodwill, and bodies linked together arm to arm refusing to move, and sambusas to feed hungry protesters, and mutual aid networks in which little old Lutheran ladies team up with the local adult toy shop to resist federal agents.

That’s what the kingdom of God is like!

And we’d say, “Well, that’s not like any rule and reign that we’ve ever heard of. But, darn if it doesn’t sound like just what we’ve been dreaming of.”

¹ Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 1-2.
² Anna Case-Winters, Matthew: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible) (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 175.
³ C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sones, 1961), 5.
⁴ R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew: A Commentary (The New Testament Library) (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2021), 250.