My husband took the girls to the zoo this past Shabbat morning and gave me the gift of a couple hours of quiet. I turned in my reading to The Gospel of Thomas and the logion next up was a familiar one, often known as the parable of the sower. It reads as follows:

“Yeshua says, A farmer went out to plant; seed in hand he scattered it everywhere.

Some fell on the surface of the road. Birds came and ate it.

Other seed fell on rocky ground and could not take root in the earth, or send grain heavenward, so never germinated.

Still other seed fell among weeds and brambles which choked it out and insects devoured it.

Some however, fell onto fertile soil, which produced fruit of high quality yielding as much as sixty and one-hundred-and-twenty percent.”

-Logion 9

I’m not going to lie. I was tempted to skip this one. I’ve heard and read this story countless times. It’s extremely familiar. I wanted something new. Something more interesting. But I made myself stay in the reading and see what might open.

Parables are profound because they are literary masterpieces. They lend themselves to story, metaphor, allusions, and multiple layers of interpretations. A good piece of literature or art does the same. You can come back to it over and over to glean new meanings, new interpretations, new depth, new ways of looking at the same thing.

Traditionally, I’ve been taught that the parable of the sower is about salvation. If you’ve spent much time in similar circles, you know the spiel:

The sower is God.

The seed is the gospel.

The soil is the human heart.

Humans respond to the gospel different ways. Some aren’t even interested in listening. Others want to listen, but they can’t root themselves strong enough, or distractions of life or moral flaws come and snatch away their faith. The fertile soil represents those who receive the gospel, accept salvation, and bear fruit as believers.

This is one way to interpret this story. But what if there are other interpretations as well? What if this is about more than the black-and-white, who’s-in-and-who’s-out of traditional salvation?

One of the inherent dangers of viewing this parable as only a commentary on “salvation” is that it lets the “faithful” off the hook. If you consider yourself to be a believer in Yeshua, then you are in the good soil. So this parable is somehow a warning for other types of people, or a lesson in how to approach evangelism. Depending on your theology, it might be a warning not to let your faith get stolen or choked out. But again, the emphasis remains on who is a believer or not. Who gets saved or not.

Consider an alternative.

What if the parable is not just about salvation. Set that lens aside for a moment. What if the seed also represents something else? What if the seed is something more like wisdom?

If this is a parable about how wisdom falls on the human heart, then this has much deeper application to every single human being, whether in the traditional Christian lens or not. What if all four types of soil are equally saved, but the story is hinting at how we go about nurturing and harvesting the seeds of wisdom in our lives? What if some believers are still closed and have that wisdom snatched away? Or choked out? Or eaten by insects? And what if others are able to open and settle into deeper soil that bears much fruit of transformation in their lives? Huh. Meditate on that one for a while.

And then there are even more layers to consider.

My commentary on this text notes, “Typically these soil types are interpreted as four different kinds of human beings whose inner condition is represented by one of these types. However, one might also conclude that all four types exist within every human being. The four zones of receptivity (and four outcomes) express the four ways that a human being relates to the divine action” (In Trouble and In Wonder by Lynn C. Bauman p.40).

Isn’t this beautiful. I’m not off the hook at all. It’s not about identifying which of these four types I am (and then getting a bit of an ego hit when I deem myself to be in the fertile soil category). It’s about recognizing that I am simultaneously all four. Such a deeper invitation to contemplation, meditation, and openness to transformation. A lens like this invites profound questions with no easy answers (questions taken and adapted from Bauman’s commentary p.41):

• As a road: Which ground in my life is hard-packed through traffic and overuse? Where can I receive nothing new that doesn’t already exist there? What carries the “life” away from me?
• As rocks: Which ground in my life is not yet soil at all and has no nutritive elements to sustain life (or wisdom)? Where am I stuck and hardened off?
• As thorns: Which ground in my life lacks depth and has lots of obstructions? Which is like a jungle within, full of tangles, overgrowth, insects that choke out and eat away at my inner conditions?
• As fertile soil: What is fruitful, productive, and creative in my life that I send up and out into the cosmos? Where is the energy in my life? Where is it coming from?

I don’t find easy answer to these questions, which is what makes them profound and beautiful and invitational to a deeper journey of self-awareness and transformation.

The good soil in my life: Writing is a huge part of that, which is why starting this blog and making decisions to create more space for writing has been a spiritual undertaking for me. I also find good soil in my pursuit of spiritual direction, meditation and other practices that help me open to myself, God, and others.

The poorer soil conditions: Those are harder to tease out. Anxiety might feel like an insect or a bird. Pleasing others. Wanting to measure up. Is the road a representation of society or civilization? Do cultural norms or expectations fall in this category? What about social media? There is also the tangle of unprocessed trauma, and what my counselor likes to call my “dragons,” my default coping mechanisms that rear their heads and speak unhelpful things when circumstances trigger. They roar things like, “See, you’re abandoned.” “You’re not safe.” “No one cares about your heart.” These definitely tend to choke out or eat away at my ability to be present to my family and enjoy them where they are at and myself where I am at. They create fear, and reacting to fear is not conducive to wisdom.

That isn’t to say I should feel shame over my fear, or suppress it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. But it does mean I can ask gentle questions. What can I do to keep teasing out that tangle until it is less of a jungle in my life? Are there ways to minimize the insects? Are there practices I can employ to nurture the soil of my life into deeper fertility? Even poor, clay-filled soil can be transformed over time. Compost and nutrients can be added. Rocks can be picked out.

I enjoy tending a vegetable garden in the summers. In our current home I’ve been tending this same patch of dirt now for five years. This summer will be my sixth. When we moved in, the space was largely a type of informal brick patio with a few raised beds. That first fall, I ripped it all out. I wanted more dirt, more space. I moved the raised beds, I removed the brick. I layered in mulch and compost to feed the space over winter. It’s been five years and I still find fragments of brick in my soil every time I plant. I find them less and less, but they are still there. I’m also still amazed to discover huge chunks of concrete or buried cinder block from time to time. The first year I went to press my tomato cages into the earth and the legs kept bending against something. I dug to uncover what I thought was a buried cinder block. With more digging it turned out to be an old cement footing for a basketball hoop or some other kind of post. It was massive. We had to rent a jack hammer so we could break it up into movable pieces. Just last year I must’ve dug a hole in a spot I had never touched before because I still uncovered a giant cinder block along the perimeter.

I say all this as an illustration that we are never done growing. There is always more to dig out and lay aside. Always more to contemplate and open to. Always more room to nurture the seeds of wisdom deeper into our lives.

Always more than one way to look at what seems to be a simple parable at first glance.