“Our Reckless God”--August 12, 2019
Jesus began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them, “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came up and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” [Mark 4:2-8]
I’m no farmer—I will be the first to admit that. But this sure seems like a waste of good seed to me. If it was your job to get the biggest “bang” for your buck and the most return on your initial investment, you would not plant crops like this. In fact, this story is laughable even for someone with a brown thumb like mine. But that is precisely Jesus’ point—the sheer divine comedy of our God, who recklessly, extravagantly scatters Good News risking that a lot of it will seem wasted.
We are bean-counters by nature, we humans. We want to maximize our profits, and we want charts and graphs to show it. We want to spend money only where we know we will make money, or where we will come out ahead somehow. We will invest cautiously, and we call it good business sense only to make investments in those places where we can reasonably expect a return. If we were telling this parable, we would tell it something like this: “There was a savvy farmer who took a look at his land. He knew that the pathway was a stupid place to scatter seed. He remembered that the one patch of rocky ground still needed more compost and manure put on it so he didn’t put any seed there. And he obviously knew not to plant any crops where there were already thorns growing up—and if he was going to be insistent on using that plot of land, he would have to rip out the thorns first. So he only planted his valuable, hybrid, genetically-engineered seed on the good soil that was worthy of the crop.”
This is virtually the opposite of the story Jesus tells: his is about a reckless (almost intentionally reckless) farmer who just starts throwing seed everywhere. And unless he is scattering seed with his eyes closed, he has to know that he will get nothing for his efforts with the seed on the path, and that the rocky ground is not worthy of the good seed, and that the thorns will kill off anything that gets planted there. He has to know it will look like a grand and royal waste of time and money and effort to scatter all that seed in all those bad places. And yet he does it anyway, regardless of whether the soil is “up to snuff” or not, worthy or not, qualified or not. Yeah, that sounds like our God.
We bean-counters have this hang-up about the way God operates: it looks too reckless, too extravagant, too risky. It looks like God is willing to waste love and grace and Good News on people who take it for granted or pay it no mind or go after other loves that will always let them down. (We forget, of course, that we are sometimes the people who do take God’s Good News for granted!) And yet God keeps scattering seed on them, apparently willing to risk looking like a fool to do it. “If a thing is worth doing,” says G.K. Chesterton, “it is worth doing badly.” Well Jesus, the sower of this story, sure doesn’t seem to mind that he’s scattering this seed “badly,” by any bean-counter’s reckoning. And that’s what the Gospel is all about: a God who is willing to look foolish for our sake, on the outside chance that a seed will take root and bear fruit in us, a God who is willing to appear to waste time and energy and effort saving a bunch of ornery creatures who don’t know that they want to be saved, thank you very much. “Listen!” Jesus says, “This is what God is really like! If you can stand to hear it, if you can believe even though it seems preposterous and too good to be true, the living God is not a heavenly bean-counter. God is not a cautious, timid planter of seed with a limited supply of Good News to hand out. The real and living God is extravagant, overflowing with Good News sent to all and shared with all and scattered among all.”
That doesn’t seem like a very dignified sort of God, perhaps. Our prodigal seed-scattering sort of God would not be at the top of the class in business school, and would have almost certainly been fired in the first episode of “The Apprentice.” Jesus, however, doesn’t really care whether we approve of God’s methods. Jesus is just going to continue announcing the Kingdom and inviting people into it, regardless of whether we look worthy of it, and regardless of whether it looks like a waste. It might not be good business for a farmer to scatter seed like this, but it is Good News for us that ours is a God who is willing to do such reckless things for the love of a whole world full of messes like us. Now that is news worth telling someone!
Lord Jesus, silence our cautious whining and let us be caught up in your reckless way of spreading Good News all around.
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