Reading Luke Together #24 – Crazed Sower
Luke chapter 8. What a great chapter! To be sure we don’t restrict the band of Jesus’ disciples to merely the well-known “twelve” (enshrined in our stained glass windows!), Luke clarifies that “there were also women.” Women disciples! How radical (for that time and place) of Jesus! We’ll see more of this from Luke, which must have puzzled first century readers.
They are named. Mary Magdalene. I’d say “Poor Mary Magdalene,” since dirty-minded male theologians deduced from Luke’s mention that she’d been healed of sins that she must have been a prostitute. Poor theologians. Mary wasn’t poor though. Clearly she was a person of considerable means, known not as anybody’s wife but independently, and from Magdala, with its prosperous fish processing industry. She’s one of several women “who were supporting them with their own means” (Luke 8:3). Wow. Very rare for women then to have disposable funds – and they are the budget support for Jesus’ ministry!
We also have Joanna, who’s “the wife of Chuza,” Chuza being Herod’s chief budget officer. Laugh out loud: the guy in charge of all the fabulous riches of the kingdom has a wife who’s traipsing around the countryside bankrolling the ministry of Jesus, Herod’s implacable foe! How tense was their household! What kind of social revolution is Jesus pulling off here?
After that, catch your breath and listen to Jesus’ first parable, Luke 8:5-8. Jesus, master storyteller and psychologist: instead of mansplaining with 5 bullet points you’d better accept, he weaves together a story to leave his listeners space to find themselves in it; he trusts them to do the figuring out.
But then his stories, which we might read as a bit tame, always have some mind-boggling element. In his first parable, “a sower went out to sow.” Commonplace. Listeners probably saw a sower upon the hillside as Jesus was speaking. But how baffled were they when he described what they had never seen: this sower threw some seed on the path, which the birds scooped up and ate; and some on rocky ground, which had no chance to survive; and then some seed among thorns, and only then seed onto the fertile, plowed ground. What kind of fool sower flings it all around, clearly wasting it on spots the chance of growth were minimal to zero?
So what is Jesus up to with this? He doesn’t mansplain it right away, but since he’s always talking about God and God’s mercy and blessing and how it isn’t for the righteous but for everybody, we sense him teasing us to see God’s word, God’s goodness as that sower flinging the grace, hope, life and joy any and everywhere.
And who knows where it might spring up? My first parsonage had a garden plot in the back where I learned I was expected to grow vegetables. I was fairly proud of my silver queen corn and green beans. But I bragged the most about my squash. I planted squash, following the directions neighbor farmers had given me. But it seems that on my way home from the garden, some seeds leaked out of my bag and fell on ground I’d not plowed or fertilized. They call this “volunteer squash” – and the produce was vast, and delicious.
There was power in the seed. And even in untilled soil. Life abundant, springing forth in unexpected places. God’s mercy and message are like that. Ours as Jesus’ church is simply to put it out there, wherever, everywhere, and wait on results we can’t manage or predict.
Jesus does circle back later in Luke 8 to compare the rocky ground to those who like hearing about Jesus but don’t put down deep roots; and (hauntingly for people like us!) the thorns are like people who are fixated on “life’s worries, riches and pleasures,” which kill off the seeds of God’s love, mercy and joy.
We’re one-third of the way through Luke’s Gospel, and one-sixth of the way through Luke-Acts – and it’s been so very inspiring and also challenging. Keep reading with me – or really with Luke, who’d say Read on with Jesus and the Spirit!