Pandemic Parables 3. What's happened to the seed?

Jesus explains his Parable of the Sower (which we often note is really the parable of the soil - and the seed).

“Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: 

When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

Most of us preachers have spoken on this story quite a few times.  But now I see the pandemic here.

It appears in the form of thorns.  

The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful.

The worries of this life.  That's a pandemic.  You don't have to catch it to be choked by it spiritually.  The promises of the Word overwhelmed by the latest Government edict, the light of the word lost behind the clouds of despair, the search for a vaccine a deeper longing than the search for a Saviour.  

Though a seemingly gentle, rustic parable there is brutal reality here.  Farming is quite brutally realistic at times.  The pandemic will find people out.  Assumed spiritual growth will be found to be wanting and corners of the spiritual landscape will deny the Lord of the Harvest.

None of this means that the harvest will be disappointing - to the contrary it will be amazing and wonderful.  But will it include me?  And you?

Chemical Attack

Suddenly there were rats.

Some years ago villagers in parts of Borneo found rats everywhere and with them the threats that come from such an infestation.  

It seemed especially cruel because considerable efforts had recently been made by the World Health Organisation to eliminate another threat – mosquitoes.  

As if that wasn’t enough the thatched roofs of their homes were frequently collapsing, weakened by some other unwelcome pest.

There are times like this the world over.  Trouble comes in threes, goes the old saying.  That’s when we can get very touchy about God.  After all, it seems an oversight on His part that any trouble gets through at all and we feel the more aggrieved when it feels like He’s mistakenly let several enemies past the entry gate at once.

Back to Borneo.  

The rats, it turned out, had become numerous because the cats were not catching them any longer.  Why? Easy – the village cats had all fallen sick and died.  (That was perhaps a fourth calamity).  

The reason for the dead cats was harder to spot.  After all, what has your cat eaten on its roaming today?  It turned out that lizards were the problem.  Having eaten lizards for years the cats discovered too late that the lizards were now poisonous.  The lizards were poisonous because they ate the flies. The lizards had probably thought they were on to a good thing because the flies had recently become markedly easier to catch – well, often dead in fact.

[I digress to point out that the roofs of the houses were made of a thatch that was susceptible to moth larvae.  The said flies, until they began dying out, had always eaten enough larvae (before themselves being eaten by the lizards – are you still with me?) to keep the thatch in good order. Dead flies = happy munching moth larvae = collapsed roofs.]

The dead flies?  Ah yes. That was because of the World Health Organisation’s chemical attack on the mosquitoes (remember them?). The chemical was poisoning the flies too.  

All the bad things were part of one system failure.

Since Adam the Bible instructs human beings that they are in sin’s dysfunctional (theologians call it fallen) system.  Bad things happen amid remaining good things.  Why so many troubles?  What could they possibly have to do with each other?  The Bible makes it clear that it is Man, not God that has let the multiplicity of enemies through the door.  Our random agonies are in the collective chain of results from sin and natural judgment.

This is why, as the Bible ends, this promise is made: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.

In Christ’s new order it is not that there will be fewer problems, less sin and reduced sadness. They will be gone. A failed system will have passed away. 

A song for a day with two funerals