The parable of the sower
One of the few he explained — and the explanation is about who is listening.
A farmer goes out to sow, and the seed lands in four places: by the road, on rocky ground, among thorns and on good soil. It opens the chapter of parables in Matthew, and it is one of the rare ones Jesus explains afterwards, point by point.
The explanation moves the focus. The seed is always the same. What changes is the ground.
The story, step by step
- Matthew 13:3–4Seed by the road, eaten by birds
- Matthew 13:5–6On rocky ground: springs up fast and withers, having no root
- Matthew 13:7Among thorns, which grow up and choke it
- Matthew 13:8–9On good soil, yielding a hundred, sixty and thirty times
- Matthew 13:18–23The explanation, soil by soil
- Mark 4:3–20The same account in Mark, with the explanation
The line the story turns on
What was sown on the good ground, this is he who hears the word, and understands it, who most certainly bears fruit, and produces, some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty.
In the explanation, each soil is a way of listening. The road is the one who hears and does not understand; the rocky ground, the one who receives it with joy and gives up at the first difficulty; the thorns, the one who hears but lets "the cares of this age and the deceitfulness of riches" choke it. The good soil is not the one who hears most — it is the one who hears and understands.
What it means
The sower is oddly careless: he throws seed on the path, on the rocks, into the weeds. No sensible farmer would, and that is exactly the point. The word is scattered without sorting, onto every kind of ground, and nobody is declared bad soil before they have heard.
Which is why the parable works better as a question than as a way of sorting other people. The four soils can be the same person in different weeks: days when nothing gets in, days of enthusiasm with no root, days choked by worry. And the yield it promises — a hundred, sixty, thirty — is not the same for everyone, nor demanded as if it were.
One parable a day, with the question around it
Walking with Jesus has a collection called The Parables of Jesus that takes them one a day — each with the question he was answering, a short reflection, a prayer, and one thing to carry into the day.
It is a one-time purchase, about five minutes a morning, and it never asks you to catch up on days you missed.
Questions people ask
- Where is the parable of the sower in the Bible?
- Matthew 13:3–9, with the explanation in Matthew 13:18–23. It also appears in Mark 4:3–20 and Luke 8:5–15, each time followed by the explanation.
- What does the seed represent in the parable of the sower?
- In Jesus' own explanation, the seed is "the word of the Kingdom" (Matthew 13:19). The four kinds of soil are four ways of receiving it.
- What are the four soils?
- The roadside (the one who hears and does not understand), rocky ground (the one who receives with joy but has no root), thorns (the one who lets cares and riches choke the word), and good soil (the one who hears, understands and bears fruit).