As an urban gardener in Toronto, I have the constant challenge of not enough soil from the concrete backyards to plant in, too little sunlight from surrounding high-rise buildings, unplanned plants that crowd out the planned plants and unwelcome visits from birds, insects, squirrels and raccoons. But hope lives on as by December, I have already gone through my seed collection and examined which seed came out of which plant and determined which was planted along an eastern or western exposure, have consulted with other urban gardeners and seed savers, and have started visualizing where I will plant next.  By February 1, I start poring through seed catalogues for seeds. Then the planning and preparation begins. The seeds are started indoors on March 26 or seedlings ordered to plant on the Victoria Day weekend.

This kind of preparation is even more crucial for commercial food producers. Plotting, fencing, crop-rotating, plowing, tilling, consulting the Famer’s Almanac, seed trading or purchasing, contracting with field workers, purchasers, consumers, and on and on.

Yet all this planning and preparation is confounded by the story of the sower as found in Matthew (13:3-9), Mark (4:1-12) and Luke (8:1-10).  In each narrative, the sower is profligate and indiscriminate in scattering the seed:  by the wayside where birds eat the seed, on stony ground where the roots have not spread and the plants are scorched by the sun, on thorny ground where the thorns choke the plants and on good ground where the plants were more successful.  This sower mystifies the issues of efficiency, sustainability, and ROI (return on investment). This sower had no plan, no preparation.

The surprise in the parable is that no matter how profligate and indiscriminate the sower was, the harvest was abundant and plentiful: “thirty and sixty and a hundredfold”;  “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty”; “it produced a hundredfold.”