This Sunday morning we were not at GPCC… we were visiting Steve and went to his church, Holy Trinity Platt, in Manchester. Steve James, the rector there, preached from Mark 4 on the parable of the sower, the sermon being entitled “The Seed of the Kingdom”.

Jesus’s strategy for spreading the good news when faced with the hard ground of those who were hostile to him or those who were fickle was to talk about sowing seed – apparently a sermon on agriculture! The seed in the parable, the Word of God, has immense creative and recreative power – not the ‘mechanical’ power of outward conformity to religion, but the ‘organic’ power of spiritual life. The Word works by going in deep. The four different types of soil described in the parable – which Steve likened to the four different audiences who heard the message, namely the Pharisees, the crowds, Jesus’s family and his disciples – determine, to some degree, the effectiveness of the seed in that environment.

Jesus taught in parables to challenge us to seek Him. Parables are not obvious; they are a little like riddles and require us to come to Jesus for clarification and understanding. If we come with the attitude of ‘I don’t want to understand… I don’t want to believe’, we run the risk of being unable to believe, rather like Uncle Andrew in C.S. Lewis’s story ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ who, although recognising that Aslan’s creation song was, in fact, a song, disliked it so much that he pretended it was not a song, just the ordinary growl of a lion, until eventually he did “hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.” (see also John 12:37-40). If, on the other hand, we seek God, we will find Him. (Matt 7:7-8)

May we know the power of God’s Word in our lives and constantly seek Him for understanding, that we may see in our lives the fruit of this powerful seed.