Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Sower
Matthew 13:1-9
1 On that day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the seaside. · WEB
He leaves the house, sits in a boat, and starts telling stories — and the first one is about four kinds of ground.
On that day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the seaside Matthew 13:1.
On that day is not filler. The house is the one his mother and brothers were standing outside Matthew 12:46, and the day is the day of the Beelzebul charge and the demand for a sign. He goes out of the house, and the teaching changes shape.
Great multitudes gathered to him, so that he entered into a boat and sat; and all the multitude stood on the beach Matthew 13:2. A few feet of water makes a pulpit of a fishing boat and an auditorium of the shore. The crowd is as large as it has ever been, and what they get from now on is stories.
The parable and its setting are given in the earlier account Mark 4:1–25, and the picture needs no expanding: seed broadcast by hand across a field crossed by a footpath, patched with rock shelf under thin soil, edged with thorn roots that were never dug out. A sower who sowed only where the ground looked promising would sow almost nothing.
Two things are worth marking in Matthew's telling.
The first is where he has put it. Nothing has changed in the message between chapter 12 and chapter 13; what has changed is the reception. A generation has watched the works and assigned them to the devil, and the response is not louder argument but a different form of speech. The parables arrive after the hardening, not before it.
The second is the arithmetic at the end. "Others fell on good soil and yielded fruit: some one hundred times as much, some sixty, and some thirty" Matthew 13:8. The yields are counted downward here; the earlier account counts them upward. Either way the smallest figure is an extraordinary harvest — a field returning thirty grains for one is a good year — and the point is that every one of the three is a success. The parable does not grade the good ground. It divides ground that bears from ground that does not.
"He who has ears to hear, let him hear" Matthew 13:9. The closing line is a warning disguised as an invitation, and the next paragraph is the disciples asking why he has started talking like this.
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