For the full unabridged audio: Mow the Yard, Miss the Point
A couple of years ago, I made a commitment — at the very least, I would go for an intentional walk for 15 minutes a day. Not much, but I needed it. I had reached that place in life where I knew I had to start moving, or I was going to lose the ability to. Surely I could walk out my door and around my block. I could do that.
I made the incredibly bad decision to ask a handful of good friends to hold me accountable. By 8 o’clock each night, I needed to text the group and confirm I had gone for my walk.
It was going great — until I got a minor injury. My shoes had worn out, and a leg muscle was making every step uncomfortable. So one evening I mowed the yard instead, tracked the whole thing, and texted the group: Guys, I mowed the yard. That’s my walk for the day.
One of my buddies wasn’t having it. “No, it’s not,” he said. I argued. I showed him the data — 40 minutes of movement. He said, “Yeah, but your commitment wasn’t to mow the yard. Your commitment was to go for an intentional 15-minute walk.”
I lost my mind. I muted the chat and threw an absolute temper tantrum. It was kind of ridiculous.
And then I went for a 15-minute walk.
I texted back: Fine. You win. It took me 30 minutes to get around the block because my leg hurt so bad. My buddy replied: I’m so proud of you. I love you. This is how it’s supposed to work.
I was 46 or 47 years old. It was the first time in my life anyone had ever held me accountable to anything. And I didn’t like it one bit.
What Isaiah Has to Do With It
Isaiah 6 is Isaiah’s call to ministry. It’s that dramatic moment: Who will go for us? And Isaiah says, Here am I — send me. But right there at his commissioning, God essentially says: you’re going to preach my love, my mercy, my grace. You’re going to speak truth to power. You’re going to challenge people in places they don’t want to be challenged. And they are going to turn a blind eye. They’re going into exile.
When you read through Isaiah, it’s heartbreak after heartbreak. There are glimpses of redemption, but Israel still goes into exile.
Jesus understood himself to stand in Isaiah’s lineage. He functioned as prophet, priest, and king — and here, he’s operating as prophet. He tells parables for the same reason Isaiah preached: to reveal things people don’t want to hear.
And notice what he says just before the Isaiah quote — “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.” Whenever Jesus talks about the “secret” or “mystery” of the kingdom, it’s always in the sense of something being revealed, not hidden. Paul uses the same language: the mystery is what has been concealed and is now being disclosed. The very next parable Jesus tells is the lamp on a stand: Whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed. Whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open.
Parables aren’t meant to confuse. They are the means by which Jesus reveals the nature of the kingdom of God.
What People Expected to Hear
So what is it, exactly, that people didn’t want to hear in the Parable of the Sower?
They expected the kingdom of heaven to be a sweep. The Messiah arrives, the word goes out, everyone bows the knee, and the kingdom wins — and wins big. That’s the expectation.
But Jesus says: actually, some people are going to hear the word and it’ll be gone before they get home. Some will receive it with joy and then disappear the moment things get hard. Some will start down the path but let the worries of life and the pull of wealth choke it out. And some — some — will hear it, receive it, and be completely transformed.
This is how the kingdom of heaven is going to work.
And people don’t want to hear that — because the moment you start framing it this way, we do what we always do. We start sorting the people around us. Bob’s clearly first-soil. Jimmy was second-soil all the way. Larry got seduced by prosperity. But me? I’m in church every Sunday. I’m doing great.
We turn it into a taxonomy for judging other people. And that’s exactly the moralistic trap I fell into for years.
Notice that there’s nothing in this parable about tilling the soil. In that era, farmers often sowed first and tilled afterward. The whole “get your heart right so you can receive the word” framework isn’t actually in the text. That’s us importing our assumptions.
The Real Question
The question this parable actually puts before us is simpler and harder than soil types: What are you going to do when you hear something in the gospel that you don’t like?
Because the Jesus way will challenge you. It challenged people then and it challenges us now. Love your neighbor. Who’s my neighbor? He tells a story about a Samaritan — despised, written off — and says, that’s your neighbor. Love them. Love your enemy? That doesn’t compute. And yet Jesus says, if you only love people you already like, what’s the point?
The path is narrow. The Jesus way demands dying to self. It demands a self-sacrificial love that actually costs something. That’s the whole point of Lent. That’s why we take communion — to remember who Jesus is, what he has done, and that his way is the way of the cross.
And self-sacrificial love hurts. It isn’t tidy. So the question is: when we encounter gospel truth that demands we live and love differently — toward our neighbors, our enemies, and sometimes even toward ourselves — how will we respond? Will we hear and be changed? Or will we find some way to kick the seed back out?
Will we be ever seeing, but never perceiving? Ever hearing, but never understanding?
There is grace here. The kingdom Jesus reveals is grace and mercy and unconditional love, through and through. But the kicker is this: we are called to turn around and live that same way.
That’s the hard part. And it’s worth wrestling with all week.
Questions to sit with: Where am I hearing the gospel and resisting it? What is the Jesus way asking of me that I’d rather not do? And is there someone — like that friend in my group chat — who loves me enough to hold me to it?