Would you still plant the seeds if you knew?

What if only some of it matters?

You decide you want to try your hand at planting veggies so you prepare a patch in the garden behind your house and you plant four sets of seeds.

A professional gardening expert comes over for a meal and you take them out back to show them what you’ve done. After looking at the setup they tell you that three quarters of your plants are destined to fail. But the other quarter is likely to produce a really tasty crop. She leaves before telling you just which quarter is the good one.

You know that it is going to take six months of care and work – watering and weeding and debugging and protecting – to see those crops through to the point of being ready. But 75% of them are going to die along the way.

Do you even continue? Even for the potential of that 25%?

The love of most will grow cold

i was chatting to my friend Annie about this after her birthday celebration the other day [you know, lighten the mood a little]. The bible seems to indicate that most people won’t ‘get it’. What do we do with that? This is Jesus talking:

‘Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold,  but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.’ [Matthew 24.12]

Jesus had crowds follow Him, hanging on His every word… until it mattered. When ships were hitting fans, suddenly there was an eerie silence of crowd absence. Even his little band of 12 didn’t fully make it. One betrayed him, one denied him, the rest fled [some naked]. After three years of focused full-time ministry, Jesus didn’t have a lot to show #YetHeDidItAnyways #DidHeMaybeKnowSomethingWeDont

So for Jesus the small yield of vegetables seemed to be worth all the work that He put into the entire crop…

Paul suggests a similar thing in his letter to Timothy:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.  People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive,disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,  without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,  treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—  having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. [2 Timothy 3.1-4]

And if you didn’t recognise it, the original vegetable story was a bit of a play on the story Jesus tells in Matthew 13 about the sower and the seed. A farmer sows some seed and some falls on the path, some of it falls on rocky soil, some falls among thorns, and the rest falls into good soil. A whole lot of that seed was wasted and if the farmer knew that, do you think he would have bothered throwing the seed at all?

We might be thinking couldn’t he have just thrown it better? But is it perhaps possible that the soil is only shown to be good by the plant that is produced?

So Annie, do we continue doing this?

That’s the question, really? If the love of most is going to grow cold – and you don’t have to spend too much time on social media or out in the real world to see that we are already there – do we carry on… for the sake of the love of the few.

i have never been a huge fan of the much used christianese disclaimer of ‘If only one person is saved this whole thing is worth it’… because as true as it might be – and i believe it is to some extent – it almost feels like it gives people permission to settle.

Was Jesus okay with the fact that in His lifetime the love of most grew cold? i seriously doubt it. Was Jesus okay that the rich young ruler rejected Him and walked away sad because the price of following Jesus was too high? i cannot believe that. But He still let him go. Another of those Both/Ands we need to keep on looking out for.

It’s okay to celebrate the few who get it, to fight for the few who will get it, to give your life for the few who will get it [and even for those who won’t] and still be terribly sad that the others didn’t get it. i believe Jesus was utterly disappointed that more people didn’t get it because getting it meant life to the full, it meant entering into a way of living that was absolutely the best for you and the people around you and even the planet.

And we keep on going back to the greatest commandment. When things get hard or confusing always always always head back to the ‘Love God, love people’ of Matthew 22:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Go ahead, plant those seeds… [you got something better to do?]

[UPDATE] Annie read this and commented and i thought this was incredibly put so:

One aspect to the parable of the soil and the good soil being the soil that reveals someone who ‘got’ what Jesus was teaching, is perhaps that the other 3 soils reveal maybe where we get stuck and never realise our true potency or bear fruit..

 

The first soil – the word (seed) was heard but the ground was too hard to receive the seed and so it never takes root, grows, ripens or multiplies.

The second soil – the word was heard and understood but as the seed begins to develop, it can’t develop roots because there are rocks in the soil preventing it. Faith soon withers and dies without roots to sustain it.

The third soil – the word was heard, understood, and obeyed to a point but the worries and deceitfulness of material wealth, possessions, privilege etc… choke the word and the seed actually dies.

The fourth soil – the word was heard, understood, obeyed and multiplies… this is good soil according to Jesus.

 

So perhaps there is a big critique here for how the church has understood and taught about bring a disciple of Jesus.

 

Discipleship has often been a course, a teaching, an event – disciples are then left to decide for themselves if they’ll do anything in response… it becomes a personal decision and choice which is extraneous to being part of a community that is seeking to faithfully follow Jesus and imitate him… There is no natural or inherent accountability as a result of seeking to face the hard, shallow, or idolatrous attitudes or practices of our lives.

 

If we long to be good soil and help others become so too, we should be asking what we need to do to help cultivate that soil – prayerful, contemplative action and interaction is essential. Allowing the Spirit of God to highlight our blindness and our captivity to the thinking and practices which keep us from becoming fruitful. Orthopraxis replacing orthodoxy… learning by doing together…

 

Apprenticeship, immersion and learning/reflection (KOLB and other tools about learning cycles) rather than didactic teaching and classroom theology.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I love robust theological teaching and discourse but unless it’s worked out in the field, the soil of our lives can never become as fertile as God intends it to be.

Annie Kirke, world changer.