Sowing for the Birds and Worms: The Gospel of Thomas and Great Life

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A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation

(A recorded version of the following piece will appear shortly)

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Although I feel sure nearly all of you will know Jesus’ parable of the sower, found in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark 4:14–20, Matthew 13:18–23, and Luke 8:11–15) and in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 9), here it is once again in the version found in Thomas:

Jesus said, ‘Behold, the sower went out, took a handful of seeds, and scattered them. Some fell on the road and the birds came and pecked them up. Others fell on rock; they did not sink roots into the soil and produce heads of grain. Others fell among thorns; they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil and produced good fruit—sixty measures and one hundred twenty measures.’

The primary difference between this version and those in the Synoptic Gospels is that the latter go on to offer the reader an interpretation of what the parable means.

The Synoptic authors present the sower as God or Jesus, the seed as the message about the Kingdom of God, and the different types of soil as the possible states of an individual hearer’s heart or mind. The hard road represents a wholly closed mind from which the evil one — also referred to as Satan or the devil — can immediately snatch the seed away, in the way the birds peck up the seed. The rocky ground represents hearers who accept the message with immediate enthusiasm but, because they have no spiritual depth, find that their growth in understanding cannot be sustained in the face of challenges. The thorny ground represents those whose everyday concerns, such as the pursuit of money and selfish desires, choke the message and cause it to become unfruitful. And the good soil represents those who hear the message with honest, open minds, in which it can grow well and fruitfully.

But in the Gospel of Thomas, no interpretation is offered, and we are left to contemplate the plain parable alone. When you read it without comment, something striking jumps out. At least, it did for me, having not returned to the Synoptic versions in a long while. You suddenly realise that if you stick with the traditional interpretation of the sower’s identity — namely, a wise farmer concerned to produce a good crop for humans — then this sower is extraordinarily incompetent. Remember that seed is highly valuable, so no competent farmer would throw it around in all directions, willy-nilly, in the hope that a quarter of it stands a chance of bearing proper fruit.

But what if, for Thomas, the sower is not meant to represent a human farmer at all, but a symbol of something else entirely? And what might be the aim of this manner of sowing? The American philosopher James Heisig, whose work bridges Western and Japanese religious thought, offers us a way in by pointing out that in Thomas's eyes:

‘Apparently it is not enough for good ground and seeds to come together; any experienced farmer could see to that. But here it takes a foolish sower to get spectacular results, which leaves the reader with the nagging question of whether this sower might know something that his fellow farmers do not. If so, then there is a more radical irony in the parable: something as ordinary as scattering seeds is used not to apply the innocent conventional wisdom of the farmer to some spiritual matter but to make light of it’ (Jesus’ Twin: A Commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, New York: Crossroad, 2015).

And what might this change of viewpoint reveal? As always with parables of this kind, there are a variety of interpretations we could run with. But in the context of the Gospel of Thomas itself — and from my own pantheistic or panentheistic perspective, one that sees the divine not as separate from the world but as intimately present within it — the interpretation that resonates most is that offered by Heisig, who thinks the parable is designed to make us ‘stop and think whether there is anything more noble about seed producing fruit than nourishing birds or worms’ (ibid.).

In other words, in this version of the parable, the sower’s competence and wisdom are seen in their willingness and ability to provide seed for all creatures great and small: humans, birds, worms and, by implication, more besides. To use the term I find most comfortable and persuasive — though you may have your own — the sower in the Gospel of Thomas turns out to be Great Life, Daiseimei, a concept drawn from Japanese religious philosophy that names the boundless, generative force underlying all existence. In the Gospel of Thomas it is presented as the very principle of free and unobstructed creative evolution, sowing without regard to human utility. And Heisig concludes his own short commentary on this passage by saying:

‘In a word, we are invited to a transformation of perspective whereby the ordinary values by which we judge the things of life are held in suspense, the better to see, just as it is and without judgment, what is right in front of our face’ (ibid.).

In our own time and place, such a transformation of perspective feels urgent. The Synoptic reading, for all its spiritual richness, centres on human hearers and their responses; the reading of Thomas presented here, by contrast, distributes value across all creatures, refusing to privilege human fruitfulness over the nourishing and, therefore, the fruitfulness of birds or worms. And in an age where the privileging of human activity over that of all other non-human beings is proving so destructive to the well-being of everything on our shared planet, that refusal to privilege, that radical generosity of the sower, of Great Life, is not merely a unusual interpretive possibility, it is, I believe, vital.