GENEROUS SOIL
‘But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with patience.’
The heart that receives the Word with gladness and proceeds to live upon it and to test it in life and action, resisting all temptations to forsake it, this is the heart that is in sympathy with the Word, that is in that sense ‘honest and good.’ This brings us somewhat nearer to realising what the good soil upon which the seed of the sower fell, what it is when it represents a heart prepared and influenced and vitalised by the Word of God.
I. There is a certain condition of the man that appreciates and that advances to welcome the Word of God when submitted to it. What is that condition? The honesty and goodness are not the fruit of the Word, seeing that they are the attitude in which they are to receive the Word. And yet just as there is a kind of soil fitted to receive and promote the seed of the sower which falls upon it, so there must be a cognate condition of heart. The ‘honest and good’ is a well-known combination of Greek words, a familiar coupling of epithets which have acquired an almost technical meaning; and when applied to men it meant a man of noble, kind, and generous race, worthy of one’s descent, true to the primal birth and endowments. I think that that word ‘generous,’ seeing that we ourselves have long been accustomed to apply it to inanimate things, would really be a very adequate rendering of the two Greek words here in combination. We know what we mean when we speak of the soil as a generous soil; it is a metaphor, no doubt, but it is one that we all accept. And even that further use of ‘generous’ in the sense of giving is not out of harmony with it.
II. A generous soil is a soil that gives as well as receives; it gives something of its own to meet half-way the boon conferred upon it; and so they both co-operate to the blessed end of bringing forth fruit. So the heart that hears the Word with gladness, it too is prepared to give as well as take.
III. Those who accepted the Word.—When we think of the various personages in the Bible history whose acceptance of the Word to rich and blessed ends is brought under our notice, it is abundantly clear that this description does not mean that the Word of God is not accepted by those who only come to it with a spotless record of past lives. We know, and it is the one hope and consolation of our lives to know, that it was not the spotlessly clean ecclesiastics of our Lord’s day who appreciated and accepted the message that He brought, but it was the sin-stained, those who approached Christ with no antecedent qualities for honesty and goodness; not the respectable but the unrespectable class for the most part supplied the hearts in whose soil the Word found its most fertilising acceptance. The man who was only too well aware of his unbelief, not the man who prided himself on his orthodoxy; the woman who had been a sinner, not the highly born lady who would have spurned her from her presence; not the Scribe who came into court with the cleanest of clean hands in such matters. Such were the subjects on which the Word tried its power with the most wondrous success. And therefore it must have been all such who came under the rule laid down by our text. The ‘honest and good’ heart describes these outcasts, these downright sinners at that moment when the Word found them and was welcomed and began its beneficent work.
Rev. Canon Ainger.
Illustration
‘Paradoxical as it may seem, it was not the strangeness or difficulty of our Lord’s first parable that was a stumbling-block to many who heard it, it was rather their familiarity and their simplicity. The defect in the listener who was offended by them was not that of mental acuteness, they were not so dull as that they failed to understand a simple metaphor; it was that they were so accustomed to receive a religious teaching of a different kind, that this new sort seemed as it first fell on their ear trivial. If the Pharisees and doctors of the law were asked to deliver a religious homily it would have been something altogether different, something in fact quite over the heads of the unlearned; and therefore when this new Rabbi proceeded to unfold His religious message, and began to tell simple fables of the ploughman and sower, and all the homely details of the life around them, it seemed to the anxious listener a mockery, an evasion of a sacred duty. It was not because the analogy was too hard for them to understand, but because it was too easy, that they were first offended.’