Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

by N.T. Wright

Many of Jesus’s stories pick up Israel’s stories from long before, stories about God and Israel, the Exodus, the creation itself, the trials and tribulations of God and God’s people, and—not least—the horrible exile in Babylon and God’s repeated promises to restore his people’s fortunes at last. This, in particular, is the reason why some of Jesus’s key parables were about seeds being sown. The idea of a farmer sowing a seed—to be sure, one of the most natural and common sights in an agricultural economy—had been used centuries before by the prophets to promise that Israel’s God, having plucked up the plant that was Israel, would come back and sow once more the seeds that would bear fruit, fruit that this time would last (see, e.g., Isa. 1:9; 6:13; 37:31–2; Jer. 31:27; Ezra 9:2). Here is Matthew’s parable of the sower (parallels are in Mark 4:1–20 and Luke 8:4–15):