Week 3 Storytelling: The Sons and Their Harvest

A farmer sowing his seeds. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

An aging farmer had three sons, and as he felt like he did not have much longer to live, he wished to pass on his wisdom and his land to his sons. He fairly divided up the land into three equal parts and gave a plot to each of them, instructing them to do their best to maintain the soil and have good harvests.

The youngest son did not have much experience with farming, as his brothers had always been called first to help on the land. He tried his best to sow and till the seed, but got frustrated easily and did not finish the job. Eventually, he simply let the land be, and weeds and thorns grew up and crowded the land, overpowering the fruit. At the end of the year, he had harvested barely anything and was very disappointed in his crop.

The second brother fared slightly better than the first. He knew what to do in order to produce a plentiful harvest, but the land that his father gave him had several trees on it. The trees drew all of the nutrients out of the soil and made a rocky foundation. The crop grew quickly soon after he planted his seeds, but when their roots went deep enough into the soil, they died because of the lack of nutrients. The second brother saw that there was nothing he could do--although he tilled the soil day and night, there was no way to make the land healthy again. He became frustrated at the rapid growth and withering of his fruit.

The third brother, however, had a much better yield. His land was dense and had good soil. He worked tirelessly, constantly digging up and turning over the soil. After he sowed his seeds, he watched as his crop multiplied. Day after day he picked his crops, noticing that he had more than either of his brothers or any of his neighbors. Looking at his harvest, he realized the hard work that was necessary to produce much fruit.

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Author's note: When I read the parable of the sower in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4, I equated the sower to a farmer planting his seeds to harvest a good crop (a fairly understandable and self-explanatory likening). The original parable that Jesus preached is about a sower spreading his seeds, with mixed results--some seeds fall on barren land and cannot grow, others land in rocky soil so their roots could not grow deep and they eventually wither away, and still others are planted in good soil and flourish. Here, Jesus tells his followers that their spreading of God's Word will similarly bring both fruit and frustration.

I wanted to retell the story in a different way, so I looked up stories about farmers. Because Jesus's parables are meant to teach lessons to his followers, I wanted to incorporate another story that also intends to give its readers a lasting moral, so I searched in Aesop's fables and came across the story about a farmer and his sons. In this, the farmer is ailing and on his deathbed, and he wishes to pass on his land to his sons and make sure that they have a good harvest. He tells them that there is a treasure hidden somewhere on the property and that it could be theirs if they find it. They dig frantically and find nothing, but the next year, the land yields an abundance of crops because the land was thoroughly tilled. The moral here is "Industry is itself a treasure."

The overall theme that I wanted to get across was the blending of these two stories: from a biblical point of view, it can be said that the spreading of God's Word can take a lot of effort--it does not always fall on accepting ears and it takes a lot of investment to make faith work. Even from a non-religious point of view, though, the lesson of reaping what one sows is a good reminder to all to be diligent in every goal that one may have.

Bibliography:
The Gospel of Mark, chapter 4
King James Bible (1611).
Found in the Un-Textbook.

The Farmer and His Sons
Aesop's Fables, illustrated by Milo Winter. 1919.
Source: Project Gutenberg.