Monica

“Nobody, in other words - not the devil, not the world, not the flesh, not even ourselves - can take us away from the Love that will not let us go. We can, of course, squirm in his grip and despise his holding of us, and we can no doubt get ourselves into one hell of a mess by doing so. But if he is God the Word who both makes and reconciles us, there is no way - no way, literally, even in hell - that we will ever find ourselves anywhere else than in the very thick of both our creation and our reconciliation. All the evil in the universe, whether from the devil or from us, is now and ever shall be just part of the divine ecology.
And the Sower says that. The seed eaten by birds is as much seed as the seed that produced a hundredfold. The snatching of the Word by the devil - and the rejection of it by the shallow and the choking of it by the worldly - all take place within the working of the kingdom, not prior to it or outside of it. It is the Word alone, and not the interference with it, that finally counts. True enough, and fittingly enough, the most obvious point in the whole parable is that the fullest enjoyment of the fruitfulness of the Word is available only to those who interfere with it least. But even in making that point, Jesus still hammers away at the sovereignty and sole effectiveness of the Word. Those on the good ground, he says, are those who simply hear the Word, accept it, and bear fruit: some thirty-, some sixty-, and some a hundredfold. It's not that they do anything, you see; rather, it's that they don't do things that get in the Word's way. It's the Word, and the Word alone, that does all the rest.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus

“The whole purpose of the coming of the Word into the world is to produce people in whom the power of the kingdom will bear fruit. But since the kingdom is fully, albeit mysteriously, present in the Word
(since, in other words, the Word's fruitfulness is not in question but is already an accomplished fact), it is chiefly for our sakes that the parable enjoins the necessity of response. The biggest difference made by responses to the Word is the difference they make to us, for us, and in us. They decide not whether the Word will achieve his purposes but whether we will enjoy his achievement - or find ourselves in opposition to it.
Admittedly, I am leaning once again in the direction of a descriptive rather than a prescriptive interpretation ofJesus' words. What he is saying in this parable seems to me to be of a piece with all his other loving, if often sad, commentaries on our condition. He is not threatening some kind of retaliation by the Word against people who fail to make the best response; rather, he is almost wistfully portraying what we miss when we fall short and fail to bear fruit.
And there is the Word. In the case of even the most promising of the deficient responses to the sowing of the Word (namely, in the verse about the seed that fell among thorns - Matt. 13:22; Mark 4:18), the result specified is that it becomes dkarpos, without fruit, unfruitful. For a plant, the failure to bear fruit is not a punishment visited on it by the seed, but an unhappy declination on the plant's part from what the seed had in mind for it. It is a missing of its own fullness, its own maturity - even, in some deep sense, of its own life. So too with us. If we make deficient responses to the Word, we do not simply get ourselves in dutch; rather, we fail to become ourselves at all.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus

“But what needs to be emphasized here is that the differences can never be interpreted as meaning that the operative power of the seed - or the operative power of the Word - is in any way dependent on circumstantial cooperation.
Perversely, though, we seem to prefer that interpretation. The history of Christian thought is riddled with virtualism. "Sure," we have said, "the Lamb of God has taken away all the sins of the world." But then we have proceeded to give the impression that unless people did
something special to activate it, his forgiveness would remain only virtually, not actually, theirs. Think of some of the things we have said to people. We have told them that unless they confessed to a priest, or had the sacrifice of the mass applied specifically to their case, or accepted Jesus in the correct denominational terms - or hit the sawdust trail, did penance, cried their eyes out, or straightened up and flew right - the seed, who is the Word present everywhere in all his forgiving power, might just as well not really have been sown.
Once again, this note of power actually present - this flat precluding of even a hint of virtualism in the proclamation of the Gospel - comes through even more clearly in the rest of the parables of the kingdom, especially when they involve, as they do here, the imagery of seeds.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus