A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on July 12, 2026 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Matthew 13: 1-9

I wonder when you first came across the notion of a risk register. A risk register is a document that seeks to identify, assess and offset things that go wrong with a project or organisation. Typically you’d put a score from 1 for low to 5 for high on how likely and how damaging a setback might be. Then you’d multiply the two numbers together to establish a risk score. Next you’d then assess your potential to mitigate that setback and put a name against the person whose job it was to do that.

Take the chances of you pressing ‘reply all’ when you meant to make a derogatory remark about your boss, but thought you were sending it your email to only one colleague. It scores 1 for likely, because you know the cc line is the most dangerous one on your screen, and 5 for damaging, because it would be catastrophic and may lose you your job. So the ‘reply all’ risk comes out at 5 out of a possible 25.

Risk registers began in the insurance and safety industries in the early twentieth century. By the 1990s it became standard to assess risk with a multiplication formula, and identify mitigation and assign risk owners. But with the onset of AI, risk has become all-consuming in its ambition and hold on the corporate imagination. There are said to be seven kinds of risk: strategic, operational, regulatory, financial, reputational, digital and ecological. I attended a meeting recently where someone said risk should be the first item on every agenda, regardless of the organisation or its purpose. Organisations are starting to believe they can genuinely control everything, and by describing, anticipating, assigning and mitigating risk they can make themselves impregnable.

Well, I’ve got news for the corporate world. The first risk register was composed by Jesus in Matthew chapter 13. He was 1900 years ahead of his time. Think about the mindset of the early church: on the one hand, in Jesus they’ve found the words and actions and relationships of eternal life; on the other hand, most people still seem impervious to the gospel. They can’t get their heads round the paradox. So Jesus makes a spreadsheet and compiles a risk register. It has three major risks.

Risk number one is the path. The path represents the project that never anywhere near got off the ground. It was flawed from the outset, faced hostile competition, and never made any impact. Risk number two is the rocky ground. The concept was good, the competition wasn’t a serious problem, and it had a promising launch. But once it had made early inroads, it had no second wind. When it faced obstacles, it had nothing to fall back on and foundered. Risk number three is the thorns. Again, the concept was good, and there was a lot of mileage in the whole idea; but the competition was absolutely cutthroat. The thorns were in possession, and they were ruthless and merciless in maintaining their terrain. Yet as the parable concludes, there is a way forward. There’s good soil. With good soil there’s limitless potential. The only issue is the size of the yield. Thirty, sixty or hundredfold returns are well within scope.

Notice how the parable provides a succinct summary of all the characters we meet in Matthew’s gospel. The path, where Jesus never stood a chance, resembles the scribes, the Pharisees, the Judaean leadership in Jerusalem. The rocky ground, where there was early promise but not staying power, corresponds to the disciples, particularly Peter, James and John. The thorns, where distractions and rival temptations take away good intentions, matches Herod Antipas who made a rash promise to his stepdaughter and the rich young man who wanted to follow Jesus but had many possessions. The good soil, where disciples hear and accept and respond and bear fruit, connects with people like the woman with haemorrhages and Jairus’ daughter whose lives show what Jesus can do.

It’s a feature of many, perhaps most of Jesus’ parables that our first instinct is to make them about us. That’s been so from the beginning: Matthew’s gospel itself records an interpretation of this parable that makes it about how we can earnestly seek to be good soil and not the path, rocky ground or thorns. But the parables come alive when we realise they’re not primarily moral fables about us; instead, they’re provocative portrayals of God. You start to appreciate this parable when you go beyond examining details about the different kinds of soil and relating them to your own life and the lives of those around you. The parable’s transformed when you realise the seed is Jesus.

The Father’s the sower, and the Father casts Jesus far and wide. Look how Jesus’ ministry is a mixture of path, rocky and thorny ground. He’s rejected by some, momentarily and flakily embraced by others, and accepted but eventually dropped by others again. And yet in the resurrection he lands in good soil; and through the Holy Spirit brings forth fruit in abundance. The God we behold in this parable is bewilderingly and exhilaratingly far from the God of our risk registers. Just look at the characteristics of this God. I’ll list a few now.

This God is troublingly weak. Just a seed. Not a big strong castle or an immovable mountain: a tiny seed. Remember the Hans Christian Anderson folk tale about the Emperor’s new clothes – where everyone fawned on the monarch and praised him for his finery, but only a little boy in the crowd was ingenuous enough to say, ‘The Emperor is naked’? Jesus isn’t the Emperor or the courtiers, but the little boy. He comes among us powerless except for the force of his logic, insight, authority and wisdom.

This God is startlingly wasteful. If we assume the same quantity of seed fell on each of the four soils, three-quarters of the seed was wasted. Jesus is like a geyser gushing up out of the ground, where three-quarters of the water lands in places where it won’t make anything grow and will just evaporate. We often use the phrase ‘a criminal waste’ when we assume something is a scarce resource, and we must guard it carefully. But Jesus isn’t a scarce resource. God’s desire to be with us is infinite, and will outlast, outflank and outrun our ignorant and perverse resistance.

This God is a terrible failure. This isn’t a story in which the path, rocks and thorns are ploughed up by some off-stage bulldozer and all in the end becomes good soil. It seems the sower can’t or won’t do anything about the other kinds of soil. Most of the seed fails to bear fruit. If you think about the early church, it had one central quandary: if Jesus was the Son of God, how on earth did he come to be crucified? Either he wasn’t God at all, and it was all a big hoax – or, this was a rather different God from the one people had anticipated. The seed doesn’t destroy the path, rocks or thorns: there’s no vengeance or victory or vindication. There’s just a constant outpouring of seed. There’s a Greek word kenosis, which means pouring out. It’s sometimes used to describe God becoming incarnate among us in Jesus and being subject to danger, injury, rejection and horror. Well, this parable is a portrayal of that kenosis: Jesus, the seed, is poured out into the earth, the place of encounter between God and humanity and the wider creation. And a lot of that encounter is failure. That’s part of what it means for God to be fully human: a lot of human existence is failure. God experiences that failure too.

This God is mesmerisingly extravagant. Remember the slightly different stories about a woman pouring out a large amount of perfume over Jesus and drying him with her hair? Jesus’ entourage is horrified at the absurd and immoral waste. But Jesus says, this is how God is. God pours out way too much love, way too much life, way too much hope, way too much trust, and knows from the beginning it won’t all find a happy home. But Jesus is God’s volcano of the lava of love, and to say God is culpably extravagant is like telling a volcano it brought forth too much lava this time.

The word that sums up the craziness of the Father sowing so much and the Son being the seed sown is risk. The so-called parable of the sower is really the parable of God’s divine risk. The shocking, arresting and chaotic message of this parable is that God upsets our whole notion of a risk register. A risk register is a measured, coordinated, sober attempt to identify dangers in order to calibrate, apportion, address, mitigate and ultimately neutralise them. God doesn’t seem to work like that. God’s risks are astronomical. Jesus is the most precious thing God is. Jesus is let loose upon the earth like seed is cast upon soil. And, like in the parable, it mostly ends badly. But what the parable doesn’t quite tell us – it is only 100 words, after all – is the precise difference between the fourth soil and the first three. The first three soils are all different kinds of death. The fourth soil is new, abundant life. The parable’s telling us that Jesus is God’s weakness, wastefulness, failure and extravagance – but that God has no regrets, because that terrifying, reckless, astonishing risk is transformed into the overflowing, limitless abundance of eternal life. And the way that’s done is through resurrection.

And that makes us look at our own lives a whole different way. It’s not about efficiency, frugality and eradicating risk. On judgement day we won’t be asked, ‘Were you careful with your resources? Did you never waste a dime? Were you measured in your judgements? Were you careful never to fail?’ We’ll look back on our lives and behold four different soils. Sometimes in our souls and in our efforts among nearest and strangers we’ll see that Jesus fell on the path. Sometimes we’ll look back on our relationships and endeavo...

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