Jack Hardaway
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If only Jesus had known about zucchini.
I’m sure he would have had a parable about it, the parable of the zucchini.
Crazy amounts of produce in a mad tumble of green sticky leaves.
A parable of surprising abundance.

God plants crazy gardens.
That is what we hear in the Gospel today.
That’s what it’s like to meet God, a crazy garden, with crazy fruit all over the place, producing and yielding fruit sometimes a hundred fold, sometimes sixty, sometimes thirty.

A parable of reckless overwhelming abundance.
Jesus brings forth explosive fruitfulness.
To encounter and experience the living God is to be accosted and overwhelmed by a sower casting seed everywhere, without concern, without hesitation and without excuse, gratuitous grace.
Birds and brambles and rocks have a hay day in the wild garden, and in the middle of that overgrown wilderness of gratuity there is good soil where surprising things grow with extravagant abundance.

That is what the parable shows us, the encounter and experience of drawing near to God is to find unexpected abundance in the wreck and ruin of the crazy gardens of our lives.

God is like that. Jesus is like that.

Can we hear that? That Grace really is grace? Gratuitous and free?
Is that what faith is like for me?
That is where the parable grabs us, can we live with that kind of freedom?
Parables have that intuitive dig and twist into our gut.
Grace beyond measure or control.

Jesus tells the parable a second time, the second time as an allegory, where everything symbolizes something else. It isn’t as fun as the first telling as a parable.
Though it is easier for us to follow. We are a literal minded people, so something literally standing for something else is easy for us to follow.
The evil one, being rootless, persecutions, the lure of wealth, those who hear and understand.
It’s easy to get.
So at the end of the parable we ask ourselves, “Am I good soil?” Or, “How do I become good soil?” Or, “Is my life fruitful?”
Something like that.
For Matthew a fruitful life is a life of discipleship that bears the fruit of mercy.

In the parable we encounter God, what God is like, a crazy garden
In the allegory, we encounter our lives in that garden.

Who am I to be in God’s crazy Garden?
If God is like this, then who am I?
Can I share gratuitous grace without hesitation or excuse?

Hear then the parable of the zucchini.
In a world of not enough, a crazy garden is being planted, yielding an absurd abundance, and it is taking over.
Let anyone with ears listen.