The time may come when people wonder what ‘broadcasting’ was, because with the move from open-access transmission of programmes across the airwaves to more restrictive and more targeted approaches, the days of the big TV channels may be numbered. In fact, as we go digital, go online and go subscription-access, one day it may no longer be possible to discuss with friends and neighbours ‘what was on the telly last night’ – because the networks will send us each completely different schedules depending on known preferences and predilections. We’re certainly a long way from the 1977 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special, when 28 million people – literally half the population of the UK! – sat down to watch a show at the same time. It raises interesting questions about what a society has in common when it has no shared narrative (or rather has a series of parallel narratives pursued by different groups with limited overlap).

But go back 150 years and everyone knew what broadcasting was: it was precisely what we hear in today’s Gospel: ‘A sower went out to sow …’ With a sweep of his arm he swished the precious seed, saved from last year’s harvest, across the ground he had prepared. It was a method which had been used since the birth of agriculture, and which changed little until the advent, with the Industrial Revolution, of seed-drills able to drop single grains evenly in neat rows.

‘A sower went out to sow.’ Jesus’ peasant audience knew this process from painful experience – both the aches and pains left by those days of preparing the ground and dropping seed and the pangs of hunger at winter’s end, aches which made not eating the seed corn an act of some self-discipline in a subsistence economy when, come the sowing season in the spring, the larder was always bare.

And what would they make of the sower depicted by Jesus – dropping seed on the path, between the rocks, among the thorns (which a good farmer surely would have cleared beforehand) as well as on the ground which had been carefully prepared? Is he just telling them what happens as a general rule, or is this farmer a caricature? Would the audience have shrugged their shoulders in self-recognition – ‘Yes, that’s just the way it is! Life’s a bitch …’ – or would they have laughed at this show of incompetence.

I happen to think Jesus was probably pretty good at slapstick: think of the man with a plank in his eye or threading a camel through the eye of a needle or straining out gnats or blind guides leading people into pits … I like to think of him acting out these memes and getting a laugh before people realised whom he had in his sights.

I also think that a good working assumption when we hear one of Jesus’ parables is that he’s talking about himself, and I suggest we read this parable in this way. Jesus is saying here: ‘What I do is I sow seeds in the most unlikely places …’ The people who were officially good and officially holy were scandalised that he so often went off-piste, wasting his time on the hardened no-hopers and those with tangled, broken lives, instead of coming to synagogue and temple where the soil was rich and the ground well-prepared. What the hell did he think he was doing on the margins, among people who didn’t count – tax-collectors, sinners, lepers and the rest?

Well, sometimes, just sometimes, says Jesus, miracles happen and ‘the seed takes root and produces grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear.’ Yes, says Jesus. I am a deliberately inefficient ‘broadcaster’ and I’m willing to let so much good grain go to waste, because what ultimately matters is only this: the glory of fruitfulness in previously fruitless lives.

You’d like to think that Jesus’ own followers would have understood that. But it seems they didn’t grasp it any more easily than their unbelieving neighbours. And after a couple of generations they’d reduced the story to an allegory of good and evil and what’s wrong with other people’s souls – all the explanation Matthew piles on at the end of the story.

How much more beautiful, I suggest, is the story of a crazy farmer going out to sow, wasting all that precious seed, out of love, a belief in the goodness hidden in the most unlikely places and a vision of the possibility of fruitfulness where hope had died long since. Doesn’t it just make you want to open up the beaten-down, rocky, tangled, thistly bits of your own story to the Lord, in the hope that a seed of his Word might take root there and bring forth its crop?