The parable of the sower is well known has a profound background context. NT Wright – always a good read – provides the following commentary.

“This parable is not simply a wry comment on the way in which many hear the gospel message and fail to respond to it appropriately. Nor is it merely a homely illustration taken from the farming practices of Galilee. It is a typically Jewish story about the way in which the kingdom of God was coming. It has two roots in particular, which help to explain what Jesus was about.

First, it is rooted in the prophetic language of return from exile. Jeremiah and other prophets spoke of God’s sowing his people again in their own land. The Psalms, at the very point where they are both celebrating the return from exile and praying for it to be completed, sang of those who sowed in tears reaping with shouts of joy. But above all the book of Isaiah used the image of sowing and reaping as a controlling metaphor for the great work of new creation that God would accomplish after the exile. “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand for ever.” “As the rain and snow water the earth, so shall my word be. It shall not return to me empty, but it will accomplish my purpose.” [Isa 55:11] New plants, new shrubs, will spring up before you as you return from exile. All this goes back to the story of Isaiah’s call in chapter 6, where the prophet sees Israel like a tree being cut down in judgment, and then the stump being burnt; but the holy seed is the stump, and from that stump there shall come forth new shoots.

It is that last passage—Isaiah 6:9–10—that Jesus quotes in Matthew 13:14–15, Mark 4:12 and Luke 8:10 by way of explanation of the parable of the Sower. The parable is about what God was doing in Jesus’ own ministry. God was not simply reinforcing Israel as she stood. He was not underwriting her national ambitions, her ethnic pride. He was doing what the prophets always warned: he was judging Israel for her idolatry and was simultaneously calling into being a new people, a renewed Israel, a returned-from-exile people of God.”

Wright, N. T. (1999). The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (pp. 40–41). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.