In part two I did not discuss an important facet of the interpretation of the sower parable: namely, the ambiguity concerning whether it is the word or the people who are sown. If you look carefully at verses 14-20, sometimes the seed that is sown is the word (14-15) and sometimes it is the people (16,18,20). What might be the significance of this? Was Mark just being sloppy?

The explanation for this apparent conundrum lies a bit later on in the Isaiah 6 passage from which Mark quotes. Isaiah reports God’s declaration that in spite of the devastating judgment to come upon the land, “as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land” (13). Here, the “holy seed” refers to the people of God. God’s activity in Jesus’ ministry was not only the sowing of the word in people, but the sowing of people in the land. More specifically, in Jesus God was re-sowing Israel, the people of His kingdom. Jesus confidently prophesied that this kingdom would grow like a mustard seed into “tallest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade” (Mk 4:32).

The kingdom God envisioned for His people has always been a kingdom to be established through the hearing of His word that leads to faith and obedience. To touch on a UBF favourite, before God prefaced his declaration to the Israelites that they would be for Him a kingdom of priests and a holy nation with the clause, “Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant….” (Ex 19:5). In this context it is also worth noting that what Jesus himself calls the first and greatest commandment, the Shema, also begins (as does the parable of the sower!) with the call to hear: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut 6:4-5). And apparently the word “to hear” in Hebrew also has the meaning, “to obey” so that there is no question of truly hearing God’s word but being disobedient to it. I hear echoes of James at this point: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says…. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:22,25).

Maybe this is starting to sound dangerously like law- or works-righteousness to you? Well, I would like to say two things about this (which, by the way, links this series back to a short discussion that went on between Joe, Dr. Ben and myself had in the comments on the last part of Joe’s 13-part series). First, even though I believe in justification by faith alone (Ro 1:17; 3:28), I also think we need to uphold James’ point that faith without works is dead (2:17,24), which I think Paul actually agrees with at several points even in the letter to the Romans (1:5; 6:16-18). John 6:29 brings this out neatly: “Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’ ” To bring this back to the sower parable, those who truly hear the word are those who also accept it and bear fruit. BUT, I also want to add that the obedience that comes from our faith and is integrally linked to it does not really come from us, and so there is still no room for boasting. In the language of the sower and connected parables in Mark 4, it is the seed sown in us that grows up and bear fruit, causing those who hear to grow up and bear fruit along with it. The seed grows up and bears fruit, and the kingdom of God comes, like this: “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain–first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head” (4:27-28). In other words, a life that bears the fruit of the kingdom is the natural outflow of the work of the word of God sown in us.

The last point I want to make is to draw attention once more to the reversal Mark makes of the apparent insider/outsider distinction based on Isaiah 6:9-10. The disciples, unlike those on the outside, have been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but they themselves do not understand. And they really don’t understand, as Mark makes clear over and over again throughout his gospel. I mentioned what happens in Mark 8 in the last post. We could also cite Mark 6 – the disciples see Jesus walking on the water, but they think it’s a ghost. After Jesus calms the wind and waves, Mark comments, “They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened” (6:51-52). Take a look also at 7:17-18. “Are you so dull?… Don’t you see..?” “Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?” (8:17-18) “But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it” (9:32). The disciples repeatedly fail to understand what is happening around them. They argue about who is the greatest instead of seeing the greatness of the kingdom revealed in Jesus who came to serve. They are indignant when they see Mary pour out her perfume on Jesus. They try to resist with violence against the mob that comes to arrest Jesus instead of understanding the way of the cross. They don’t believe the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.

What might Mark be trying to convey to his readers by presenting the disciples in this way? Remember that these very disciples are the apostles and leaders of the Church, the heroes of the faith for the early Christians Mark initially wrote for. If even these guys struggled so hard to understand the kingdom, what about us? Are we likely to be doing much better than they did? “Consider carefully what you hear,” Jesus warns us in Mark 4:24. The way I have often heard people deal with Mark 4 is to go through the different obstacles (path, rocks, thorns) and ask what sort of soil we are. In those discussions, hardly anyone thinks he or she is like the hardened path that the word doesn’t even get inside. But I think our hearts are often hardened like the path, hardened by repeated use. We have heard the gospel stories so many times that, just as ground that gets packed down by frequent travelling, we have such fixed ideas about what they mean that we aren’t really open to hear anymore, and the word Jesus is speaking to us now often doesn’t even get in.

I think we have a lot more to learn from blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10:46-52) than we would like to admit. (I am mainly talking about myself here, as I continue to realize how much I have to learn and how little I know of God’s kingdom.) Bartimaeus was under no illusions about his blindness. With this in mind he cried out with all his strength, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” When Jesus asked him what he wanted, he simply said, “Rabbi, I want to see.” To this man, Jesus replied, ” ‘Go… your faith has healed you.’ Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus along the road” (52). The attitude we need to have as hearers of the word combines a serious humility: sober judgment about our ignorance, but combined with a vibrant hope in Jesus, who “even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak” (7:37; see also 7:33-35 and 8:22-26).

God has indeed given us the secret of His kingdom in the person of Jesus. Now it’s up to us to heed His main imperative, “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” (9:7).

References

1. Bailey, K.E. Poet and Peasant: A Literary Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976.
2. Capon, R.F. Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
3. Crossan, J.D. “The Parables of Jesus,” in Interpretation, July 2002, pp. 247-259.
4. Evans, C.A. “On the Isaianic Background of the Sower Parable,” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 47:1985, pp. 464-468.
5. France, R.T. The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
6. Hedrick, C.W. Many Things in Parables: Jesus and his Modern Critics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.
7. Heil, J.P. “Reader-Response and the Narrative Context of the Parables about
8. Growing Seed in Mark 4:1-34,” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 54:1992, pp. 271-286.
9. Myers, C. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988.
10. Snodgrass, K. Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
11. Westermann, C. The Parables of Jesus in the Light of the Old Testament. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990.
12. Yoder Neufeld, T.R. Recovering Jesus: The Witness of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007.

I chose to discuss the parable of the sower because it is the “parable of parables” or the “master parable.” In Mark 4:13 Jesus says to his disciples (the Twelve and the others around him), “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?”

Let’s begin at Level 1, where we consider the meaning of the parable itself, in isolation from its narrative context. Strictly speaking, the actual parable of the sower only takes up six verses (3-8). Before that, Mark gives us the narrative setting (1-2), and after the parable itself we have Jesus’ challenge to his audience (9), followed by a shift in scene to Jesus giving private instruction to his disciples (10-32), followed by a return to the crowd setting with a summary statement in 33-34. In the private instruction section, the disciples ask Jesus about the parables (10); Jesus responds by first providing a general principle drawn from Isaiah 6 (11-12), then issues a challenging question (13), provides an interpretation of the sower parable (14-20), and tells two related figures of speech (21-25) and two more parables about growing seeds (26-32).

Most of us are already familiar with Mark’s interpretation, so it is hard to do this, but try to imagine yourself only hearing Jesus tell the actual parable (verses 3-8). What might we think? Here is a story about a farmer going out to sow his seed, who experiences a progressive three-fold failure followed by a three-fold success. Failure or success is linked to the sort of soil the seed falls on, not to the quality of the seed, which is presumably the same in each case. The seed on the path doesn’t even get into the soil; the seed on rocky places gets in but doesn’t take root and so ends up scorched; the seed among thorns grows up nicely but gets choked and fails to bear grain. The successful seed yields a surprising crop – some of it producing thirty, some sixty, and some even a hundred times what was sown.

Without the narrative setting, how might we understand this parable? Taking into consideration socio-economic considerations about peasant life in first-century Palestine, some scholars suggest that this parable, in its original telling, offered sympathy and even revolutionary hope to typical overworked and oppressed farmers who would be familiar with the tragic experience of crop failure. A harvest as abundant as the one described in verse 8 would enable such a farmer to pay off his debts and free himself from his servitude to the landowner under the vassal system. According to Ched Myers (1988), Jesus describes the kingdom of God as envisioning “the abolition of the oppressive relationships of production that determined the horizons of the Palestinian farmer’s social world” (p. 177). While this brings elements of the parable’s social and cultural setting to bear on its interpretation, showing a way Level 4 can contribute to reading the parable, such an interpretation – however exciting it might be for those inclined toward socialism – might not seem very plausible, at least, not without more explanation.

Without clear interpretive constraints, the parable on its own could mean just about anything anyone wanted it to mean. And to my mind this is the biggest problem with either restricting interpretation to the narrative world of the parable on its own (Level 1) or opening it up too broadly, a danger facing anyone who would use Levels 4-6 on their own and then speculating and allegorizing away. Either way we have no clear guide for reading the parable. But if we read the parable at Level 2, as an integral part of the overall narrative Mark has put together, we quickly get a grip on some firm constraints to work with. In the case of the sower, more so than most of the other parables that appear in the gospels, Mark gives us a lot of help. For one thing, he provides an actual allegorical interpretation (14-20). In light of this, we see that the sower parable is about what happens to the word that is “sown in” people who hear it. Three types of obstacles hinder those who hear from bearing fruit: the birds (Satan) eat up the seed (word) sown along the path; the sun (tribulation and persecution) scorches the shallow-rooted plant in the rocky ground; and the thorns (cares of the world and deceitfulness of wealth) choke the healthy plants that grow up among thorns. But amidst the apparent failure of the word, there is also surprising success – “those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold” (20).

Mark’s interpretation doesn’t tell us who the sower is or what the fruit refers to, or what makes the difference between those who bear thirty, sixty, and a hundred times what was sown. But the broader context of Mark’s gospel provides some clues. Just as there are three failed responses to the sowing in the parable, in chapters 1-3 we find three groups not responding well to Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom (1:14-15): the Scribes (2:6-7; 3:22), the Pharisees (2:16,24; 3:6), and Jesus’ own family (3:20-21,31-35). In spite of this, we also see successful response in the disciples (1:16-20; 2:14; 3:13-19) and in the increasing numbers of people following Jesus (1:27-28,37,45; 2:1-2,13,15; 3:7-9,20,32; 4:1). The other elements in Mark 4 all support the idea that the sower refers to Jesus and the seed/word to his preaching of the kingdom.

(a) The hearing of Jesus’ word (here spoken in parables) is emphasized throughout the chapter: Jesus introduces the parable, “Listen!” and concludes it with the challenge, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Structurally, the whole section is framed by comments on Jesus teaching/speaking the word to the crowds in parables (1-2, 33-34).

(b) The quotation from Isaiah 6 distinguishes between superficial and genuine hearing. Jesus gives us the impression that his very purpose in using parables is to make sure people “on the outside” don’t understand what he’s talking about, even though they “hear” the word. It almost sounds like a version of double predestination – God chooses to let some hear, turn and be saved, but causes others to harden their hearts and be unable to turn and be forgiven. But as the next point will show, a complete understanding of what Mark is doing in 4:1-34 mitigates against this, even if the actual result of Jesus’ preaching is a kind of polarizing or sifting of his audience.

(c) Jesus uses the lamp image (21-23) to say that what is hidden (namely the mystery of the kingdom in Jesus’ parables) is meant to be disclosed. He repeats, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” The measure saying (24-25) is also introduced with the words, “Consider carefully what you hear,” suggesting that the measuring has to do with applying oneself to Jesus’ words. Both of these sayings have the function of clarifying the earlier quotation from Isaiah – Jesus is not intentionally preventing anyone from being saved. In this context it is relevant to notice that even the disciples, those on the inside, to whom the secret of the kingdom of God has been given (11), don’t understand the parable. In fact a major theme of the rest of Mark’s gospel is the persistent and serious lack of understanding of the disciples, who like everyone else need to have their eyes and ears healed (see for example 8:17-21,29-33).

(d) The two additional parables explain two further aspects of the same process discussed in the sower. The parable of the growing seed (26-29) indicates the inevitable growth and fruit-bearing of the sown seed, which has nothing to do with human effort – in other words, it happens by the power of God. And so the harvest is assured. And the parable of the mustard seed (30-32) depicts the unexpectedly great effect that the growth of this seed will have in the world. The focus here is on the “seed sown on good soil” (20), which, just like Jesus’ ministry, will win out in the end in spite of small beginnings, all sorts of opposition and obstacles, and unlikely odds.

To my mind, reading the parables in their immediate narrative contexts (Level 2), as I have done for the sower above, only makes sense. The fact is that we only have the parables of Jesus embedded in narrative contexts, and when we take these contexts into consideration, the significance of the parables themselves, and of the narrative in which they are set, becomes much clearer. But even at Level 2 we already saw the broader Scriptural and theological context creeping in via Mark’s quotation in verses 11-12, and in some of the interpretive moves I made in points (a)-(d). At Level 3 a lot of new possibilities break in, and the potential for allegorizing breaks open as much as it does at Level 5, given a sufficiently fertile imagination, so much care is needed when working at Level 3.

There is so much more to say about this parable, and about the way the different levels of meaning can contribute to its interpretation, but let me conclude this installment by stating in what sense the sower is the parable of parables. The kingdom of God, which Jesus has come as God’s agent to establish, gets established via the word of God. When the word of God gets sown in us, it powerfully and inevitably produces a great and glorious harvest of righteousness. This happens by the power of God, but it also requires obstacles to be overcome. Many people, even those who hear, will fail to produce the fruit of the kingdom. But many others will hear, accept, and bear fruit, and the harvest will be astounding. When this happens, lives will change and our world will be transformed. The purpose of all the parables is to describe what the kingdom of God is like and/or to stimulate us to think about, come to understand, and then to decide and act in ways that realize this kingdom. The sower is the parable that reveals to us the foundational secret of how this takes place – through the hearing, receiving, and response to the word of God. So “he who has ears to hear, let him hear”!

This is the first part of a three-part series on the parable of the sower, focused on the version of that parable that appears in Mark 4. In the second installment I will give my analysis of the parable itself, and in the third I will share some lessons I think the parable has for us.

To understand the parables of Jesus is crucial for anyone seriously interested in knowing what Jesus taught during his time on earth, since the New Testament gospels are the main documents that preserve the teachings of Jesus, and parables make up a large portion of these teachings – about thirty-five percent in the synoptic gospels (Snodgrass, 22). Jesus was clearly a teller of parables, so any student of Jesus’ teachings needs to come to terms with the parables. For people in UBF, understanding the parables takes on additional significance since the gospels make up the bread and butter of our theological understanding. Sunday sermons and correlated Bible studies typically move passage-by-passage through a book of the Bible, and the general pattern of book selection in many UBF chapters takes one of the gospels, then another OT or NT book, and then back to another of the gospels, alternating between a gospel and other books of the Bible. Knowing, then, what Jesus’ parables are supposed to be doing can only help us as we seek to follow him.

So what is a parable, anyway? The New Testament’s use of the Greek word parabole, and the Hebrew word mashal (most frequently translated parabole in the Greek version of the Old Testament), actually cover a wide range of literary forms that precision-oriented people would want to distinguish from each other. Metaphors (“You are the salt of the earth” (Mt 5:13)), aphorisms (“Let the dead bury their own dead” (Lk 9:60), proverbs (“Physician, heal yourself!” (Lk 4:23)), allegories (e.g. the two eagles and the vine in Ezekiel 17), simple comparisons or similitudes (“Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly” (Prov 26:11)), extended narrative comparisons (e.g. the parable of the prodigal son in Lk 15) and more can all be referred to as “parables” in the biblical sense of that word.[1]

New Testament scholars who do research on the parables disagree with each other on various points concerning both the nature and the function of parables. I won’t be able to go into much detail on the fine points of this vast literature, but will simply present what I see as a good working definition of the term “parable,” and a good general characterization of how parables are supposed to work. For the purposes of understanding the sort of thing the parable of the sower is (and what most of the other texts we usually think of as parables are), it will be sufficient to define a parable as an extended comparison in narrative (story) form with a beginning, middle and end, that compares some event from human experience or nature to something else (usually to some aspect of the kingdom of God). Whatever else the function of parables might be, it is clear that Jesus used them to teach. Many scholars see the theme of Jesus’ teaching, especially in the parables, as concentrated on the overarching theme of the kingdom (or reign) of God. From this point of view we can explain the wide variety of different parables by noting that, just as a king does many different things, so to does the King whose kingdom Jesus describes. So the kingdom of this King can be compared to many different things, each of which is intended both to give us insight and to move us to the sort of faith, decision and action appropriate for subjects of the King.

A core question to ask about the parables is how we should read them. The rest of this installment will investigate this question. To get our minds around the different possible ways of reading a parable, it is useful to think of parables as narrative worlds. Part of what you do when you tell a story is to generate a world of meaning. For example, J.K. Rowling, in writing the Harry Potter series, created a narrative world that is populated by various fictional characters (e.g. Ron Weasley, Lord Voldemort), institutions and settings (e.g. Hogwarts School, Ministry of Magic), and that has its own history. The parables of Jesus are obviously much shorter than the fantasy novels of Rowling, Tolkein or C.S. Lewis, and the narrative worlds generated are relatively sparsely populated. The characters in Jesus’ parables do not get developed much, and he includes only the details needed to make his point. Still, they generate small narrative worlds. An interesting thing about Jesus’ parables is that they are stories within stories. Each one occurs within the larger narrative context of a gospel, which is itself a story (in this case a story whose main character is Jesus), and so a distinct narrative world. Parables, then, are stories embedded inside of bigger stories. We can take this further: the gospels themselves are part of the New Testament, and the New Testament is one part of the two-part canonized work Christians call the Bible. It is possible to see the entire Bible, even with all its diversity, as generating an over-arching narrative world.

Each of these world-levels – (1) the parable itself, (2) the gospel as a whole, (3) the whole of Scripture – can play a role in how we read and understand any given parable. Some scholars have wanted to pull the parables out of their narrative contexts and examine them in isolation (focusing exclusively on Level 1). The motivation for reading the parables in this way is to get at the “original” parable, as Jesus actually told it in its historical, first-century life setting. People worry that when the author of the gospel recorded the parable, he adapted and shaped it to fit his own theological agenda, and so lost the function and intention of the historical Jesus. The effort to understand how Jesus’ first-century audience would likely have heard his parables brings an additional level into play: (4) the parable within the first-century cultural context of Jesus’ life and ministry. Reading the parables informed by what we know about Jesus’ cultural context and social setting can enable us to fill in the unspecified details of the parabolic worlds more accurately.

Another worry that drives these scholars comes from the tendency of parable interpreters in the past to “allegorize” the parables. Allegorizing means treating the parable as a secret code that needs to be deciphered, and resolving its meaning in ways disconnected from the actual text and the original intention of telling the parable. The way Augustine interpreted the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) often gets cited as a particularly bad example of this. Augustine says the man who gets beat up is Adam, the thieves are the devil and his angels, the priest and Levite are the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament, the Samaritan is Jesus, the donkey is the incarnation, the inn is the church and the inn-keeper is Paul, and this goes on for pretty much every single object in the story. Is this what Jesus meant when he originally told the story? Allegorizing introduces still another level or two of meaning from which parables can be read: (5) the parable within the network of Christian theological doctrines, or even (6) within the network of universal truths about human beings, God and the world. But even if we agree that allegorizing in an overly imaginative way is a problem, it seems clear that we shouldn’t get rid of it altogether. As we will see in the parable of the sower, either Jesus himself or the gospel writers (or both) allegorized to some extent (see Mk 4:14-20), and in doing so followed a practice common in Old Testament writings and in other writings around the time of Jesus and the early church.

In the next installment, I will try to show how reading the parable of the sower at each of the levels of meaning (1)-(6) can help us to get a deeper understanding of the text, but at the same time can limit us and lead us astray if we aren’t careful.