Mark 4:1-9
Again he began to teach beside the sea.Such a very large crowd gathered around himthat he got into a boat on the sea and sat there,while the whole crowd was beside the seaon the land. He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them:
“Listen! A Sower went out to sow. And he sowed, and some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up.
“Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away.
“Other seed fell among the thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.
“Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundred fold.”
[And he said] “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”
“Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”
The declamation suggests impatience: impatience with people who refuse to understand; impatience with people who refuse to try to understand. Ears have never been a guarantee that people listen.
The twelve disciples were blessed with ears and they had trouble listening. They had trouble understanding. Perhaps, like so many people of their time and station, they were used to being told what is true or false … being told what is good or bad. They found it difficult to think and feel their way to the truth for themselves.
Early on in ministry, Jesus developed a style of communication which caused people to sit up and take notice. He developed a style of language which aroused curiosity and moved people to ask: “What did he say?” “What does he mean?”
We can only guess the intention of Jesus, but it is reasonable to assume that a commitment to lead others to the threshold of their own minds moved him to speak in parables.
It is foolish to think he deliberately set out to confuse and confound others. It is conceivable that he was willing to do what was necessary to move people to think for themselves upon the meaning of their lives in relation to God … to others … to oneself.
The Parable of the Sower may be one of the most popular of Jesus’ open-ended tales. Mark, Matthew and Luke not only record it, they interpret it! The three evangelists have passed on the early church’s interpretation of the parable. First Century believers focused on the types of SOIL into which the seed falls.
The choice to give that one interpretation the weight of authority belies the intention of Jesus. It sets people up to misunderstand not only the purpose of Parables but the person who spoke them.
Some Christians think there is but one meaning — one right answer — to each of the Parables of Jesus.
The setting of the Parable of the Good Samaritan reveals how and why Jesus used parables.
A lawyer asks Jesus: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“What is written in the Law? What is your reading of it?
“Love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself!”
“That is the right answer; do that and you will live.”
“Ah, but who is my neighbor?”
Jesus tells the Lawyer about a traveling man who falls prey to robbers and is left for dead on the roadside, a priest and a Levite pass by, a Samaritan stops administers the fellow first aid and takes him to an nearby Inn.
Jesus asks the lawyer: “Which of these three do you think was neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
“The one who showed him kindness.”
“Go and do as he did.”
Parables are intended to provoke a response from the listener. They are not exhausted by one interpretation. The parables also reveal something about the person who tells them — about his or her way of being present in the world and to the world.
For example, the action of The Sower shows something of the way Jesus brings people to life. In light of all the military actions in the middle east we need to remember Jesus came not as a conqueror.
Persuasion and patience were his route to victory. His was the way of kindness, and the way of the Sower which allows time for growth.
Please note that in The Parable of The Sower, the word is planted — not handed down from a throne.
The harsh forcing of compliance — so characteristic of dictators — has no part in Jesus’ way of being with others. There is in the sowing of the seed an element of carelessness!
The picture of one scattering seed broadcast is a little frightening. Who can tell for sure what the result will be? So much of it will be lost. So many things can interfere with its growth. The Sower must be patient and confident — and a person with a certain abandon.
Carelessness characterized much of the ministry of Jesus. He chose disciples from the least promising class and most of them had done nothing to indicate special abilities or gifts.
The Galilean neither wrote a book nor arranged for a permanent record of his teaching. He seemed as willing to share his thoughts with one woman or a handful of peasants as with a crowd. No one has had less to show for his labors than this itinerant teacher-healer.
There were no guarantees that his life had accomplished anything to last a decade beyond his execution.
One of the most significant contrasts between Jesus and other leaders is a willingness to trust so much to the unseen. Living as we do in the age of intentionality, we sometimes forget that Truth cannot be forced.
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Charles Rice believed Northern Spies make the best apple pies. He was, of course, right! Northern Spies cook up well while keeping their shape and texture. They don’t go mushy.
After searching for three years for a supplier, Charles Rice found two trees. On a fine November day, he dug two holes and set about to plant the two four-foot sticks. His neighbor wanted to know what he was doing.
“Planting Northern Spies — the best pie-making apple in the world!”
“The best in the world?”
“Yup! holds its shape and has a flavor smack between tart and sweet. No greater pie-making apple than the Northern Spie!”
“How long before them two sticks make any apples?”
“I figure between five and seven years.”
“Rice, you sure do have more faith in the future than most folk!”
The trees survived six winters of drifting snow. Charles knew that gypsy moths might come back next year. Heavens! There are more bugs and worms that prey on apple trees than there are varieties of apples. But like Charles Rice told his neighbor: “The trees are still in the ground and it is going to be a great day when we pick our own Northern Spies and sit down around the first apple pie … that will be at least a sixty-fold yield!”
The seed like the sower also reveals something about the vocation of Jesus. According to the first century theologians who put the explanation of the Parable of the Sower into the mouth of Jesus — the seed is a metaphor for the Word.
The seed is the word. The word is more than a sound. The word is more than a sermon. The word is more than the declaration: “I love you.”
The word is personal presence.
What sets Christians apart is their belief that the word became flesh and dwells among us. The word is the embrace which gives flesh to the declaration: “I love you.”
The word is Emmanuel: “God with us.” “Here in is love — not that we love God, but that God loves us and sends Jesus Christ to show us how to be for others.”
Christians believe that God — who came in Jesus, the Word made flesh — works in us and others by the Spirit. We are not alone — that is the herald, that is the promise of the faith — we are not alone! And it is the personal presence of God which moves believers to be personally present to others.
“But when did we see you hungry or thirsty and give you drink?”
“In that you have done it unto the least of my sisters and brothers, you have done it unto me.”
Jesus calls us to personal presence. He calls us to be with and for others in a way that is eloquent in its simplicity, and radical in its social, racial and political implications.
It is a presence which the Russian Poet Yveteshenko glimpsed the first time his mother took him to Moscow in 1941. There he saw for the first time the enemy — nearly twenty thousand of them. German war prisoners were to be marched through the streets of Moscow. The pavement swarmed with onlookers, cordoned off by soldiers and police.
The crowd was mostly Russian women — every one of whom had a father or a husband, a brother or a son killed by the Germans. The poet remembers how the women gazed with hatred in the direction from which the column was to come. When at last it came, the Generals marched at the head, massive chins stuck out, lips folded disdainfully, their whole demeanor meant to show superiority over their plebeian victors.
The police had all they could do to hold back the women as they clenched their fists and shouted their anger at the enemy. But all at once something happened to the women. They shrank back and fell quiet. They saw German soldiers — thin, unshaven, wearing dirty, blood-stained bandages, hobbling on crutches — leaning on the shoulders of their comrades. The soldiers walked with their heads down.
The street became dead silent. The only sound was the shuffling of boots and the thumping of crutches. The boy saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward and touch a policeman’s shoulder saying “Let me through.” There was something about her that made him step aside. She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colored handkerchief and unfolded it. It was a crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. Suddenly, from every side women were running towards the soldiers, pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had.
Twenty-five years later, the poet, remembering the little boy standing in the street of Moscow, wrote: “The soldiers were no longer enemies; they were people.”
Personal presence is the call of Christ — the vocation of Christians! A few years ago, a friend passed to me an obituary of a man with whom I had a very brief but fascinating and rewarding association. The man was to my friend a beloved teacher and mentor who gave of himself — his knowledge and love — never counting the cost. I wish to share an excerpt from his obituary for it illustrates wherein resides our capacities for personal presence. The obituary appeared in a newsletter of The American Society for Psychical Research and remembers a man of exceptional psychic abilities — Alex Tannous.
“Why was Alex so much more fortunate at the gates of (paranormal phenomena) than the rest of us in the lab(oratory)? I can only guess that his purity or absence of moralism, of judging, of putting people down, of disdaining ‘the bad’ in others, had a major power over the gates.”
“Alex genuinely sensed in so many people something fascinating, something good, a potential in even the most miserable.”
“Alex was very able to develop warm relationships and, at the same time, graceful detachment. He helped ease the sorrows and tragedies of countless people, but he himself never got drenched or drowned in their sea of suffering. His psychic eye seemed to put everything in a broader perspective where there was hope, light and potential solution.”
“His generosity of heart seemed to open doors to all kinds of people; from the well-placed and powerful to those who weren’t at all successful.”
“Again he began to teach . . . . ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. . .’”
Prayer
Eternal God, whose purpose and whose laws pervade this vast universe, and make of it one world, we worship you. We too in our personal lives need the wholeness and harmony which you alone can bring. From our confused and random living we would turn to you to have our souls unified and made whole. Against all that divides our lives, scatters them, and makes them futile with confusion we pray to you this day. Unite our hearts to serve your will with single-minded devotion.
Grant us purposefulness, we pray. Forgive us our aimless living, for all the scattered devotion of our lives to things that matter little or not at all. Help us to discover a purpose in life so worth the soul’s dedication that all our existence shall be drawn together about a central loyalty.
Give us faith, O God, faith in values so beautiful and good that our lives will be drawn into unity by our vision and love of them. Save us from cynicism, from skepticism, from all maladies of the mind and moods of the spirit that spoil our lives, and help us this day to see your will for us, excellent and august, beautiful and elevated, that we may believe in it and so be unified.
Give us love, O God. Bestow upon us the fine gift of friendliness. Forgive us for the way we tear our lives apart with our angers and hatreds. Teach us once more that when we hate we do ourselves more harm than we do our enemies. Draw us together into unity because you plant good will at the center of our lives.
As thus we pray for those forces that draw our lives together and against those evils that scatter them in careless living, so we pray for those powers that draw our societies together. God forgive us for the prejudices and hatreds whereby we have cut asunder our humanity and have made of what might have been an earthly paradise a hard and bitter place.
We pray for better understanding and co-operation between the world’s religions. Teach us with ever deeper and more sympathetic insight to look below the surface into the hearts of all who worship God. Be this day with every Buddhist soul seeking to discover Enlightenment; with every Muslim heart sincerely trying to do God’s will; with every Hebrew mind endeavoring to make real to this generation the high ideals of righteousness which your prophets proclaimed; and let your benediction rest on all who call themselves Christians, of whatever name or sign.
Beneath all our differences teach us our oneness. Beyond all our varieties teach us our common goal. And so bring together, we pray, the spiritual forces that ought to make for peace, that religion, no longer dividing, may unite us all in the cause of humanity.
Amen
Rev. Garvey Mac Lean, Guest Preacher