Parables - Mark 4:1-34
4:1 He began to teach
1Again he began to teach beside the lake sea. (παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν) Such a very large crowd The biggest crowd yet (ὄχλος πλεῖστος) gathered around him (so) that he got into a boat on the lake (τῇ θαλάσσῃ,) and sat there and sat upon the sea (ὥστε αὐτὸν εἰς πλοῖον ἐμβάντα ⸃ καθῆσθαι ἐν τῇ θαλάσσῃ), while the whole crowd was beside the lake sea on the land. (ὁ ὄχλος πρὸς τὴν θάλασσαν ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἦσαν) 2He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them...
Notes
1. Jesus began to teach: His teaching is highlighted by a threefold mention. The meaning is clear: Despite all the acts of power some things about the culture of God are not obvious. We need to be taught.
But the teaching is in parables. Parables remain an enigmatic form of communication. They provoke, they mystify and, perhaps most of all, they create space in which we are invited to question and wrestle with the reality in which we live, particularly the actions of God in our human affairs. The issue is clear: if Jesus is so powerful and if the culture of God is at hand, why are so many people are unmoved by it, if not downright hostile? But the answers are never quite settled. Parables warn us that our understanding of God, and God's purpose for Creation, is always partial. Parables have gaps which discomfort and question us.
2. Seated on the sea: The sea— thalassa, not NRSV's lake— is mentioned three times in this single verse. Jesus, who is about to cross the sea several times, is inviting his listeners to cross into another way of seeing and being which will bring them into confrontation with chaotic forces. As we have already noted, "Mark presupposes the connotation of the sea as chaos, threat, danger, in opposition to the land as order, promise, security..."1
In the original text, Jesus does not sit in the boat, as NRSV leads us to imagine. He gets into the boat and sits on the sea— kathēsthai en tē thalassē. He sits to teach, which implies all the authority of a rabbi. The crowd stands to listen, as respectful followers of a rabbi stood. But he sits on the sea, which leads Marcus2 to note that “biblically literate readers might be reminded of… Psalm 29."
The voice of the Lord is over the waters…
The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever… (Psalm 29, 1,10)
Against the claims by the scribes of Chapter 3 that Jesus belonged to the kingdom of satan, Mark symbolically states the opposite. After the teaching of the parables in Chapter 4, and after more works of power, his authority will be made absolutely clear, for he will come to the disciples in the dead of night, walking on the sea.
He came towards them early in the morning (peri tetartēn phylakēn, about the fourth watch tēs nyktos), walking on the lake (epi tēs thalassēs, walking on the sea). He intended to pass them by. But when they saw him walking on the sea lake (epi tēs thalassēs)… (Mark 6:48-9)
Much will be said below about seeing and not seeing, and it is foreshadowed here. If we were blind, if we could not see or hear, then like the scribes, we would see this sitting on the sea, and walking on the sea, as even more proof that Jesus belonged to the kingdom of satan. (cf 3:22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.’) The mystērion of it all is that we can see something else!
“The whole crowd was beside the sea on the land," but Jesus sits on the sea. The crowd is in a transitional moment. The land feels safe, but those who follow Jesus need to get into the boat with him and cross over the water. We can follow him around the edges, seeking to remain safe on the land (epi tēs gēs), but that will not finally allow us to see what is being said in the parables which we are about to hear, or to truly see the cross. Until we brave the sea there will always be a veiling of our vision. We will see “trees walking around." (cf 8:24)
3. The biggest crowd yet: NRSV translates ochlos pleistos as such a very large crowd. It sounds rather like 3:20 where the crowd is so large he couldn't even eat. But Marcus translates ochlos pleistos as "the biggest crowd yet." Typically, the crowd is polys (cf 3:7,8), a great number. Here, though, pleistos instensifies the meaning.3 It is a grammatical superlative.4 Unlike the previous seaside event in 3:9, Jesus this time needs to be in the boat. Being the "biggest yet," the crowd essentially ratifies the truth of Jesus' claim that he is plundering the house of the strong man; that is, he is not using the power of Beelzebul but is greater than the ruler of demons. (3:22)
4:2-20 The Seeds
2He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: 3‘Listen, behold! (Ἀκούετε. ἰδοὺ) A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seed fell on beside the path (ἔπεσεν παρὰ τὴν ὁδόν), and the birds came and ate it up. 5Other seed fell on rocky (ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τὸ πετρῶδες ) ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. 6And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. 7Other seed fell among thorns (ἔπεσεν εἰς τὰς ἀκάνθας), and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. 8Other seed fell into good soil (ἔπεσεν εἰς τὴν γῆν τὴν καλήν) and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.' 9And he said, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!'
10When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the secret [Or mystery] (τὸ μυστήριον) of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; 12in order that
“they may indeed look, but not perceive (ἵνα βλέποντες βλέπωσι καὶ μὴ ἴδωσιν), and may indeed listen, but not understand (καὶ ἀκούοντες ἀκούωσι καὶ μὴ συνιῶσιν); so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."'
13And he said to them, ‘Do you not understand (οἴδατε) this parable? Then how will you understand (γνώσεσθε) all the parables? 14The sower sows the word. 15These are the ones on beside the path (οἱ παρὰ τὴν ὁδὸν) where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. 16And these are the ones sown on rocky (πετρώδη) ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy. 17But they have no root (καὶ οὐκ ἔχουσιν ῥίζαν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς), and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away (σκανδαλίζονται). 18And others are those sown among the thorns (ἀκάνθας): these are the ones who hear the word, 19but the cares of the world (τοῦ αἰῶνος), and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing. 20And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.'
Notes
The parables of Chapter 4 slow the narrative down. They provide a place to meditate upon the meaning of Jesus, and specifically the question left by Chapter 3. If Jesus is so powerful, how is that so many people do not see or hear the obvious truth of his gospel? Hamerton-Kelly says
The parable of the sower is the key to all the parables. (4:13) Whoever understands this understands the whole gospel. We are at the point where Mark offers us the hermeneutical key.5
1. Listen, behold! NRSV's Listen! in verse 3, hides the Greek which is Akoúete idoù... Listen! Behold... This parallels the hearing and seeing (or not) in verses 10-12 which come from Isaiah 6, and it also corresponds to the later healing of the deaf man and of the blind men. This latter connection appears to be intentional because the seed of verses 4 and 15 which NRSV has fall "on the path" is, in both cases, para tēn hodon,6 which is the description of Bartimaeus as he sat blindly by the road/way in Mark 10:46. When he regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the Way (en tē hodō)
2. Sowing: A farmer in Jesus' time would typically cast out the seed and then dig it in with a plough.
3. The mixed metaphor: (4:14, 15, 16, 18, 20) The sower is sowing the word. But the seeds are people. Marcus says, "This kind of plasticity is common in OT, Jewish, and NT parables."7
4. The seed beside the way: (4:4, 15) The birds came and ate it up. "Satan disguises himself as a bird in several Jewish texts."8 This thought might already occur to the listener before they arrive at the interpretation given in 4:15. (I am reminded of Pharaoh's baker in Genesis 40, with the birds eating the loaves from his basket.) Satan is the outworking of our culture of violence. People hear the word but the culture neutralises what they hear. But in another mixing of metaphors we will soon see "the birds of the air can make nests" in the shade of the mustard bush, where here the birds seem to be the gentile nations. (cf Ezekiel 17:22-24 Mark 4:30-32)
5. Rocky ground... no root: (4:5, 17) In the parable, the seed on the rocky ground had "no depth of soil." But in the interpretation, the seeds "have no root," according to NRSV. The Greek phrase is intriguing. kai ouk echousin rhizan en heautois means and (or but) had no root in themselves. Rootlessness is a sign of ungodliness as Wisdom 4:3 indicates:
But the prolific brood of the ungodly will be of no use,
and none of their illegitimate seedlings will strike a deep root
or take a firm hold.
In Colossians 2:7 those who have received Christ Jesus the Lord are
rooted and built up in him and established in the faith...
But here in Mark the seed of the rocky ground has no root in itself. Marcus wonders if Mark "has a rudimentary theology of the self." He notes the tension of opposites in Mark 8:34-36 where the denial of self that is needed to follow Jesus leads to finding our true self.9
Carroll asserts that the rocky ground (petrōdes) is
metaphorically the home of Petros. Simon belongs on stony—or rocky—ground, that matter out of which he is formed. When Simon the fisherman was called to follow, he heard the word with joy. But the forewarning is that he has no roots...10
We often import Matthew's text into Mark. Matthew says that Jesus will build his church on the rock of Peter, which is an image which plays on the foundation stone of the temple, the place where many Jewish folk thought the creation of the world began.11 (cf Matthew 16:13-23) If we banish Matthew's later image of Peter, what Mark shows us is a man who is stony ground.
6. Falling away: (4:17) The word for "fall away" in verse 17 is skandalizontai, and Marcus reminds us "the basic image is of being enmeshed or falling into a trap."12 The reflection at 6:1-13 A prophet is not without honour, Point 2 [Not yet posted] suggests that the entrapment of scandal is bound up with rivalry or, as I say there, scandal "is to see a person with the eye of empire rather than from the perspective of the kingdom of God." If we have no root in ourselves, and no root in Jesus, no wonder we see everything with the eye of empire and immediately fall away.
The sentence begins with kai and ends with euthys skandalizontai.13
7. The thorns: (4:7, 18) akanthas. Thorns are the crowning feature of empire: they are the cares of the age. In the abuse of Jesus during his trial, the crown of thorns tells the truth about this age.
8. The age: (4:19) NRSV translates tou aiōnos as of the world. Jesus' people often thought of the present age (cf Galatians 1:4) and the age to come. We often speak about the world and worldliness as pejoratives. But Mark has been making the distinction between the kingdom/culture of God and the culture and kingdoms of empire which are both around us. The culture of God is "at hand." Not all that is in the world is choking thorns.
9. The fruit: (4:20) Marcus14 says that traditional cropping systems typically yield, even today, only seven to elevenfold. The point of the parable is clear: even though so much seed is apparently wasted, the yield of that which bears fruit is amazing. Despite all the appearances to the contrary, God is acting powerfully.
Marcus reminds us that fruitfulness was a typical image for the new age for which Israel longed, while a lack of fruitfulness is characteristic of this age where we are under judgement. Jeremiah 31:12 gives us an example of this fruitfulness as he speaks of the return of the exiles:
12 They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again.
See also: Hosea 2:21-2, Amos 9:13, Joel 2:22, and Zechariah 8:12.
By contrast, Genesis 3:17-18 shows us the effect of judgement upon fruitfulness:
17And to the man he said,
‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,15
and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
“You shall not eat of it",
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns (LXX ἀκάνθας) and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
See also: Joel 1:11-12, Jeremiah 8:13.
Thus Mark is using a "standard apocalyptic metaphor: the new age will be like a miraculously fruitful field."16 Marcus also quotes 2 Esdras 4 at this point:
... the age is hurrying swiftly to its end. 27It will not be able to bring the things that have been promised to the righteous in their appointed times, because this age is full of sadness and infirmities. 28For the evil about which you ask me has been sown, but the harvest of it has not yet come. 29If therefore that which has been sown is not reaped, and if the place where the evil has been sown does not pass away, the field where the good has been sown will not come.
But Mark is also different. Where Ezra saw the old passing away and being replaced by the new, Mark saw the old and new coexisting together; good soil along with hard ground, shallow soil, and weed infested soil. He saw the loss of seed and yet great fruitfulness. Mark knows the end has not yet come, but he and his community are seeing the fruits already before the end.
10. How long? We began our reflection on chapter four with the question of how it is that people fail to hear and see what is so obvious about Jesus. The other question which surely accompanies this is "How long?" How long must we wait until the new age?
Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?' And he said:
‘Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate... (Isaiah 6:11)
Mark is writing when Jerusalem is destroyed; that is, when it lies waste. He will expand this in much greater detail in Mark 13, where it is also made clear that the destruction of the city is not the end. We know we cannot understand Jesus and the mystery of the kingdom of God until we have seen the lesson of the crucifixion. Highlighting the destruction of the city just before the narrative of the crucifixion suggests to us that we will also not understand the gospel until Jerusalem is destroyed—until we have left it. Here, Jerusalem becomes a symbol beyond itself: It is one of the cities, one of the bastions of empire, which blind us to the mystery of the kingdom of God. It's not so much the city itself which is the problem, but the sacred structures like the Temple which it supports and represents. The city does not give rise to the Temple; the Temple gives rise to the city.
11. The key parable: (4:13) "And he said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?" Does Mark mean us to understand "all the parables" as those in the remainder of Chapter 4, or all the parables in the gospel, such as in 3:23, for example?
12. The mystery: (4:11) NRSV translates to mystērion as the secret. Marcus17 says of this word, "there is something elusive about it," and
The most significant background is in OT and apocalyptic Jewish passages where the strange way in which God deals with humanity renders that relationship a mystery that can only be fully fathomed at the eschaton.
By contrast, our English word secret may imply, for some people, a sense that we understand much more than we actually do. Even mysteries are "solved" in our way of thinking. There was a humility to the culture of Mark and Jesus' which recognised a different reality. It understood that some things are beyond our understanding. We are "given the mystery," but it always at the same time remains beyond our comprehension.
Seeing and not seeing
The parable of the seeds (and the disciples' questions about its meaning) is firstly a rhetorical device to forestall the listener's question of why so many people seem unable to hear and see the truth about Jesus. Listeners who have heard the message of God's kingdom may begin to wonder how Mark can be true, given that so many in the narrative don't seem to respond to Jesus, or even oppose him. And for those who have heard the whole story, and who know about the crucifixion and resurrection, Mark also addresses how it is that rank evil still exists in the presence of the risen Jesus. Chapter 13 will make it clear that these questions arise from lived experience within families, and even between believers. (cf Mark 13:12)
Secondly, and at the same time, Jesus names the parable of the seeds as the key parable. Grasp something of this and you will hear truth in all the other parables. You will find you have been given the mystery of the kingdom. Misunderstand this parable, and your ears will be closed to all the rest. His question, "How will you understand...?" (4:13) is rhetorical in the sense that it demands the answer: "You won't."
At base, the parables of Chapter 4 address the issue of God's power in the world. What is God like? How is God powerful in the world. Does God invite or coerce? Does God "save" all people, or is God unable to invite-persuade some to respond? Can God only save some by destroying others? These questions issue a challenge to God: Is the Creation "very good," or flawed? And yes, these are our questions, not questions asked by Mark. Mark is more likely aching with the lived grief of brother betraying brother, but he has nothing to say to us if we can find no answers to our questions.
For us, and our C21 sensibilities, if God coerces, God is simply one more empire, only more powerful. But if God is invitational then all God can do is die on the cross, which is an affront to all we children of empire have learned about power.
Beyond the cross there isn't a reservoir of awesome force. The power of God just is the weakness of the cross. The cross exhausts what we mean by "the power of God," with no remainder. As Bonhoeffer says, God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us. Key those words, "the only way." In this view there is no other power but powerlessness. No other form of control than weakness. And this is the only way. There is no Big Stick, no Big Power Switch sitting in reserve. The weakness of the cross is the only way God rules the world. The. Only. Way.17b
If we do not understand this, then we fail to understand faith. Faith becomes a transaction which has a reward. And faith ceases to trust, and can only see failure and suffering, rocky ground and thorns, and must have personal reward now. It cannot see that even now, when violence and evil seem unchecked, there is an extraordinary harvest "bearing fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."
In the end, and this is where this meditation ends, we learn or are given a different conception of what it means to understand and to trust. And if this all begins to sound like a circular argument, it is, for we go round and round, struggling with the issues of our lives, just as the Gospel of Mark itself invites us to read and reread, until finally, we are given a different way of seeing.
....
Below, I sketch out a description of the God who invites rather than enforces, and what this implies. I am not sure that, on its own, this argument convinces anyone. Faith, Hebrews 11:1 says, "is the conviction of things unseen." What we can see in Mark's Gospel is a person who lives non-coercively and pays the cost of that, yet is not destroyed. Either we come to Mark with a lived experience of that person Jesus who has already broken into our reality, or, in our circular rereading of the gospel, we find him somehow intruding18 into our reality. Faith is given. It is more than intellect. As Alison says, we undergo God.
The imagery of seeing but not seeing is familiar to biblical culture; for example, in Ezekiel 12:3, God says,
Mortal, you are living in the midst of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear...
Deuteronomy 29:4 and Jeremiah 5:21 use similar imagery. But Jesus uses the words of Isaiah 6 to add another dimension:
Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.’ (Isa 6:10)
Quoting from this, Jesus says God has created the mystery of the kingdom of God in order that (hina) some people—those outside, ekeinois de tois exō—do not see or understand... "so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."
We can be certain we are not misunderstanding this text, for Matthew and Luke both seek to soften Mark's statement.19 Mark is clear that Jesus thought God had hardened people's hearts in order that they could not repent.
It is not surprising that Mark thought this to be the case. If a community has been gripped by its insight into the gospel, how can they make sense of other people's intransigence and blindness? How can people not see!? Jesus himself would be asking the same questions. And Isaiah 6, which we have noted he quotes, offers a ready-made answer: God hardens people's hearts.
9And he said, ‘Go and say to this people:
“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand."
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.' (Isaiah 6:9-10)
This is simply how the culture understood people's intransigence towards God. Pharaoh is another example (e.g. Exodus 9:7, 12) of God hardening a person's heart.
The logic is plain: How else can it be that the seed of the gospel is sown, sometimes yielding one hundred-fold, and yet three quarters of it yields nothing at all? Surely, such a thing is only possible if God has hardened the hearts of people to that which is obvious, otherwise they would have listened and seen! Marcus comments that in "situations of persecution, a theology of apocalyptic determinism functions to assure the hard pressed faithful that their suffering does not signal a loss of divine control."20 The popular expression of this is to say, "It's all part of God's plan."
Yet this understanding offends us, and it should, because it also means that God uses power in the same way that empire uses power. It sounds to us, in our time, that in Isaiah, and in Mark, that God has arbitrarily chosen certain people to suffer. God enforces rather than invites, and without justice. Where such a theology as this leads us can be seen in the movie God on Trial.21 "There are children in the camp. What punishment does a little child deserve?" asks one of the characters. In this movie set in Auschwitz, Rabbi Akiba is the last speaker in the trial:
We have become the Moabites. We are learning how it was for the Amalekites . . . What did they learn? That Adonai, our God, is not good... He was not ever good. He was only on our side.
This god is one of the gods of empire, and the mark of our conversion and the sign that perhaps we have borne some fruit, is that we are discomforted by a God like this: We struggle not to agree that God is not good when faced with the outrage of concentration camps. Our problem is that it seems Jesus was not discomforted!
A common argument here is that God does not interfere with the evil we cause, for that would also be to enforce; it would dehumanise us by removing our free will. But "in Mark's world demons do not work without God's permission."22 (cf Mark 5:13) Where do we go with all this?
We forget that Jesus is human—fully human. Like us, he was formed by, and limited by, the environment in which he lived. As the "pioneer and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2) he has shown us a way through and out of our violence, but as that pioneer he still lived in and was shaped by the violence. His perfection23 (Hebrews 5:9) was not based in an omniscience which conveniently dovetails into our current ideas about the nature of God; his perfection was based in his perseverance and faithfulness even to death. We do not need Jesus to fit into our ideas of perfection; rather, we need Jesus to show us how to live when we find we are wrong. In Mark 7:24-30, when the Gentile Syrophoenician woman shows Jesus his unconscious racism, he immediately repents—changes! If we make Jesus measure up to our ideas of perfection, we first of all make him something which is not fully human. And then, of course, we make ourselves blind, for if we create a Jesus who agrees with us, then he has nothing more to tell us.
Ellie Wiesel formed his play The Trial of God from his experiences of Auschwitz. The Auschwitz trial which he remembered24
happened at night; there were just three people. At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means, 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.
To say that God owes us something, or that God has something to answer for, is to hold a faith honest enough to grapple with the "inescapable conclusion that, if God is in control of the world, he must somehow be responsible for misfortunes such as insanity as well as for good things."25 The way God is creating the world, and is creating us, means it is unsurprising that many, even most of us, will not perceive the kingdom which is at hand among us. How can a child born into a world founded in violence be anything other than a child of violence, and therefore grow up to be violent—this is what they are taught to live. It is the reality in which God has placed him. As I say elsewhere,
With respect to the culture of empire, in which all humans must live, we are like fruit fly larvae in an orange. We, and our whole world, are coloured orange. Therefore, we can barely perceive orange, let alone know how not to be orange. Orange is the "just is" of our cultural existence which most of us never question.26
Psychologically and biologically the real difficulty here is how it is that we manage sometimes not to be violent, and to see other options! The real wonder is that we are at all able to be troubled by Jesus' quotation from Isaiah! What power, and what grace, has broken into our reality which was formed and rooted in violence and fear? There was a time when the violence of Ps 137 (see below) was unremarkable—simply what the victors in a war had the right to do—and yet we call each other to account over human rights! This is simply extraordinary! But despite this, it is impossible to feel that God owes us something for every last innocent child who has suffered.
Even for those around Jesus—witness the disciples, the parables can seem obscure. But parables are all we have. We are storied creatures. And if God is gracing us with a humanity which is limited in its comprehension—we will always be a small creature in a creation which it is beyond us to fully comprehend; if God graces us non-coercively—instead of forcing us, empire-like, to be a certain kind of creature, then all God has is parables. God has stories, analogies, and ideas, which blind or enlighten depending on who we are, where we have been, and what has happened to us and formed us, until now. The notion that we can logically understand the world (see below) is a modern conceit.
What Mark is doing, is taking us through a profound meditation upon, and re-conception of, the nature of power. Jesus is powerful, casting out evil, teaching seated upon the sea, healing the sick. Yet even when he is teaching "the biggest crowd yet" (Mark 4:1), three quarters of the listeners are unable to hear27 , and many of the faithful who have longed for his coming see him as evil and have set out to destroy him. Even after his death and resurrection his followers suffer persecution. What sort of power is this? These are the sort of questions with which the parables of chapter four invite us to wrestle.
How will we read Mark 4 so far?
Psalm 137 offers us a way to understand what is happening to us as we grapple with Jesus' statement about the hardening of hearts. The Psalm reflects the deep grief of the exiles in Babylon. How can we not weep with those whose lives have written this Psalm? But the last two lines of the Psalm should horrify us.
8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
We know violence does not redeem violence.28 We know violence is the satan29 among us. So, we do not pray these lines from Psalm 137 unless perhaps as a cry of sorrow and repentance for our own violence. We have learned that the last lines of the psalm are no longer adequate for the purpose they were intended; that is, they are not a healing passage for our grief or a healing response to the wrongs done to us. Instead, they continue the cycle of violence. In the same way, we need to let go of Jesus' understanding that God hardens people's hearts. It makes God a monster. It is no longer adequate for the purpose it was intended.
At this point the text of Mark reads the fruitfulness that has been wrought within us through our reaction to Jesus's words as he quotes Isaiah 6. Will we see something about the mystery of the culture/kingdom of God which at that point Jesus himself did not see? He says in John 14:12, "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these..." This is one of those "greater works than these" moments. Jesus could see that despite the blindness of people, the Creation would be completed. Will we go beyond his understanding of the blindness of people and the evil which followed it? This is not a comfortable place. Not only do we take the audacious step of faith that says we really have done a greater work here than Jesus himself did, but we also live in the discomfort that we have no answer for the intransigence of the seeds and their continuing violence. We can only trust, or faith. Yet this audacious stepping forward is what the church has always done. In Acts, the gathered church said, "For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us..." (Acts 15:28)
I have just said that "at this point the text of Mark reads" us. We will intuit the limitation of Jesus' understanding about God causing people not to see, or we won't. We will see, or not see. Someone may point out to us that we have not seen the problem of the coerciveness of God which underlies the text, and we will for some reason beyond us, be able to hear them... or not. This is how we people are.
The Interpretation of the Parable given in Mark
There is something inadequate about the interpretation of the parable of the seeds. Marcus suggests the interpretation is a product of the church rather than of Jesus himself.30 The parable itself speaks directly to the mystery of people's inability to hear. I see myself within it, sometimes rootless and cowardly; sometimes choked out by worldly worries or simple greed, even impervious to the Word, refusing compassion. Carroll31 observed that Petros—Simon Peter—was rocky ground, and I am no better. The parable sees—it grieves, even—the unanswerable question of the wasted and unfruitful seed, but the interpretation pretends to answer it.
The given interpretation invites me to place myself in the role of the fruitful ones and to put my Christian brothers Mark and Toby, who ended their own lives, among "those outside" (and myself in the inner ring32 around Jesus). When it invites me to say they "desired other things," (4:19) for example, and condemn them, I am appalled, for I have three questions: Why not me?—there is no reason I know to explain why I have survived. Secondly, how dare I pretend that I would rise over whatever horror intruded into their lives? And finally, I ask, "Who sowed them among the thorns?" The interpretation apologises too much for God, and blames the weak who cannot answer. There is the smell of the scapegoat about the interpretation of the parable. It is not fit for purpose unless, like Psalm 137, we allow it to jolt us into a new way of seeing the nature of God and human being.
Until now, we have seen a growing polarisation in Mark's text: empire vs the culture of God. The stark choice will continue to the very end of the gospel, and it will remain as we re-read the gospel. The opposition to Jesus, the fear and violence that creates the satanic, will remain. But will we remain the same? Will we choose the satanic comfort of insiders chosen above "those outside?" Or will we see that even "those outside" the house are still gathered around Jesus?
Robert Crotty said that the apparent pause in the urgency of Mark during Jesus' teaching of the parables in chapter 4 was just as much an action as the other works of power. We can see that in the Greek; the kai euthys is hidden in 4:15,16,17, and 29. Crotty saw this "letting loose [of] the parables" setting people up "in opposite camps: either for him or against him. There is no middle path."33 Will that be our seeing yet not seeing, or will we allow the lessons of Psalm 137 and Mark 4 turn our seeing on its head? Might we even begin to wonder if the seed is not "them" at all, but us, rootless petros, and distracted by "the cares of the age, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things."
Finally, a part of what we are dealing with is the question of how we know, or see. NRSV translates three different Greek words as understand. Our culture tends to think of understanding as having a clear perception of how things work, or how they are. Understanding has two extreme usages. Much more common today is the usage we might call "scientistic34 rationalism." This is the conceit that thinks the sort of closely defined formulae which enable the building of bridges and aircraft can also be applied to human being. Its older form is Gnosticism, a secret knowledge which unlocks the truth of human being. Both forms pretend to know. They believe they stand over the reality, which is a kind of idolatry.
Indeed, the self-named "Brights" are essentially non-supernatural gnostics. "Tellingly, Dawkins speaks of himself and other evolutionary biologists as those who have had their 'consciousness raised' so that they can see things others can't… This is the classic language of Gnosticism." (N.T. Wright Creation, Power and Truth: The gospel in a world of cultural confusion in the chapter "God the Creator in a World of Neo-Gnosticism.")
It's tempting to do a little folk etymology and say that as created beings we are meant to stand under the reality in which we have been placed; that is, to under stand. But the word comes from the Old English word understanden 35 meaning to "stand in the midst of." We use, and must master, "hard" knowledge in order to keep planes in the air. But we can only "stand in the midst of" other people, and gently at that, or we objectify them and lay claim to a knowledge we can never have.
If we read the parable of the seeds and its interpretation with ourselves at the centre, then it is "natural" to see that we are the fruitful ones, and to judge the others. This too is a kind of idolatry for it places us at the centre and over against others, including God. We claim to know things we cannot know. If we falter here, in this key parable of how the kingdom of God and evil coexist, we will falter everywhere.
4:21-33 More parables
21 He said to them, ‘Is a lamp (ὁ λύχνος) brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand? 22For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret,( ἀπόκρυφον) except to come to light. 23Let anyone with ears to hear listen!' 24And he said to them, ‘Pay attention to what you hear (Βλέπετε τί ἀκούετε); the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you. 25For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.'
26 He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.'
30 He also said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; 32yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.' (cf Ezekiel 17:22-24)
33 With many such parables he spoke the word (ὸν λόγον) to them, as they were able to hear it; 34he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
Notes
1. Lamp light and word: (4:21) For Jesus and his listeners there is a connection between the imagery of light and God's word. They would remember Psalm 119:105,
Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path
Marcus36 adds that logos and lychnos have a similar sound to them, and that in Jewish symbolism the lampstand "is often associated with the shrine of God's word, the Torah."
Coming from a time and culture where electricity is the norm, the ridiculousness of placing a flame under a basket or a bed is not immediately apparent to us. In its original context, the rhetorical force of Jesus' question was probably stronger than we notice.
2. Except to come to light: (4:22) Despite the current inability of so many to hear and see, there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed. The message is given with Mark's beloved use of the threefold: the lamp will be seen, the hidden will be disclosed and the secret will come to light. The present situation will not continue. Everything will become clear. God will prevail.
I note that the secret thing (apokryphon) is a different word to the secret or mystērion which Jesus uses in 4:10. More work to do here :)
3. Empires: (4:30-32) Ezekiel 17:23 saw that every bird would rest under the branches of the cedar God planted. Ezekiel 31:1-6 has the same image applied to Assyria and Pharaoh. Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 4 shows the tree of his empire being stripped and the birds and animals it sheltered fleeing. (4:10-14) The image of the sheltering empire was well understood. The surprise in the image of the culture/kingdom of God is that the image is not a great tree, but a weed!
4. More and nothing; the harvest: (4:26-29) Pay attention to what you hear is Blepete ti akouete, a continuation of the seeing and hearing motif of 4:10-12: See what you hear, look at it with your eyes open! Do not think that human being flourishes at the expense of others as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The culture of God is a completely different economy of being. You need to understand the difference! For if you give without expectation and without condition, if your being seeks to imitate the completely gratuitous self-giving of God (which we see in Jesus) then you will understand and enter the mystery of God's culture. You will be given the mystery of the kingdom of heaven. Not merely measure for measure, but more richly again. But if your being is about recompense, or earning respect, or becoming a good person, even what understanding you have about the culture of God will be taken from you. You might even think this parable is about money! Beware the prosperity preachers, for they are false prophets.
But as much as you may inhabit this mystery, no matter what glory you glimpse, you will not understand how it works. The seed is scattered. The earth—we might even say the Creation itself!—produces of itself, and there will be a harvest. You will not know how.
And all our ideas of glory and power are under question. In Ezekiel 17:22-24 is the image of a noble cedar placed by God on a lofty mountain of Israel. Under this cedar
every kind of bird shall live;
in the shade of its branches will rest
winged creatures of every kind.
All the trees of the field shall know
that I am the Lord.
I bring low the high tree,
I make high the low tree;
I dry up the green tree
and make the dry tree flourish.
I the Lord have spoken;
I will accomplish it.
But here in Mark 4 the great tree has become a shrub. And the seed is tiny and insignificant. But most undignified of all, mustard is a weed! Seen with the eye of empire, the kingdom of heaven—the culture of God, looks like an infestation of weeds. There is, as some point out, a dry humour here37 , but the parable is deadly serious. If we do not understand the parable of the seeds, we will see only weeds.
When it comes to shrubs, there is an odd resonance here between Mark and the Old Testament book Jonah. Mark's next pericope, (4:35-41) where Jesus overpowers the great storm, has clearly intended parallels with the story of Jonah and the great storm from which the Lord saved him. Near the end of the book, Jonah descends into a great sulk, focussed on his own comfort "from the shade of a shrub" and furious that God allows it to die, yet unconcerned about the lives of a hundred and twenty thousand people.37b
5. Preaching: Jesus saw an unlikely future and trusted it. Kingdom will grow like a weed, taking the place over. Much of the population will be un-noticing. Some will hate it and seek to eradicate it, but will fail, along with some millennia of the world's farmers, for mustard is mustard, and here to stay.
And the greatest of all the shrubs— what a dig at the curators of fine cedar! — will not be measured by its stature, but by what it shelters. All the birds of the air will come and find shelter. All the odd, damaged, seeking, and despairing folk will find a place. And if government tidies the suburbs, and rips out the challenges to its pretentions and idolatry, well… mustard is mustard, and here to stay.
And for those with eyes to see, there will be a discovery. Those tiny mustard seeds of kingdom are the Tardis-fruit of love. They are rich figs, full of life and energy, transformers of the wounded and dispossessed. If you can see. If you really long for life. If you will listen.
In all my years of listening to Church Growth experts, I don’t recall a single one saying, “The Reign of God is something that you sow inadvertently and it grows while you are busy going about your business and, in fact, the whole harvest is simply a big surprise and a gift.” No, our agricultural metaphors for the Reign of God are of the deliberate, technique-driven sort.38 (Mark D. Davis)
I remember a small book whose author, long forgotten, suggested that growth is an accident; we don't know where it comes from. The question is whether we will foster it, or get in its way, or cut it down. I wondered, after reading Davis, what it is we are planting when we get really intentional about church growth. (Edited from "Mustard Seeds and Fig Trees.")39
And now, as we have spoken about being inside and outside (remember 4:11, and also the ambiguity of crowds which even when hostile, are still gathered [add internal link] around Jesus,) and the tensions involved with these realities, Jesus chooses to go across to the other side.
Footnotes
1. Thus Malbon quoted in Davidson https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/did-mark-invent-the-sea-of-galilee/. See more at: https://www.onemansweb.org/the-die-is-cast-mark-31-35.html at 3:7-12 The Sea and Separation, Point 1.
2. Marcus pp291
3. Marcus 291 "capable of meaning 'very, very big,' but in this case there is probably an intensification of the previous descriptions..."
4. In the series big, bigger, biggest, for example, biggest is the superlative.
5. Hamerton-Kelly pp87
6. Against Jeremias, Marcus pp292 is definite that para should be translated as beside
7. Marcus pp308
8. Marcus pp309
9. Marcus pp305
10. Carroll, John, The Existential Jesus, (Scribe 2007) pp31
11. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Stone or https://placeandsee.com/wiki/foundation-stone
12. Marcus pp309
13. καὶ οὐκ ἔχουσιν ῥίζαν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς ἀλλὰ πρόσκαιροί εἰσιν, εἶτα γενομένης θλίψεως ἢ διωγμοῦ διὰ τὸν λόγον εὐθὺς σκανδαλίζονται.
14. Marcus pp293
15. One might also observe that this age has some shortcomings in its attitudes to gender.
16. Marcus pp296
17. Marcus pp295, 298
17b. Richard Beck, quoted at https://www.onemansweb.org/theology/weakness/weakness-part-two.html
18. James Alison's book Undergoing God, has the subtitle dispatches from the scene of a break-in.
19. Matthew 13:13 changes in order that to because (hoti blepontes ou blepousin): "because seeing they do not perceive." Luke 8:10 keeps hina blepontes mē blepōsin, but like Matthew, removes the Markan clause mēpote epistrepsōsin kai aphethē autois, which is "so that they may not turn again and be forgiven."
20. Marcus pp307
21. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/11/god-on-trial
22. Marcus pp306
23. In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; 9and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, 10having been designated by God a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. Hebrews 5:7-10
24. https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/wiesel-yes-we-really-did-put-god-on-trial-1.5056. Clearly Cotrell-Boyce's screen play owes something to Wiesel.
25. Marcus pp306
26. https://www.onemansweb.org/intro.html
27. Of the four groups of seed in the parable, only one group is fruitful.
28. Cf Wink, Walter, The Myth of Redemptive Violence, http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml
29. For a brief understanding of satan see: https://www.onemansweb.org/the-die-is-cast-mark-31-35.html#satan
30. Marcus pp310 Among other things, it shifts from being a parable to being a "fixed" allegory. It is a different form of literature.
31. Carroll pp31
32. cf C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, “The Inner Ring.” Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1965
33. Crotty, Robert Good News in Mark, (Fontana 1975) pp71
34. Understand that the use of the word scientistic is not a criticism of science. We need scientific insights. Scientism is where we claim to much for science. It is not scientific.
35. https://www.etymonline.com/word/understand
36. Marcus pp318
37. "In my comments on the Gospel, I present the Parable of the Mustard Seed as a joke, a joke that would be difficult to get without Ezekiel 17 in the background…" "Is Jesus half-joking in using the image of a mustard bush to lampoon empire and sow seeds of hope for their small, persecuted community? A dominant image for me became people’s lives who feel like weeds in someone else’s garden" … "most of us modern city dwellers don’t realize that this farmer is also sowing a weed into his garden (if we take Luke’s “garden” over Mark’s more vague "ground"). Now, if we’d change that to something like a man sowing dandelion seeds into his lawn, I think we’d finally realize that this is a joke." Paul Nuechterlein, http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/proper_6b/
37b. A gourd: "The Hebrew term for the plant that is translated in a variety of ways in English, including “vine,” “gourd,” or simply “plant” or “bush” has a long history of controversial translations." (https://tips.translation.bible/tip_term/gourd/) LXX uses the word κολοκύνθῃ in Jonah 4:6-10) The shrub in Mark 4:32 is essentially a λαχάνων which is translated as shrub by NRSV but is simple a garden plant. See especially Luke 11:42: But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every kind of garden (lachanon | λάχανον | acc sg neut) herb, yet disregard justice and the love of God. These you should have done, without neglecting the others. (Mounce https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/lachanon)
38. Mark D Davis http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2015/06/scattered-spores-and-mystery-yields.html
39. https://www.onemansweb.org/mustard-seeds-and-fig-trees-ezekiel-17-mark-426-34.html
