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Mark 4:1-12 "Everything"
Scott Hoezee

Note: This sermon is based directly on an excellent sermon by Dr. Thomas Long, whose sermons, books, and insights nourish the preaching of many, including this preacher!

This morning we had our annual youth service, which included giving Bibles to our Second Graders from Worship Center and Neighbors' Night. Now if you are a preacher like me, then what you normally do for that service is work on a sermon that will somehow speak to the concerns of the younger generation. Both in terms of sermon illustrations and the kinds of language you use, you shoot for something that you think will be interesting and relevant and just downright useful to middle schoolers and high schoolers and children.

So just imagine that this morning I chose to present a sermon on the atonement of Jesus. What's more, suppose that I decided really to make the sermon more of a theological lecture, basing my thoughts on the work of the great 11th century theologian Anselm and his work on the legal transactionism of substitutionary, vicarious sacrifice and its relation to the ontology of the triune God as it intersects with the kenotic incarnation of Jesus the Son.

Now had I done such a thing today I would have no doubt left a few folks confused if not angry. Our youth pastor, Curt, maybe would have been kind of quiet in front of me, but oh, the things he would have said to his wife while they drove home. And Miss Cindy would probably also try to be nice about it but would probably eventually whack me upside the head, and not a few folks would agree that I deserved it! Eventually someone would no doubt ask me, "Why did you do that? Why did you blow an opportunity to talk to the kids? Nobody could figure out all that high-flying theological jargon!" And all such questions would be asked because by all appearances I would be guilty of a major goof: I would have mis-read my audience and so produced the exact opposite of what should have been my goal.

Something very much like this happens in Mark 4. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus' ministry has recently taken off like lightning. Jesus has rather quickly built up quite a reputation. Now the crowds that come out to hear Jesus talk are so big that it's getting tough to find a place for everyone to sit. So in this chapter Jesus actually has to push a boat a little ways off shore and so create a kind of amphitheater as he preached to the people on the shore.

Clearly Jesus was catching on! Clearly he now had the opportunity to do great things and to reach a lot of people all at once. But Mark tells us that Jesus gave the people nothing but parables. A lot of us love Jesus' parables but apparently back then when Jesus first preached these stories, nobody could figure out what in the world he was talking about. True, the imagery was familiar and the stories all had a kind of homespun quality to them, but what they meant and why Jesus was telling them in the first place was by no means clear.

So finally the big crowd that had been gathered along the crescent of the shoreline disperses and the people all go home scratching their heads about what Jesus had said. The disciples cannot believe it! It looked like Jesus had blown it. So they come up to Jesus and begin to sputter, "What did you do that for? You had a standing-room-only crowd right in the palm of your hand and then you baffled them. Why?!"

In reply Jesus speaks some words that have been confusing preachers, teachers, and Bible scholars for pretty close to 2,000 years now. In essence Jesus says, "The reason I speak in parables is so that they will not understand me. I don't want them to believe the gospel." Now I don't know about you, but that's not exactly what I expected Jesus to say! Again, suppose that I really had given that big lecture on the atonement at the youth service this morning and suppose that Curt asked me why I had done that. What would he or anyone think about me if I replied, "The reason I was so technical in my sermon today is because I wanted to fly over the heads of the youth. I didn't want them to get it."

"The reason I speak in parables is so that they will not understand me. I don't want them to believe the gospel." As Tom Long once noted, you don't expect to hear Jesus, of all people, saying things that sound un-Christian! Instead maybe the disciples thought Jesus would say something like, "Oh dear! They didn't catch my drift? I'm very sorry about that. You see, the reason I speak in parables is because I know that theology can be hard to understand. I know that sermons can be about as bland as Gerber baby food, so I try to spice things up with a little sermonic cayenne pepper, a little dash of tabasco to keep people listening."

But no, Jesus didn't say that. "The reason I speak in parables is so that they will not understand me. I don't want them to believe the gospel." The exact words that Jesus spoke in Mark 4:12 come from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Way back then the prophet Isaiah had the strange job of preaching even though God had told Isaiah right up front that no one would listen. Isaiah's getting ignored by the Israelites would then become a chance for God to say, "You see! You won't listen to me or my servants and so now I'm going to punish you." In other words, Isaiah's preaching was a kind of dare: "I dare you to ignore me," Isaiah may as well have said, "because if and when you do ignore me, then we will all see that God is perfectly right to pronounce judgment on you."

That was a strange enough thing in Isaiah, but here with Jesus it seems stranger still. So what could this possibly mean? Let's just assume that Jesus does not say anything un-Christian here or anywhere. Let's assume up front that there is a deeper reason behind this--something that maybe we all need to learn. So what might it be? To answer that we need to take a look at the big picture of the whole Gospel of Mark.

As some of you perhaps already know, in Jesus' time there were a lot of people looking for God's Messiah to come. Not surprisingly, many people had come to expect that the Messiah or Savior would be an obviously powerful person. They figured he would be also a political force to reckon with--someone who would do battle with the Caesar and maybe finally chase the Romans out of Israel. They wanted a king like David. Even as David was the great warrior who established the nation of Israel in the first place way back when, so what they needed was a new David who could re-establish Israel by getting rid of the Roman Empire which currently claimed Palestine as part of its larger political holdings.

Jesus was well aware of this kind of thinking. But he was equally well aware that this was not the kind of Messiah he was going to be. So he tries to keep his identity hush-hush. Over and over in Mark whenever someone comes to believe that Jesus maybe really is God's Son and so the Christ, Jesus responds with a finger pressed to his lips saying, "Ssshhhhh! Don't tell anyone about that just yet, OK?" It would take time for people to learn what Jesus had come to this earth to do. In fact, only after watching Jesus die on the cross would anyone be able to grasp how salvation was going to work.

"The reason I speak in parables is so that they will not understand me. I don't want them to believe the gospel." Or now maybe we could paraphrase Jesus a little bit more to hear him say, "The reason I speak in parables is because I don't want them to believe in me . . . yet. First I need them to follow me a little longer. I need to drive them deeper." Jesus wanted to drive the people of his day deeper, and he wants to do the same with all of us today, too. He wants to make us think about difficult things. He wants to unsettle us, shock us, maybe also confuse a little. Sometimes scratching your head because you can't understand something is frustrating, but sometimes head-scratching leads to the wonderful moment of "Ah-Ha!" Jesus wanted us to learn a new way of thinking about God and sin and what it would take for even God to forgive our sin.

"The reason I speak in parables is so that they will not understand me. I want to drive them deeper." Jesus doesn't want us to grab onto just a few of the things he stands for. He doesn't want us to just enjoy the miracle stories or our other favorite parts of the Bible. He wants us to work on grabbing ahold of the whole ball of wax. Believing only the parts of the Bible you like does not result in just a shallow Christian faith, it results in something that really isn't very Christian at all. It's kind of like using only half of the ingredients in a cake recipe. If you do that, what you will finally pull out of the oven will not be half a cake but something that bears no resemblence to cake whatsoever! So also believing in about half of the gospel doesn't give you half-a-faith but something that isn't really faith at all.

The great preacher George Buttrick was once flying on an airplane. As he sat there, he had a legal pad out on which he was furiously scribbling some notes for his sermon the coming Sunday. The man next to Buttrick inquired, "Say, what are you working on there, sir." "My sermon for Sunday--I'm a Christian preacher." "Oh," the other man replied. "Well, I don't like to get caught up in the complexities of religion. I like to keep it simple. You know, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' The Golden Rule. That's my religion!" "I see," Rev. Buttrick replied, "and what do you do for a living?" "I'm an astronomer. I teach astrophysics at a university." "Ah, yes, astronomy," Buttrick shot back. "Well, I don't like to get caught up in the complexities of science. 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.' That's my astronomy. Who could ever need more than that, eh?"

"The reason I preach in parables is to drive them deeper." Here is a challenge that we need to hear again and again. It's too easy to assume we understand everything. It's too easy to pick and choose from the Christian faith so as to arrive at a brand of Christianity with which we are the most comfortable with every loose end neatly tied off. It's also often tempting to want to reduce faith to what's obvious or simple, like the man who thought that it all comes down to no more and no less than the Golden Rule.

But Jesus keeps coming at us with those nail holes in his hands and feet to remind us that life is not so simple, and so neither is the Christian faith. Oh, it's not that you have to be brilliant or some professor to understand it. As a matter of fact, Jesus said that becoming simple and humble like little children is one of the key ways to get at the riches of his kingdom. But what the scars on Jesus' body tell us is that taking care of sin and evil took everything out of God's Son. Now our following of that Son, which we can do only because we have received the awesome gift of grace, is going to demand most everything of us, too.

By now you've probably noticed that this sermon has yet to talk about the parable of the sower which led up to Jesus' strange words in verse 12. So let's conclude with a glance at this parable to see how it also aims to drive us deeper.

The seed that the farmer sows is clearly like the Word of God, which in the New Testament is both what we now call the Bible and Jesus himself, the Word of God made flesh. God really does want everyone to hear this Word and receive his Son and so he's more careless in scattering it about than any farmer would be with real seed. If today you saw a farmer putt-putting down the road on his tractor with a corn planter in tow behind him, you'd be surprised to see the farmer letting the seed drop everywhere he went. What would be the sense of plopping seed onto asphalt, along a gravel road, in a ditch, or anywhere else that is not the well-tilled field where he plans to grow his crop of corn? In fact, if you did see such a thing, you'd maybe flag the farmer down to tell him his planter was accidentally swtiched on--what other explanation could there be for such a careless waste of seed?

But the farmer Jesus talks about seems to be well aware that he's scattering seed all over the place, including long before he gets to the actual garden or field. God the sower of gospel seeds is a bit careless, almost reckless, in hurling seeds all over the place. Or maybe a better way to say it is that God is generous. He really wants everyone to hear the good news that Jesus can save us. So the seed falls into all kinds of different hearts, but the only hearts where the seed makes the kind of difference God so dearly wants is in the lives of folks who let the seed grow deeper.

Some people don't want religion at all, so the Word of God almost literally bounces right off them, and the people walk away from it. Others are interested enough to adopt a few religious principles. Maybe they even give church a whirl for a few weeks or maybe they attend whenever they can (even though somehow or another that always ends up being only about once every two or three months even as for others it ends up being just Christmas, Easter, and funerals). Some figure there will always be time later to get serious about their faith, and anyway a dab of religion goes a long way.

But it's not true, Jesus says. Those whose faith is shallow and those who let faith always get shoved to the back corner of life, hidden behind a thicket of other weeds in this hectic world, will finally find a day where their faith has just evaporated. Only those who are willing to be unsettled by Jesus, willing to follow him every day, willing to stick with Jesus even through the cross and its ugly Godforsaken death--only those who listen every day to the wonder and mystery of it all have a chance for faith to take very deep root indeed.

This life is not easy, and Jesus never said otherwise. Saving our lives wasn't easy for Jesus, either. Just look at what it ended up costing Jesus, after all! But it is precisely because life and faith are complicated that you need a well-rooted faith. If confusing people for a little while will help nurture that deeper faith, then that's what Jesus will do, even as he did in Mark 4.

Some time ago an American preacher was interviewed in England by a pretty smart reporter for the BBC. The reporter asked, "Now, you preach a message of successful possibility thinking, don't you?" "Yes, I do," the preacher beamed. "I believe Jesus wants us to sail not fail!" "Well," the reported probed on, "didn't Jesus die a horrible death on the cross? How does that fit in with leading a successful life in this world?" "Oh," this preacher said, "like all successful people Jesus had his setbacks. But on Easter he put all of that behind him!"

"The reason I preach in parables is to drive them deeper." In Mark 4 it was just too early for people to believe. They would have gotten it all wrong, made Jesus into a hero, tried to elect him president. He didn't want it. He needed people to stay with him longer, to go deeper. Here and there Jesus said and sometimes did amazing things which led at least a few folks to say, "Hey! You're God's Son the Messiah, aren't you?!" And Jesus would always hush them up for the time being.

About the only time in Mark's gospel when someone calls Jesus God's Son but is not told be keep quiet is at the cross. Jesus dies, and the solider next to the cross says, "Surely, this man was the Son of God!" And nobody hushes him up this time. Not this time. The cross sinks us to the depths, you see. It shows us the true power and grace of God's Word and of the salvation it can bring us. Once you stick with Jesus that long, then you realize that this changes everything. Everything, right down to the depths of your heart every single day. Amen.