Mark 4:1-20 "Many Things by Parables" Scott Hoezee

Years ago a friend of mine was fresh out of seminary and serving his first congregation. He had recently read, and been inspired by, the classic book by Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. In this book Otto talks a lot about our human sense for what he called "the numinous," that which is holy and radiant with mystery. My friend loved the book and so launched a series of sermons on the numinous and its implications for us as disciples. He had just finished his second or third sermon in what he hoped would be a ten-sermon series when a kind elder gently pulled him aside one Sunday evening to say, "You know that series you have going on the numinous? Nobody knows what in the world you're talking about!" The series came to a sudden halt, disappearing into a numinous cloud of unknowing!

Probably most preachers would react the same way at hearing the news that their preaching is not connecting. Preachers, even those who struggle with writing sermons, want to be clear, want to be understood. We want people to be reached with the gospel. We want them to be saved or, if they are already long-time believers, we want their faith to be enhanced so their Christian commitment can be deepened.

So it is nothing less than scandalous to hear Jesus' explanation for why he preached in parables. In verse 12 Jesus as much as says, "I talk the way I do in parabolic fashion because I want people to walk away having heard me but not understood me. I don't want them to believe the gospel. I don't want to be any clearer than I am or else they might turn, repent, and be forgiven."

Now these are words to widen the eyes. How can we account for the fact that Jesus flat out says that he told parables less to illumine than to confuse? Tonight as we open a series of sermons on the parables, we need to do two things. First, we need to think about the nature of parables in general, especially in the light of Jesus' explanation in Mark 4. Second, we need to see in the Parable of the Sower not just a classic example of what a parable is but also a commentary on the entire meaning of Jesus' ministry.

First, let's reflect on what we could call the genre of parables. The parables of Jesus are found in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John, interestingly enough, contains not a single parable. There are a total of about 29 parables with Matthew's gospel containing more than either Mark or Luke. Only five parables can be found in all three synoptic gospels (the Parable of the Sower is one of those). Robert Capon has divided the parables into three broad categories: parables of the kingdom, of grace, and of judgment. There are a few parables that do not fit neatly into just one of the designations, but in general Jesus' parables tended to be about one of those three topics.

But just what is a parable? What kind of genre or type of teaching is it? John Timmer thinks that the category of metaphor works as well as anything to describe parables. Metaphors are what we reach for when we want to take something that is unfamiliar and make it clearer by describing it in terms of something familiar. Metaphors are not literal descriptions but rather are a form of analogy. So if you tell me that your wife is a gem, I know what parts of that image to ponder and what parts to leave aside. I know that you are telling me that she is someone of exceedingly great beauty and worth to you. But I also know that you do not mean that your wife is a cold stone with hard-chiseled edges! We instinctively know how to understand metaphors when we hear them.

Seeing the parables as metaphors works pretty well overall. Jesus used parables to describe the unfamiliar in terms of something that was already familiar. The kingdom of God may seem like a big concept, but you can wrap your mind around that kingdom more easily if you picture it in terms of a woman baking bread or a farmer sowing seed.

Yet Mark 4 indicates that as metaphors go, Jesus' parables were not a cinch. In fact, as with the Parable of the Sower, Jesus gives the metaphor but sometimes he does so without saying what the point of comparison is. If you tell me, "My wife is a gem," I know what you mean. But suppose you talked to me for ten minutes about the nature of gems without ever once mentioning your wife. You prattle on and on about emeralds and rubies but then walk away, leaving it up to me to tumble to the idea that this had something to do with your wife! That is more like what Jesus did. In Mark 4 he tells about a farmer, about seed, about four different fates for that seed, but then he says in closing no more than, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." Hear what?!

Jesus does not say. Later he tells the disciples that to them the secret of the kingdom of God had been more directly revealed. But no sooner does Jesus says this and he notices the blank look in the eyes of even Peter and James and the others. So in verse 13 he says, "Well what's wrong? Don't even you gentlemen understand what I was talking about?" No, they didn't! So Jesus has to take it down to brass tacks for even the disciples. But where did that leave the crowds who were not privy to this explanation? Apparently it left them at least temporarily confused. Apparently this was also Jesus' direct intention.

But as Tom Long once pointed out, this was only because Jesus' mission was to drive people deeper, down into new and fresh understandings about God, about the Messiah, and about the kingdom the Christ was bringing. Jesus knew full well what kinds of ideas people were carrying around in their heads as to what the Messiah would look like and what he would do. The kingdom of God had become politicized with ideas about it getting forged in the fires of foreign occupation. The Romans were the principal threat to their happiness, and so any Messiah worth his salt would make his first order of business the expulsion of the Romans from Jerusalem.

These were the kinds of ideas Jesus needed to change. He didn't want to give the people quick and easy things to believe. So instead of that Jesus subtly began to paint a whole new picture through the use of parables. He told the crowds these homely little stories about farmers, old women, fathers and sons, sheep and shepherds. He would not detail the ins and outs of the metaphor but would let the parable lodge in the people's consciousness like a kind of narrative time bomb, as Eugene Peterson once characterized it. They would go back home with the parable tick-tick-ticking away in their hearts until finally it would explode into a new understanding. Suddenly people would say, "Hey! He wasn't talking about a farmer! He was talking about God, about us, about our relationship to God!"

Once they came to this explosive new awareness, they would also be introduced to what educators call "cognitive dissonance." They would be forced to start re-thinking in ways that cut against the grain of their earlier preconceptions. So when Jesus says, "I tell parables to confuse them, I don't want them to believe the gospel," what he really means is "I don't want them to believe the gospel yet. I don't want them to believe too quickly because if they do, they will likely believe wrong things."

In Mark 4 Jesus appropriates for himself a mission similar to the one Isaiah had (it is Isaiah's words that get quoted in verse 12). Isaiah was commissioned by God to preach to the people but was told up front that no one would listen. But Israel's lack of understanding in Isaiah's day was a judgment on the people. Had the Israelites been in tune with God to begin with, they would have accepted Isaiah's preaching. Their inability to comprehend Isaiah revealed, in the harsh light of God's judgment, how bad off they were.

Jesus' parables did the same: they revealed that the people's ideas were out of whack. That much was a form of judgment. But in the case of Jesus, his hope was that eventually their ideas could change. Above all, Jesus hoped that in the light of the cross, much of what had been confusing would coalesce and come to make retrospective sense after all. But isn't it curious to notice that Jesus was in no hurry for the people to understand. Through the parables Jesus confused in order to make people dive deeper and think harder.

In geometry and algebra, a parabolic curve, when charted, takes on a U-shape. A parabola starts at some point high on a graph, plunges down deep to a very low point on the graph, and then swoops back upward toward an infinite point. Jesus' parabolic ministry had this effect on people: Jesus met them where they were but then confused them and so forced them to plunge down deeper into depths of theological meaning. But for those who stuck with it, for those who were able to follow Jesus to the cross, eventually new meanings exploded onto their theological consciousness, rocketing them back upwards.

All of which means that if we have tended to think that Jesus' parables were easy to grasp or were instantly charming for those who heard them, we need to revise that notion. Tonight's Parable of the Sower illustrates this. So much happens in this simple little story that you would never have guessed. Yes, we now know that the "seed" represents the very Word of God. But if so, why is the farmer so careless with it? Why is he so prodigal in tossing this seed everywhere without much regard to where it lands? And anyway, since we Reformed folks can be pretty good at going on and on about the sheer power of God's Word, how can it be that the seeds of that Word are, three times out four, totally powerless and ineffective in producing results?

This is but the first of many parables that reveal the apparent weakness and humble outer trappings of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is not what you would expect. God's Word does not come crashing into people's lives with the staggering intensity of a Howitzer tank. So we can witness to God's truth and preach our hearts out but when we are finished, we may be shocked to see that the Word just lays there. It bounces off people the way a corn seed would bounce off pavement. Sometimes it just disappears, as though while we weren't looking for second, a bird swooped down and snatched it away.

Other times we are thrilled to see someone's swift reaction to the Word. They perk up. They come to church weeks on end. They join the new members class and maybe even make profession of faith. And then just as quick they are gone. This happens in churches. It has happened here. And you feel almost snookered. But it turned out that the Word had no real root after all, despite how vibrant the plant of faith looked on the surface.

Sometimes the same net result happens, but it takes longer. A person remains on the fringes on the church, doesn't disappear altogether, but clearly has lots of other things on his plate, too. He can't be bothered to do much more than attend church now and again. There's always another out-of-town meeting he has to fly out to on Saturday nights. Making ends meet and climbing the corporate ladder means he can't possibly let his name stand for Elder or Deacon. He means to give more to the church's Ministry Fund, but somehow December 31 comes and goes again, and so when the Deacons send out his annual giving statement, the bottom line is either a big goose egg or something mighty close to it.

You wouldn't think that the seed of the Word, or even the plant of faith that grows from that seed, could languish like that. But Jesus says this happens. The kingdom he proclaims will be simultaneously the most powerful reality in the world and one of the more vulnerable realities in the world. But lest we forget the tremendous power of the Word, we know, too, that when it takes firm root in a person's life, the bumper crop of spiritual fruit can be, and thanks be to God frequently is, downright stunning.

The Parable of the Sower, like all of Jesus' parables, is not what you would expect to hear Jesus say. If we let ourselves be properly shocked by what we hear, what new realization can we take away from this passage? Well, I think there is some good news to be discerned here, and this encouraging information is not restricted to the good results in the final, fertile soil. So let me in closing suggest two other lessons we can learn from this.

First, maybe it's encouraging to know that when we witness to someone about the gospel--and this may be a witness to one of our own children as well as to some stranger on an airplane or a longstanding fellow employee at work--if we just can't seem to get through to this other person, it is not necessarily because our witness was weak. In this parable when Jesus points to three different times when the seed produced either no results or less-than-optimal results, please notice that in every case it was the same seed. Jesus didn't say that the seeds that finally took firm root in fertile soil did so because they were a superior hybrid seed, that those particular seeds had more oomph to them than the other ones. In the first three soils, there was nothing wrong with the seeds.

Of course, it's always good to ponder how well we are doing in providing a consistent witness to the gospel. We cannot discount the possibility that sometimes if our witness fails, it is due to something we did wrong. But this parable tells us that this is not necessarily so. There can be any number of times in life when we sow a perfectly healthy gospel seed and we do it perfectly well even though, and in the end, we must sadly admit that it just didn't take root the way we prayed it would.

Second, perhaps it is encouraging for our faith also to recognize that when Jesus talks in verse 11 about the "secret" of the kingdom of God, he's not kidding: the kingdom is a quiet reality, something more likely to be whispered about from ear to ear than some grandscale, highly impressive reality that has all the outward might of some military campaign of "shock and awe." This can be comforting to us at those times when even we who are on the "inside" of the church have to admit that compared to the glitz of Hollywood, the wealth of Wall Street, and the power of Washington, the church simply pales by comparison. We don't look like the ticket to the top of anything.

Again, however, maybe there is solace to be found in the fact that Jesus never said we were supposed to be some obvious place of spiritual razzle-dazzle. In the quietness of our work, worship, and witness we are still the people of God displaying the secret of the kingdom of God. We don't need to compete with this world's big shots to bear an effective witness.

The gospel of Jesus, and the kingdom of God to which it points, are in one sense the most simply beautiful and beautifully simple realities in the world. But they are not finally easy matters. Any Savior who accomplished his final purpose by doing the totally unexpected thing of letting himself be impaled upon a cross did not come here to proclaim a message that is obvious.

In a culture of sound bites and catchy slogans where people want instant gratification because they don't have patience to learn something that requires more effort, we may find even more barriers to the seed's taking root. The temptation is always to retrofit the seed, give it a coating of some cultural fertilizer, gild it with slogans that might catch the eye of the media. Yet we are Jesus' latter-day farmers called to scatter the gospel seed wherever we can. Although our witness may confuse some people and upset others; although it may yield mixed results or no discernible results at all, the main thing for us is to make sure is that it is always and ever the true seed of the Word that we proclaim. If we try to change that, we lose the gift Jesus has given. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. Amen.