Monday, April 20, 2020

Telling a Story about Jesus' Stories: Seed, Soil, and You ~ Mark 4:1-20 (Short Stories Jesus Told series)



Jesus loved to teach with parables – powerful short stories, filled with meaning, innuendo, and mystery. About 30 of them come to us in the Gospels and their use was widespread among Jews at the time in the ancient world. What are they? How should we read them? And Mark 4 is basically Jesus’ Master Class on answering those questions. The parable of the sower is Jesus’ parable about parables, so to speak. If you’re going to understand Jesus’ parables at all, he would say. You’d better get this parable right. So let’s dive in.
          1.    Dreams, Cartoons, and Allegories, O My!: What is a parable? (4:2)
My wife is an intense dreamer. During her divorce, she tells of a dream in which she’s in a house and hears a child crying. She begins to search for the child all through the house unable to locate her. Finally, she opens a cupboard and discovers herself as a child, totally emaciated, starving to death. She then takes hold of the child and begins to love her and feed her. What’s even more amazing than the dream was that my wife has no problem explaining it. In the dream, the house stands for her whole self. The crying, emaciated child-version of herself in the cupboard referred to the fact that during the divorce as she was trying to care for her own three children, and hold down her job as a single-parent, she was ignoring her own needs, her own inner child, who was starving for attention. The dream, in other words, was calling her to a decision. If she wished to make it out of the challenge that she found herself in, she must also take care of herself. Likewise, the ancient world knew about dreams and their interpretations. The Old Testament has plenty of them. Jesus’ parables are in some ways like dreams in search of meanings. Like Marianne’s dream, you have to understand the symbols in order to accept the invitation to change.
Alternatively parables are like political cartoons found in newspapers. 


Cartoons often use animals to represent countries or politicians. You have to know the code to understand them. When a political cartoonist wants to signify countries, for example, we know that a lion is Great Britain, a bear is Russia, an eagle is the United States and the dragon is China. If you know the symbols, you’ll understand what’s going on. But if you don’t, you won’t get the message. The ancient world knew all about using symbols, not least animals, to tell coded stories about nations and kingdoms. Jesus stories are bit like that too.

A few rules/principles for reading the parables thus seem to be worth mentioning at this point:
     1.    If you wish to heed the parables, you’re going to have to read. You must read the Old Testament. You must, you must, you must. Many of the Parables have Biblical and cultural antecedents that we must listen for. The imagery of God as sower and the people of the world as various kinds of soil was found in the Old Testament and other literature (Is. 55:10-11, 2 Esdras 4:26-32).
     2.    Find a good tour guide for the ancient world. The parables are often challenging not because they’re hard but because they’re old and addressed an ancient people before they addressed us. The scholar Ben Witherington III wisely notes, “A text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.” We’re going to have to learn about cultural expectations of fathers and sons, the plight of day laborers, the elements of a wedding, even thoughts about birds. If we get the context wrong, we’ll get Jesus wrong as well. Other symbols also take root in the literature of the time, like the “birds.” Even the birds as minions of Satan fit as bringers of evil and death are stock images in the Old Testament and cultural milieu of Jesus’ ministry (e.g. 1 Kings 16:4, Jub. 11:5-24)

For example, the book of Jubilees (also known as Lesser Genesis) covers much of the ground of Genesis. It’s not considered Scripture but was widely read and known about prior to, and during, the first century. In one powerful story, Abram battles a wicked king [Mastema], who uses birds as make-shift soldiers to plague Abram and others. He sent “ravens and birds to devour the seed which was sown in the land, in order to destroy the land, and rob the children of men of their labours. Before they could plough in the seed, the ravens picked (it) from the surface of the ground. And  . . . reduced them to destitution and devoured their seed. And the years began to be barren, owing to the birds, and they devoured all the fruit of the trees. ~ Jub. 11:10-12. Everyone would have known “birds” symbolize evil forces which plague God’s people.
     3.    We must understand what a parable is: an allegorical story which aims to surprise people with a creative challenge about the kingdom of God (God’s rule and reign) and Jesus’ role in relationship to that kingdom. They are not sweet, homespun moralisms or benign religious truths. One of the interesting elements of difference between Jesus’ parables and rabbinic parables around the same time is that the vast majority of rabbinic parables aim to reinforce conventional Jewish values from the Torah, serving primarily to exegete Scripture, while Jesus’ parables are subversive counterparts almost never referring back to scripture directly they gain their force from his personal authority. It’s interesting that the sower is never explained by Jesus nor is the seed called the “word of God.” I think that’s because Jesus wants people to understand that he is the sower and that the seed isn’t Scripture directly but Jesus’ own words which function as the “word of God.”
     4.    Finally, the parables are allegorical stories but that doesn’t mean that every little thing is to be interpreted allegorically. Commonly, the primary details which disclose the meaning are the narrative’s principal characters and the meanings ascribed to them which the audience members could have originally grasped.

          2.    Listen! I’m telling you this so that you don’t get it. Get it? Vss. 3, 10-13


Parables are stories of paradox. For Jesus, they have this odd function seemingly to conceal and reveal. I kind of think about Jesus’ claim of secrecy (vs. 11) is like the secret menu at In & Out. You know In & Out the Burger joint franchise which started in California and just opened down the road in Keizer – and which still has lines that run around the restaurant and all the way down the street. They have created quite a fan base by having a secret menu (off-menu items that you had to know the name of to order). It was huge with fans (and even more cool before being all over the internet) because to know it you had to investigate it, to try it, to love it. You’d have to go through the line and say, “I want my fries ‘animal style.’ Or, “Give me the flying dutchmen.” If you knew the secret menu – you weren’t some genius or code-breaker – you were a fan! You loved them and because of that you were willing to go above and beyond to figure it out. Jesus parables are like that – they were just secret enough, just below the surface enough to demand such an investigation, to require that you, well, love him. How do I know this is what Jesus meant? Well, the first word of vs. 3 should clue you in. It’s the command “Listen.” Then in vs. 9, he says, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” That’s an encouragement. It’s Jesus invitation to listen carefully. In the Gospel of Luke, after sharing this parable, Luke reminds us of something else Jesus says that Mark leaves out: “Therefore, consider carefully how you listen. Whoever as will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.”
The parables of Jesus aim to challenge you to get closer to this enigmatic king. They make you want to ask, “What was that about?” For Jesus, speaking in parables is not a riddle as such. They are perplexing because of the behavior they call for and people’s refusal to change or believe. That’s why Jesus’ quoting of Is. is so interesting. He acknowledges with the quote that people can see and hear but neither perceive nor understand. The point is that his enemies apparently understood the parables at a cognitive level but refused to accept in faith what that meant.
For example, consider Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Those who believe that individuals are by nature good and it is society which corrupts them are not likely to abandon their convictions as a result of a direct challenge to their world view. But they may be drawn into an alternate world view through the experience of the boys on the island, who ultimately reveal their violent nature even when divorced from civilization. Jesus’ parables likewise aim to indirectly challenge a world view (conceal) but once discovered they leave little doubt what one thinks about Jesus’ message or Jesus himself (reveal).
          3.    Which soil do you wish to be? How can you cultivate your life? 

The allegory of the parable assigning people different soils should not detract from the choice nevertheless implied – which soil do you wish to be? Yes, I know that soils don’t read self-help books or make decisions but people do. People who were listening to Jesus tell his short story and understand that all this “Listen!” “Pay attention!” is the heart of the matter demanding a choice. And like the call to investigate Jesus’ own teachings about the kingdom we also must do the work of listening and introspection about his kingdom message and our own “pest or weed” problem that we currently face.! During this new season, I want to invite you to change your perspective. I want to encourage you to reimagine your life. What if you aren’t alienated and separated from others but cloistered – set apart for religious devotion.  If so, then you could make your house a seminarium. And now it’s time for the Latin of the Week (seminarium, which gives us our word “seminary” literally “seed bed” or “nursery”). If your life right now is a seminarium, a nursery or seed-bed, what do you want to grow? What do you have time to do?
Read. Friends, during this cloistered season I want to invite you to read the Old Testament, like Isaiah (Jesus uses a lot of symbols that come from Isaiah), or read a book about the parables like Klyne Snodgrass’s book, Stories with Intent. Cultivate some knowledge so that you can decode the symbols that you encounter in the parables.
Weed. Finally, you will need to do some introspection. What are the weeds/challenges in your life? What are things that you must address during this current season so that you can both hear and live out the kingdom call that Jesus addresses you with? For example, are the “worries of this life” threatening your crop? Every Monday morning at 10 am, I will be hosting a conversation about Sunday’s parable where we can talk with one another about the seed and the weeds/stones/birds, thorns of our lives.
Pray. Learning the parables is more than “seeing” or “hearing” symbols or challenges in them. You must also respond. That requires a proper disposition, a better willingness to pay attention. That requires prayer. I will be restarting my book group on centering prayer – every Wednesday at 10 am in a Zoom chatroom. We will be starting on chapter three and will be discussing the book as well as joining in silent prayer together. This is a practice which will better able you to hear with your ears, as Jesus says.