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.
