Mark 4:1-20, listen to how Jesus opens, the very first word out of his mouth, before the farmer, before the field, is a command. Listen and then at the end, after the four soils, he closes with it again, Mark 4:9, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. The whole parable is wrapped on both ends in the same instruction. Hear this. Then, did you hear that? The Greek word underneath is “akouete”, it is not passive, it is not the sound washing over you while your mind is somewhere else, it is hearing that leans in, hearing that intends to catch something. Jesus brackets the entire parable with akouete, because he is telling you, before you even start, that the subject of this parable is not really farming, the subject is how you hear.
The seed is the word, the soils are four ways of receiving it and the difference between a wasted life and a fruitful one, comes down to what happens in the half second after the word lands. Walk the field, four kinds of ground, four kinds of hearts. The first seed falls on the path, this is the strip of ground worn hard by feet, packed down over months until it is almost like stone, people had walked it, animals had walked it, the traffic of an ordinary life had pressed it flat and firm. The seed cannot get in, it just sits there on the surface, exposed in plain view and the birds come and take it away, Jesus says, this is the person who hears the word and before it can sink even a little, the enemy snatches it.
Notice that the path was not always a path, at some point it was open field, soft enough to plant, it became hard, the same way all hard ground becomes hard, one footstep at a time. No single step packs the earth, it is the accumulation, a thousand small pressures repeated until the surface that used to receive seed cannot receive anything at all. Some hearts are like that, not hostile exactly, not consciously closed, just walked over so many times, by so many things, that the word lands and finds nowhere to go, it stays on top in the open where it does not last long, there is always something waiting to carry off a seed that never got buried.
The second seed lands on rocky ground, not soil with some rocks in it, this is a shelf of limestone bedrock with a thin layer of dirt over the top and here is the cruel trick of this soil, it grows the fastest. The seed springs up immediately, quicker than anywhere else, because the rock underneath traps a little heat and the shallow dirt warms fast, it looks like the best soil in the field, green, eager, first out of the ground, but there is rock under it, so the roots have nowhere to go, they hit stone and stop. When the sun climbs and the heat comes, the plant with no roots has nothing to draw on and it withers as fast as fast as it grew, Jesus says, this is the person who hears the word and receives it right away with joy.
Real joy, there is nothing fake about that first response, they are moved, they are excited, by every visible measure, they look like the best soil in the field, but there is no root, so when trouble comes, when following the word starts to cost something, when there is pressure or pushback or the slow grind of a faith that suddenly asks more than it gives, that fast green faith dries up just as fast as it grew. The problem was never the enthusiasm, the problem was what was underneath the enthusiasm, nothing and what is underneath only shows up when the heat arrives. On a cool morning, the rootless plant and the deep rooted plant look identical, it takes the sun to tell them apart.
The seed is the word, the soils are four ways of receiving it and the difference between a wasted life and a fruitful one, comes down to what happens in the half second after the word lands. Walk the field, four kinds of ground, four kinds of hearts. The first seed falls on the path, this is the strip of ground worn hard by feet, packed down over months until it is almost like stone, people had walked it, animals had walked it, the traffic of an ordinary life had pressed it flat and firm. The seed cannot get in, it just sits there on the surface, exposed in plain view and the birds come and take it away, Jesus says, this is the person who hears the word and before it can sink even a little, the enemy snatches it.
Notice that the path was not always a path, at some point it was open field, soft enough to plant, it became hard, the same way all hard ground becomes hard, one footstep at a time. No single step packs the earth, it is the accumulation, a thousand small pressures repeated until the surface that used to receive seed cannot receive anything at all. Some hearts are like that, not hostile exactly, not consciously closed, just walked over so many times, by so many things, that the word lands and finds nowhere to go, it stays on top in the open where it does not last long, there is always something waiting to carry off a seed that never got buried.
The second seed lands on rocky ground, not soil with some rocks in it, this is a shelf of limestone bedrock with a thin layer of dirt over the top and here is the cruel trick of this soil, it grows the fastest. The seed springs up immediately, quicker than anywhere else, because the rock underneath traps a little heat and the shallow dirt warms fast, it looks like the best soil in the field, green, eager, first out of the ground, but there is rock under it, so the roots have nowhere to go, they hit stone and stop. When the sun climbs and the heat comes, the plant with no roots has nothing to draw on and it withers as fast as fast as it grew, Jesus says, this is the person who hears the word and receives it right away with joy.
Real joy, there is nothing fake about that first response, they are moved, they are excited, by every visible measure, they look like the best soil in the field, but there is no root, so when trouble comes, when following the word starts to cost something, when there is pressure or pushback or the slow grind of a faith that suddenly asks more than it gives, that fast green faith dries up just as fast as it grew. The problem was never the enthusiasm, the problem was what was underneath the enthusiasm, nothing and what is underneath only shows up when the heat arrives. On a cool morning, the rootless plant and the deep rooted plant look identical, it takes the sun to tell them apart.
