Mark 4:1-20, watch what the sower actually does, he goes out to his field, he reaches into his bag of seed, he scatters, then he reaches in again and scatters again. Four handfuls in the parable and every single handful is the same, the same grain, thrown by the same hand, with the same motion. So, if the sower never changes and the seed never changes, then whatever explains the four completely different outcomes in the parable, it cannot be the sower and it cannot be the seed, there is only one thing left in the parable that can change, the dirt. The dirt is the quiet genius of this parable, people name the parable after the farmer, they could just as easily name it after the grain.
The farmer does the same thing four times and the grain is identical four times and the harvest comes out wildly different anyway, which means the parable is not really about the one throwing the seed, it is about the ground the seed lands on and the ground in this parable is you. Jesus said something about this parable he did not say about any of his others, he told his disciples that if they could not understand this one, they would not understand any of the rest. This was the key, the doorway, get this parable and the others open, miss this one and you are locked out of the whole set. So, it is worth slowing down and seeing what he actually buried in the soil.
Start with where Jesus was standing or rather where he was sitting, because he was not on land at all, the crowd had gotten so large that Jesus could not teach from the shore anymore. So Jesus got into a boat, pushed out a little way onto the Sea of Galilee and sat down in it, the people stood on the slope of the shoreline and he taught them from the water. There is a practical reason for this that has nothing to do with comfort, a body of calm water in front of a rising bank of land acts like a natural amplifier. Jesus’ voice would carry off the surface and up the hill to thousands of people at once, no walls, no roof, just a man in a boat, the water and a hillside packed with farmers and fishermen and families. Jesus looks at this agricultural crowd and he tells them an agricultural parable about the most ordinary thing in their world, a man planting grain.
Consider who was on that shoreline, Galilee was farm country, the hills around the lake were terraced and worked and most of the people standing there either farmed themselves or lived one step removed from someone who did. These people knew the smell of turned earth, they knew the ache of a season that failed and the relief of one that came in. So, when Jesus started a parable with a man going out to sow, every person on that hill had a picture in their head before he finished the sentence, they had watched it happen, many of them had done it that very spring. Jesus was not reaching for some exotic image to impress the people standing on the shoreline, he was reaching for the thing they saw every year, the most familiar sight in their lives and he was about to show them it had been carrying a sermon the whole time.
The farmer does the same thing four times and the grain is identical four times and the harvest comes out wildly different anyway, which means the parable is not really about the one throwing the seed, it is about the ground the seed lands on and the ground in this parable is you. Jesus said something about this parable he did not say about any of his others, he told his disciples that if they could not understand this one, they would not understand any of the rest. This was the key, the doorway, get this parable and the others open, miss this one and you are locked out of the whole set. So, it is worth slowing down and seeing what he actually buried in the soil.
Start with where Jesus was standing or rather where he was sitting, because he was not on land at all, the crowd had gotten so large that Jesus could not teach from the shore anymore. So Jesus got into a boat, pushed out a little way onto the Sea of Galilee and sat down in it, the people stood on the slope of the shoreline and he taught them from the water. There is a practical reason for this that has nothing to do with comfort, a body of calm water in front of a rising bank of land acts like a natural amplifier. Jesus’ voice would carry off the surface and up the hill to thousands of people at once, no walls, no roof, just a man in a boat, the water and a hillside packed with farmers and fishermen and families. Jesus looks at this agricultural crowd and he tells them an agricultural parable about the most ordinary thing in their world, a man planting grain.
Consider who was on that shoreline, Galilee was farm country, the hills around the lake were terraced and worked and most of the people standing there either farmed themselves or lived one step removed from someone who did. These people knew the smell of turned earth, they knew the ache of a season that failed and the relief of one that came in. So, when Jesus started a parable with a man going out to sow, every person on that hill had a picture in their head before he finished the sentence, they had watched it happen, many of them had done it that very spring. Jesus was not reaching for some exotic image to impress the people standing on the shoreline, he was reaching for the thing they saw every year, the most familiar sight in their lives and he was about to show them it had been carrying a sermon the whole time.