Mark 4:1-9

The Mystery of the Kingdom (1) – The Purpose Of Parables

Mark 4:1-2 - Parables

¹ Once again he began to teach beside the lake.

An enormous crowd gathered around him.

So he boarded a boat on the lake and sat down there.

The crowd spread out along the beach facing the lake.

² He taught them a lot of things in parables.,

Given that the lake was identified as the setting for this section of the narrative, it is fair to assume that there would be no open contestation of Jesus’ teaching. For Mark, beside the lake was a congenial venue. The address that was to follow was directed to people generally.

Why Did Jesus Use Parables?

Up until now, Jesus’ teaching had been almost exclusively conveyed by his activity. Jesus now adopted another technique in the hope of arousing deeper reflection by his hearers. He did not set out to provide answers to questions they had not asked. His aim was to stir their thinking. What had been the significance of his activity? What had he been seeking to communicate to them? For that reason he used parables.

A parable was essentially a story with a twist or a sting, usually in its tail. The story aroused attention; the twist stirred deeper thinking, and invited people to look at their own experience and their own questions and so to come up with their own answers. The genius of the technique was that the tentative answer could always be re-examined in the light of further experience and throw yet more light.

The parables expressed no doubt the fruit of Jesus’ own reflection on experience and his finding meaning in what otherwise made little sense.

He challenged his audience to listen. Why did he not instruct them outright? Perhaps it was because he knew that answers to unasked questions would go nowhere. If not understood immediately, they would risk being treated as irrelevant and quickly forgotten. They would serve to dull the questioning, rather than to stimulate it.

Life is mystery, not puzzle. Mystery is something whose meaning goes deeper and deeper. Jesus himself was in the process of probing the mystery of his own experience, seeking signs of the presence and invitation of God. His own observations, stimulated by the familiar world that surrounded him, threw light on what might be happening. They did not necessarily give definitive answers, but they provided pointers and invited further reflection.

Mark 4:2-9 – The Parable of the Sower

² In the course of his teaching he said,

³“Listen to this.

Imagine a sower who went out to sow.

⁴As he spread the seed, some fell on the track

and birds came along and ate it.

⁵Some fell on a rocky area where there was not much soil.

It germinated very quickly because the soil was not deep;

⁶but when the sun came it, it was scorched

and dried up because it had no roots.

⁷Other seed fell in thistles.

When the thistles grew up, they completely choked it,

so that it produced nothing.

⁸And some fell where the soil was fertile.

When it grew up and matured it produced its crop,

yielding a thirty, a sixty and a hundredfold return.

⁹Let those with ears to hear listen

The twist in this parable was in the tail - the sheer abundance of the yield. Even good soil in Palestine, after an exceptionally good season, could not be expected to yield much more than a tenfold harvest. What was the reality that this story could possibly throw light on?

Out by the lake his audience was not the educated or wealthy elite of the towns, the Pharisees or the scribes. It was the dispossessed, the day-labourers, the tenant-farmers, the struggling land-holders, the women.

To these people a hundred-fold harvest would not have simply been a wonderful and unexpected windfall. A harvest of this magnitude would have paid off their debts, provided them grain for lean years, enabled them to break free permanently from oppression, to stand tall, and even to assist their friends and neighbours in similar need. It would have led to a total reversal of their social reality. It would have been the unbelievable realisation of Jubilee abundance and Jubilee freedom, the fulfilment of all God’s promises, not just for isolated individuals but also for all who wished to take part.

It would have been the gift of the creating God.

Perhaps through the parable Jesus was hoping to elicit the sense that, when life was lived appropriately, there would be not only enough for all but abundance for all. God was God of the Sabbath, indeed, the God of Jubilee. The stratification of society, the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many did not express the mind of God. Cultural, social, economic, political or religious systems that relegated some to the margins and shored up the positions of privilege of others were not according to the mind of God.

The consistent thrust of the action of Jesus to date had been to address this situation of oppression and injustice. The parable served to put into words to what might have otherwise been missed.

In the short reflection that followed immediately, Mark would give a brief insight into the pain and frustration of Jesus (and also perhaps of Mark’s own community) occasioned by the resistance to Jesus’ message not just by those who could have been expected to lead, but also by people generally.

Next >> Mark 4:10-13