Parable of the Sower
Mark 4: 1-20
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Back to Basics The
New Testament Witness of the Apostle
Peter |
Max
A Forsythe | |
One of the strengths of education in the past was the student's freedom to choose to learn from teacher's of their own choice. Recently I reread an article about a teacher who titles himself professor of nothing in his retirement. However, when he speaks on campus, the hall is crowded even though no credit can be earned from attending. His name is Harold Bloom and his specialty is literature. And only when he chooses to describe theology and religion does he get himself into deep deep trouble. Yet within his field of expertise, he is still recognized as someone worthy of hearing, which the crowds of students regularly prove!
About fifteen years ago, when there were only two of us teaching history, my partner and I would go around to the junior classes late in the spring and describe our senior courses in government and history. We would then give the students a survey card to choose how they wanted to spend their last year in required academics. Usually, my partner would get a third, I would get a fourth and the rest indicated they didn't care. Thus, we were always able to give them their first choice. And as a result, things usually went better because of that voluntary association. Oh how much we need such choices in the field of education in our time! A majority of the young people who are required to go to school and take courses they don't want really and truly resent the prison like atmosphere which has widely been generated to maximize educational "profits" to the system as it currently exists.
This was not always the case. While youngsters between six and ten have usually been corralled in schools in America since the colonial period, it has only been in the last hundred years that ten to thirteen years of captivity have been made mandatory. One of the retired ladies in church when I was young always complained about compulsory education that ruined the schools in the first decades of the twentieth century. That requirement escaped my grandfather who quit school after the third or fourth grade to go to work for a living. He certainly had a knack for reading and read widely, you would never have known that he had not gotten to college since he read and spoke like a graduate!
What a breath of fresh air it would be to allow older students to have the same choices in our time! And how indicative it would be if the less able faculty had only empty rooms to force them to consider finding their true calling in the fast food world! Oh, but that freedom would make it absolutely impossible to maintain the expensive system that exits today! Good teaching might lure the best students away to a place where they might actually improve themselves beyond the limits being imposed by society.
Such a dramatic course aptly describes the scene before us in our passage today. Having probably been denied access to the official teaching halls and temple precincts, Jesus withdraws to the remoteness of the Galilean hills down by the sea. In one or more of the natural coves, where the spoken voice can reach a crowd of seven or more thousands, he speaks from the prow of one of his disciple's boats. The crowds have given him practically no relief and the boat will allow Him a chance to get away when the lessons are done.
How many of you would travel very far to hear a popular speaker? Television, radio and the media have downplayed the power of the spoken tongue even while enlarging the potential audience. However that enlargement has also resulted in a powerful new set of gatekeepers who censure who can be heard just as effectively or even more so than any government laws might try to do. I once heard of a reasonable pacifist who was gaining popularity when World War One was on the immediate horizon. So there was a meeting of News Paper Editors to consider the threat to patriotism. Now in France, the leading voice against war in 1914 had simply been assassinated. Here, the leading minds simply agreed never ever to mention his name in print. And since there was no other way for the speaker to find an audience, he disappeared from the stage of history!
The gatekeepers today are mightily worried about the proliferation of channels and urls that lessen their control so that more and more the old adage of a message finding its audience is once again possible. And so, we have come full circle since the time of Christ and those whose hearts are on fire by His Spirit may once again by pass the gate keepers and find a voluntary audience actually interested in the message being given. Yet, like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we well know that even His message falls on deaf ears, busy ears or depraved ears if I may be so bold as to describe the audience of Christ. For so does Jesus describe the places where falls the precious seed of the good news of the eternal gospel of glory!
Now, one point that my commentator makes is that in Palestine, the seed was normally scattered before the plowing took place. Remember with primitive tools the plowing was not too deep, probably just enough to mix some loose soil with the seed. Here in this country, the traditional deep plowing, disking and cultivating a whole field into a seed bed is giving way to a gentle loosening of the soil an inch or two wide and the no-till laying of seeds into that surface with the accuracy of computerized planning.
In the fields of Palestine, where pin-point computer/satellite enhanced fertilizing was impossible, the field would have good and bad areas for growth. The paths where neighbors cut short their cross country meanderings would be difficult for growth. As an example of that, the one and a half acre field on top of my hill once had a lane that went back to the old colonial cabin, and out in the middle was where my 150 year old barn once stood. When you plant new seeds into that field, you can almost trace those now ancient routes and foundations which are still impacted from decades of use.
Once when I sowed some alfalfa on that field, I walked it in the old fashioned manner and scattered the seed by means of a mechanical crank. Having walked the horizontal plane and having a third of the seed left, I walked a vertical path in those areas were seed had often had a poor start in the past. That was a good crop of hay grown because of the extra attention.
Another problem described by Jesus is the hunger of the wild life. Birds in this case, the king's deer in our situation, and one year when we had a half acre of sweet corn, the raccoons from all over invited themselves in for a nightly feast. World wide, it is estimated that rodents can sometimes account for 25% to 50% of the harvested crop. The ancient colonial mill where my son works needs to come down for the very reason that it is so honeycombed with rat holes that profits are almost negated by their continued presence. For that rodent reason, I had gotten into the habit of using old freezers for feed storage - a most reliable means for a small farmer.
We see also in the parable the problem of thorns which can choke a crop. My father spent a life time getting control of the weeds on his hundred acres. And whenever a neighbor came in with a combine, dad would pull out the hose to wash the weed seed out of the nooks and crannies of that equipment because he said they were the most polluting means of spreading weeds. In our day, farmers are learning to plant by the dark of the moon because when they stir up the soil at night, even excessive head lights or moonshine can stimulate long dormant weeds. A decade or more ago, I paid the boys a nickel for each thistle they dug out of the ground. And for a few years, we were somewhat weed free on our ten acres. Then the neighboring land went into government set aside and that first summer, when the thistle went to seed, it was almost like a snow storm!
Well does the curse of Adam hamper the growing of crops in this manner. Rocky soil is another problem. Only in the Ukraine is the top soil measured in depth by feet. In most of the rest of the world, the top soil is only three to six inches deep. At our place, I have always been careful with turning up the soil and at the edges of our property you can see the results, since on both sides the ground falls off anywhere from four to eight inches. I remember a rain that hit the neighbor's land one year the week after he had tilled the seed bed as fine as sand. A spray rig came through and left tracks down every other row. Then it rained and I have no idea how many inches of top soil was lost, but the ditch in front of his property and along my yard was completely filled in! The soil that is left is rocky indeed and that is why it is more profitable to farm the government than the soil itself!
Then there is the good soil, which in our area is found south in the county along the Mad River, it was there that the colonial Indians farmed for generations and made a good living. The farmers there, the flat landers of legend and story have only to whistle it seems and the profits grow thick in the green paper that counts so well and much in our society.
At the end of the parable, all of the yields mentioned by Christ were considered very good. A ten fold increase was probably more normal, especially in dry years. So the almost miraculous hundred fold was listened to with a certain rapture that only farmers can work up!
"He who has ears to hear, let him hear!"
Thus ends the agricultural parable preached by our Lord and Savior. Who could profit from an old farmer's tale, we might well ask. Calvin observes "that if those who ran from distant places to Christ, like hungry persons, are compared to an unproductive and barren soil, we need not wonder if, in our own day, the Gospel does not yield fruit in many, of whom some are lazy and sluggish, others hear with indifference, and others are scarcely drawn even to hear."
Even the disciples are perplexed with what they have heard, so they enjoin Him later to explain what He had spoken. Again the master Calvinist explains "Still it remains a fixed principle, that the word of God is not obscure, except so far as the world darkens it by its own blindness. And yet the Lord conceals its mysteries, so that the perception of them may not reach the reprobate. There are two ways in which he deprives them of the light of his doctrine. Sometimes he states, in a dark manner, what might be more clearly expressed; and sometimes he explains his mind fully, without ambiguity and without metaphor, but strikes their senses with dullness and their minds with stupidity, so that they are blind amidst bright sunshine."
So we see there is a purpose in the apt description quoted from Isaiah "Seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them." And that purpose is by divine revelation which the disciples have been blessed to hear. Calvin reminds us even as Jesus "reminds his disciples how kindly God acts towards them, that they may more highly prize his grace, and may acknowledge themselves to be under deeper obligations to his kindness."
And so we come to the application of this text, an application that flies in the face of institutional growth and revivalism in general. I can well remember the vast expansion of my home church in the fifties when I was growing up. After the war, all manner of people felt some cultural compulsion to join a church, usually any church since that was a sign and symbol of the good life in the Mayberry Days of American History. Yes, the worldly were already planning a new consolidated future for the self-independent rural areas and the progressives moved into the churches, schools and businesses to bring American finance, culture and religion into the full "light" of a twentieth century.
The new members were not really converts in any expectation of the word. They just wanted to hang around those whom they presumed to be better than themselves. Of course, some good did rub off - I know of one businessman who eventually experienced the new birth. A birth he might have realized he said - if things had been more plainly spoken decades ago! And only realized by good reading and the miraculous regeneration of the Holy Spirit.
The vast majority however - simply insisted on watering down the doctrines of the church so that they wouldn't feel guilty or put upon. The church budget hardly budged as a result of a forty per cent increase in numbers. In fact, so many of the new crowd could see little use for sending money overseas when it could be better spent here. So those who were mission minded sent their gifts elsewhere and many removed themselves as well to more evangelical groups. How well does our Lord and Savior understand the complexities, tragedies and corruption of the human heart, which he explains to His disciples.
Hearers, like the seed are divided into several groups of humanity. The first group are harried by the habits of Satan, they have no discipline of laying aside or hiding in their hearts the Word of Christ that comes to them. His words and the gospel sounds nice to them, but it is not something that they would meditate upon or even make a mental note. I have had students like this, people who can loose a set of notes on an empty desk in less than twenty minutes flat. They are so irresponsible that they hardly know what a pencil is, let alone how to keep one. And for what reason would they even want one, really? Each time you speak to such people it is almost like starting fresh with a completely blank mind. I have had several students over the years that I have asked to have removed because I got tired of explaining what good manners were every fifteen minutes day in and day out! And like Satan, such people make it difficult if not impossible for other people to learn. There are people like that in many churches, those who are there to entertain the crowd and draw attention away from serious thought, discussion and learning.
Secondly, there is a group of people who gladly receive the good news, but try it on only for a time. These are the people who rotate through churches over an eighteen or twenty-four month period of time. By all appearances - they seem sincere. I remember a politician in my youth who came to church to garner votes. He was on the fast track to influence, so within a few months - this stranger to the gospel was teaching and leading significant portions of the flock. However, he had not the discipline to grow and learn himself and never progressed beyond the glad hand and happy hour concept of fruitfulness.
The third group are the ones whose worldly cares remain a constant burden. Their favorite sins grow and flourish and screen the gospel of all necessary light. These are the ones who demand that the Church accept them just as they are and go on to reimage the gospel in such a way that their favorite sins are only known as a garnish of freedom, while they celebrate their salad days of enjoying life to its fullest.
The last group is where we want to be counted, here amongst the faithful of every generation. Here is where the Spirit would lead our hearts - to hear and comprehend the revealed Word and to grow in it, to love the law of God and as best as we are able - to do that which He commands us. May the Spirit give us power and joy in that relationship today and for all eternity. Amen.
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Resources Used | |
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Cole, Alan. |
Tyndale New Testament
Commentaries: |
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Keener, Craig S. |
The IVP Bible Background Commentary:
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Pringle, William. |
Calvin's New Testament
Commentaries: |
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The
New Geneva Study Bible
(NKJV) | |
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B2b21 |
20 February 00 |