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Mark 4:26-34
The Parable of the Growing Seed
26He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
The Parable of the Mustard Seed
30Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. 32Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”
33With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. 34He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.
The more I think about it, the more interested I get in the fact that Jesus did so much of his teaching in the form of parables. According to the New Testament scholars, about a third of all the teachings from Jesus in the gospels take the form of parables. That seems significant to me, for a couple of reasons.
One reason is that parables are meant make us think. (The scholars say, ‘to provoke theological reflection,’ but that’s just a more scholarly way of saying the same thing.) The parables get us to turn the stories over in our minds to figure out what Jesus means to say to us.
Lots of people think of ‘being a Christian’ in terms of obeying certain rules and laws so you can go to heaven. And certainly, Jesus could have just given us hard-and-fast rules and commandments for living the Christian life. That would have been a lot simpler for Jesus, and for us. But not better, I think. Because making us chew his teachings over in our minds and think about what they mean – that engages us in a way that memorizing rules does not.
In Deuteronomy 6:5, the Hebrew scriptures say that we are to love God with heart, soul and strength – but Jesus added ‘mind’ to that list. And the parables of Jesus engage our minds in a way that rules and doctrinal statements just can’t.
Another thing we should say about parables is that they’re easy to pass along. Jesus was establishing a movement – a group of followers who would go out into the world to tell people what he had done and taught. For those he was sending out into the world – and the word ‘apostles’ actually means “those who are sent out” – the parables would be very effective tools for passing along his teachings. It’s a lot easier to teach people the Parable of the Prodigal Son than to teach them to explain the doctrine of prevenient grace. So disciples without formal education could help people understand the points Jesus was making about the life of faith.
You might remember that our reading says that Jesus gave more complete explanations of the parables to his disciples than he did to the general public. I suspect that those fuller explanations Jesus gave were meant to prepare the disciples for using those parables in their own ministry.
Another advantage of teaching by parables is that they can communicate different meanings to people in different life circumstances. Think about the Parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance. That parable teachers one lesson to people who have wandered away from God and made a mess of their lives, but it teaches a different message altogether to religious people who can be a little self-righteous. For one group, it’s a message of forgiveness and acceptance. For the other group, it’s a warning against self-righteousness and a sense of entitlement.
Some scholars say the parables might be meant to say different things to people at different stages of their lives of faith. Take the Parable of the Sower, for instance. When you’re just beginning to follow Jesus, that parable tells you to ‘be good soil,’ taking in the Word and bearing fruit for God. But later, when you’ve grown up into a committed disciple and maybe even a leader of the church, that parable tells you not to be discouraged when others fail to commit their lives to Jesus.
So, having said all that about parables in general, what about the parables in today’s reading?
In one of them, Jesus likens the kingdom to seed that is sown in a field, then takes root and continues to grow even when the farmer is sleeping. It seems to me that Jesus is telling his disciples that as they went through the world teaching and ministering, they could be confident that even as they traveled from place to place, the Holy Spirit would keep the faith growing in the hearts of those they converted and then left behind them.
In the other parable, Jesus uses the metaphor of a mustard seed to communicate the idea that the kingdom can grow quietly and steadily into a mighty structure tree giving shelter and shade. Jesus started with a handful of peasant followers, and now there are something like two billion Christians in the world. So this parable seems like a great way to communicate that we should maintain our confidence in God’s promises about the church.
Or at least, those are meanings that leap out at me at first glance at these two little parables. Maybe some other meaning suggests itself to you. But it seems hard to deny that Jesus’ parables are an ingenious way to communicate the principles of the faith. Two thousand years later, most of them work just as effectively today as they did in first-century Palestine.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for the parables of Jesus – for the way they have guided the growth of our lives of faith, and for the way they still have the ability to show different facets of your way, shining new light into our minds. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 27 and 80; Isaiah 45:5-17; and Ephesians 5:15-33. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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