Parable Perplexity

Do you ever find yourself looking at a passage of scripture you’ve read a hundred times and realizing you never really processed it? I had one of those moments this morning in Mark 4 as I read and re-read what commentators refer to as “The Parable of the Seed Growing”. This short parable is unique to Mark’s gospel. Perhaps it is so easy to gloss over because it contains similar imagery to the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 (and earlier in this same chapter).

Or perhaps other people pay closer attention to detail that I do.

Not a Rehash

A little more attention makes it evident that this parable is not merely a rehash of one of Matthew’s kingdom parables, but teaches its own lessons. It reads as follows:

“And he said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.’ ”

The seasoned student of scripture is no doubt aware that interpretations of the Lord’s parables vary wildly from denomination to denomination and from reader to reader; our systematic theology so easily intrudes on our reading of the text and forces it to speak to our imaginations rather than our hearts. I’m not going to offer any definitive interpretation of the parable today as I’m still working on it. No doubt this is the result our Lord sought when he spoke it. His use of figurative language obliges both the original and modern audiences of the parables to go away and meditate. There are no quick and easy answers to the interpretation of parables except in the instances where the Lord himself provided them.

So while there are many things I cannot say yet about this parable, there are some things we can. As I have discovered and noted elsewhere, when we read “The kingdom is like” something, it is unproductive and misleading to stop at the next noun in the parable as if that is the pat answer. The Lord is unfolding a distinct scenario in each kingdom parable, and the kingdom is like the entire thing, not just like a king, or a man, or shrubs, nets and yeast. In this case, I believe the kingdom of God is not the man or his seed, but the whole picture the Lord is describing. 

The Obvious and the Not-So-Obvious

On we go. In the earlier parable, the seed was the word of God and the ground was its audience, and I suspect that’s what these figures suggest here also. Seeds produce crops, and disseminated wisdom from God produces favorable results in at least some of the lives into which we have the privilege of introducing it. Again, in the version of one of these earlier parables in Matthew, the harvest is “the end of the age”. Perhaps that is the case here as well. We might also note that the Lord’s emphasis in this little parable is not on various impediments to crop growth (birds, rocky ground, thorns) or on the fake growth (weeds or tares) that may also develop among the people of God, confusing observers about what is genuine and what is not. Rather, the distinctive emphasis of this parable is on the process of growth itself and the result.

The problems come when we try to go too far beyond that. It’s probably unimportant to debate whether the man scattering the seed is Christ himself or those who preach his word in the world. When we try to make the man strictly one or the other, contradictions arise. The man does not know how the seed sprouts and grows. That cannot be the Lord. He knows every human heart and every reason his word takes root and produces fruit in our lives. He knows exactly how the seed sprouts and grows. However, the “man” is also the one who “puts in the sickle”, which in the earlier parable is a picture of the judgment. That is surely not you or me, right?

The Main Message?

So then, we should probably not pick the parable apart exhaustively, but rather look for the main message it carries. The sickle, for example, is elsewhere a symbol of judgment and wrath. Here, though, the instrument may be only the means by which the man harvests the grain for its intended purpose. Judgment does not always result in punishment, but sometimes also in reward.

I suspect the main emphasis here is the way the word of God works in lives independently of the people who spread the gospel in the first place. “The earth,” the Lord Jesus says, “produces by itself.” The Holy Spirit of God takes his word and makes it effective while those who spread it go off and do other things. The man “sleeps and rises night and day”. He has moved on, as the apostle Paul notes in Corinthians: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” The planter of the seed plays only a small part in producing the harvest. The credit for growth belongs to the Lord, and the unique method by which each individual heart is touched and transformed by the Lord’s word is largely a mystery to us. As he himself said to Nicodemus in another parable, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” The way the Spirit works is above our pay grade.

There is much more to it, I’m very sure, but I’m going to have to go away and think about it some more.