Mark 4: Fruitful Seed in Receptive Soil

Introduction

Outline

  1. Parable Told
  2. Isaiah Quotation
  3. Parable Explained

Audience

At Jesus’ initial telling of the parable, we find “a very large crowd gathered about him” (4.1).

During the quotation and explanation, there was a smaller group: “when he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him” (4.10).

There’s no direct interaction with religious leaders.

1. Parable Told

Invitation

Jesus’ words start with an invitation: “hear and see.” Most English translations leave out the Greek behold/see, but we’ll see how it plays an important part tying this parable to its Hebrew Bible background.

Story Components

The only character is the sower.

The seed is assumed by the verb “sowing” but the word “seed” isn’t used at all in Mark’s version of this parable. Everywhere the English versions say “seed,” the Greek only has pronouns (like “it,” “some,” “other”).

“Is this a good way to sow?” some have asked, “Seems a bit wasteful to me.” Ancient sowing for some farmers was a two-person job: one would sow by throwing seed; the other would plow immediately behind the sower, turning the soil to bury the seed. Around the edges of a plot, some seeds would fly too far and land on paths, between rocks, or among thorns. There’s no sense of “carelessness” in this story: it’s quite normal.

There are four soil types:

There’s one desirable result: fruitful growth. The numbers “thirty and sixty and a hundredfold” are likely not literal. If a farmer could get 100x return on their investment, everyone would’ve been a farmer! Rather, the phrase “hundredfold” has other biblical connections to abundance:

Isaac sowed seed in that land and in the same year reaped a hundredfold. The Lord blessed him.
~ Gen 26.12

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the sake of the good news who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
~ Mk 10.29-30

“100” isn’t math; it’s a metaphor for unimaginable abundance. Another math thing to set aside: the four types of ground does not equal “25% of the seed on each type.”

The whole crowd doesn’t get any explanation: Jesus saves that for a smaller group.

Isaiah Quotation

Mark transitions to a smaller group to start the explanation. This is likely an insertion of something that happened later, since Mark emphasized the boat & crowds in 4.1 & 4.35-36. This “when he was alone” section probably happened later but Mark includes it here to create a complete block of story (as do Matthew & Luke).

Before actually explaining the words of the parable, Jesus quotes Isaiah 6.9-10:

So that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.
~ Mk 4.12

“Go, and say to this people:
‘Hear and hear, but do not understand;
see and see, but do not perceive.’
Make the heart of this people fat,
and their ears heavy,
and shut their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”
~ Isa 6.9-10

After seeing YHWH on his throne, repenting of the people’s sin, and being cleansed by an angel, Isaiah accepts his prophetic commission. The job he’s given, however, shocks us at first. “Tell them not to understand or perceive, make them unresponsive, lest they repent.”

That commission comes with additional context that helps us move past the surprise we felt initially.

First, we know that God desires repentance and won’t rebuff a contrite heart:

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
~ Ps 51.17

Second, we’ve already been told that the people are unresponsive to God. Isaiah 1 brings God’s lawsuit against the people for “not know[ing]… not understand[ing].” Isaiah doesn’t need to produce this effect; the people are already acting this way.

Third, we see Isaiah live out this commission by doing the opposite: he steadily calls the people to repentance. Isaiah understood these words to be intentionally provocative, but actually aiming for the opposite effect of their surface shock value. Such startling language about preventing repentance actually led Isaiah to call urgently for repentance.

For Jesus to quote this passage in this place is meaningful. In fact, Matthew, Mark & Luke all include the Isaiah interlude between the parable and its interpretation.

By anchoring this parable on Isaiah 6, the gospel writers are casting Jesus as a new Isaiah.

This is why it’s important to notice that English translations omit “see!” from Jesus’ words. The Isaiah quote says “hear but don’t understand, see but don’t perceive.” Jesus is inviting his audience to succeed at the same two things that God indicted Isaiah’s contemporaries about.

Jesus is taking up Isaiah’s mantle as prophet to a people who don’t want to listen to God their King, but are the object of God’s restorative love anyway. That’s a lot of words in a short summary, so let’s pause to unpack it a bit. In fact, we can find all that content right here in Isa 6:

9 And he said, “Go and say to this people:
‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.’
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes
and listen with their ears
and comprehend with their minds
and turn and be healed.”
11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said,
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
12 until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
13 Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.”
(The holy seed is its stump.)
~ Isa 6.9-13

As we expand our vision to the entirety of Isaiah’s commission, we see things get darker quickly. Not only were we shocked by words telling Isaiah to harden his hearer’s hearts, we also hear him told to keep this up until the people are utterly carried away into exile. So where am I getting that bit about “restorative love” from? Well partly from the last 27 chapters of Isaiah, (we’re not covering that material here, but check out chapter 40 for a beautiful description of that restorative love in action!), but also from a small phrase at the end of v13 that happens to connect to our parable in an interesting way.

Isaiah is told that “the holy seed is its stump.” In this passage where Israel will suffer exile like a tree, reduced to a mere stump, then burned again. Yet there’s a glimmer of remnant, of restoration there: “the holy seed.” Even after being decimated (eventually by Babylon), Israel is described as a seed: something containing life, something about to be planted, something with potential to grow and thrive! Verse 13 is almost like the legend of the phoenix: though reduced to a burnt-out tree stump, God’s people are actually like a seed, ready to bloom into new life. Even though the people are self-hardened and unresponsive, God intends to sow them like seeds and restore their blessing.

This identification of Jesus with Isaiah, the prophet to unresponsive people who are still the object of their heavenly King’s restorative love, is core for Mark (and Matthew & Luke). Positioning it between the parable and the explanation signals to readers that it’s key to understanding the explanation.

Let’s gather in some more Hebrew context to bolster understand the listeners’ mindset before we get to Jesus’ own explanation.

Human hearts can be like hardened soil:

Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns.
Circumcise yourselves to the Lord;
remove the foreskin of your hearts,
O people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem.
~ Jer 4.3-4

Humble hearing/seeing are connected to harvest:

Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,
who have eyes but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear.
…
They do not say in their hearts,
“Let us fear the Lord our God,
who gives the rain in its season,
the autumn rain and the spring rain,
and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.”
~ Jer 5.21, 24

God’s “sowing” the people produces restoration:

But you, O mountains of Israel, shall shoot out your branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel, for they shall soon come home. See now, I am for you; I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown, and I will multiply your population, the whole house of Israel, all of it; the towns shall be inhabited and the waste places rebuilt, and I will multiply humans and animals upon you. They shall increase and be fruitful, and I will cause you to be inhabited as in your former times and will do more good to you than ever before. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.
Ezk 36.8-11

To summarize all that data: Jesus is identified with Isaiah, a prophet who preached to unrepentant people, calling them to repent and ultimately promising God’s restorative love. Additionally, Jesus’ listeners would have had a theological mindset that included ideas of human hearts being like soil, unresponsive hearts being the opposite of God’s harvest blessings, and God tilling and sowing the people in order to produce restoration. Let’s take those ideas into the rest of the passage and see how Jesus uses them in his explanation.

There’s one other detail we need to nail down before we move to Jesus’ interpretation: what the word “hear” really means in this passage. We’ve seen “hear and see” as paired verbs in Jesus’ introduction and in the Isaiah quotation. Are Jesus & Isaiah primarily concerned about people’s ears successfully converting vibrations into signals and transmitting them to their brains? Are they talking about people’s eyes and optical nerves correctly sending reflected light up to the brain? No, it’s quite clear that these sense words actually point to obedience.

James might be leaning on this parable when he uses both sight and sound to warn us:

For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.
~ Jas 1.23-24

Jesus is about to use the word “hear” throughout his explanation, so let’s be sure to recognize that as a call for repentant obedience, not merely to experience auditory sensations.

Parable Interpreted

I’m sure we’ve heard lots of interpretation of this parable over the years. One of our goals now will be to notice if those interpretations account for Jesus’ explanation and the Hebrew Bible context we’ve assembled.

The Sower

First question people like to ask is, “who’s the sower?” God? Jesus? The Church? And the short answer is, Jesus doesn’t say. He just scoots right past that and talks about what’s been sown. That said, we don’t have to throw our hands up and shrug. Our context from Isaiah and Jeremiah leads us to suspect that the sowing is divine work. I think we can start off by softly concluding that the sower is God and/or Jesus, then let any additional details refine that conclusion as we go.

The (Unnamed) Seed

The first thing Jesus really does identify is what is sown (remember, the word “seed” isn’t actually in the passage): it’s “the word.” This is a common Greek word: λογος (logos) and is used to mean “message.” So the sower is sowing a message of some sort. Jesus doesn’t define the message; he lets people familiar with Hebrew prophecy figure it out. It probably isn’t specifically “the Gospel” or more broadly “the Bible” - those wouldn’t’ve been good potential conclusions for his audience.

I think that down the road, eventually we can conclude that this parable may apply to those things. Since Jesus is identified as the new Isaiah, does the content of Isaiah’s preaching give us any clue as to what the “message” might be?

Isaiah’s message was strongly focused on repentance. Additionally, it included frequent promises of restoration after exile. Is that a “message” that would’ve been relevant to Jesus’ listeners? Mark introduces us to Jesus the prophet with these words in Mark 1:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Mk 1.14-15

God’s Kingdom, repentance, and good news? Sounds like a really good match. Matthew’s take on this parable confirms this conclusion: he calls the seed “the word of the kingdom” (Mt 13.19).

If our Isaiah/Matthew connections allow us to connect “the message” in this parable with the content of Jesus’ preaching, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that we can also conclude that the Sower is Jesus, God’s prophet. Given Mark’s “Messianic Secret,” it’s pretty reasonable that Jesus wouldn’t say out loud that he’s the “messiah-like” character (anointed prophet) in his parable. Mark does, however, give us plenty of narrative evidence that Jesus constantly sowed the seed of his kingdom preaching:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (1.14-15)

And he went throughout all Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. (1.39)

And he appointed twelve to be with him and to be sent out to preach and to have authority to cast out demons. (3.14-15)

The Soils

Jesus draws parallels between the four soil types and four human responses:

Soil Response
Path with birds Satan steals seeds
Rocky ground fall away because of persecution
Thorns earthly concerns distract
Good soil fruitful obedience

I’ve heard sermons and read commentaries that get bogged down in pressing these comparisons to the nth degree, especially to answer difficult questions about whether or no the “rocky ground” and “thorn” people are really saved, and what that says about “eternal security.” Those are interesting questions, to be sure, but since Jesus doesn’t bother answering them in his interpretation, all we can do is speculate or theologizing. What’s clear about the passage, however, is that only the good soil produces fruit. Jesus isn’t teaching about “eternal security,” he’s teaching that obeying the message is the only reception that’s fruitful.

At this point, you might be sensing a question about our prophetic context. Isa 6.13 calls the people “holy seed” (reborn from a burnt stump), but Jesus says that what’s sown is his kingdom preaching. So do we have mismatch with our Hebrew Bible context? Are people sown, or is a message sown in people?

I’d like to suggest it could be both. In the prophets, we have all the metaphors:

After talking about sowing seed, Jesus would have had all these connections close at hand for his audience, especially for the smaller group listening to his Isaiah quote and explanation. The message is sown, according to Jesus, but does that mean he’s breaking from his biblical context? I don’t think so; he’s just taking one aspect among multiple uses of the seed metaphor for his teaching. Consider “both” for a moment, though. Does a message from God have any effect without human hearts? Combining all the layers from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jesus, what’s actually causing the growth? God’s message finding receptive, obedient hearts. Soil and seed can’t be separated (they weren’t doing hydroponic gardening in this parable!) so the conclusion is, fruitfulness happens when the message of Jesus kingdom lands in receptive hearts. We can notice the details of each author’s use of seed metaphors (and we should!) but we don’t need to press them so strictly that we split something that must be combined.

There’s one last detail before we get a little more personal. Based on our Isaiah connection, we should expect that loving restoration is the aim of Jesus’ sowing his kingdom message in receptive hearts. That’s our touchpoint for what “fruitful” means. It’s not “one convert produces 30/60/100 more.” Rather, the fruitfulness of our receptive hearts is participation in God’s kingdom work of restorative love. (Yes, that will mean more converts along the way, but that’s not our primary metric.) If we wanted to pull some Pauline theology in, we’d observe that the disobedience of Israel (Isa 6) has brought Gentiles into God’s people, and that such inclusion is meant to draw Israel to obedience (Rom 11.11).

We can sum this up with three points from Klyne Snodgrass’s Stories with Intent (171):

Application

While we’ve focused on the meaning of the parable for Jesus’ audience and his own message, as we consider this passage for our lives, we can consider very specific connections to this Jesus/Isaiah text, or we can broaden our application to any interaction we have with God’s words to us: Scripture, sermons, Spirit-led prayer, relationships in Christ’s body, etc.

Where do you feel “pathiness,” “rockiness,” or “thorniness” in your interaction with Jesus’ message? Are there topics, passages, or seasons of life where you sense those obstacles? How do you find grace in those times of need?

How do you typically measure “fruitfulness” in your life, or in the lives of those you care for? Can you imagine ways in which a focus on restorative kingdom love would improve your metrics?

As you hear and obey Jesus’ word, do you connect it to his work of full kingdom restoration? How might our interaction with God’s words change if we kept that in mind?

There were more ways to fail than to succeed in the sower’s work. (I suspect Jesus could’ve made up a few more types of ground if he’d wanted to.) Does that affect our confidence in God’s kingdom goals?