Mark 4:1-34
Lesson Focus: The kingdom that Jesus brings is extravagant and seemingly wasteful, yet frustratingly successful, hidden yet revealing, mysterious in the way that it grows, and begins in small and insignificant ways yet is large and life-giving.
Lesson Outcomes: Through this lesson, students should:
Understand what a parable is.
Begin to understand the mysterious ways of the Kingdom of God.
Be encouraged to look and listen well for God’s Kingdom.
Catching up on the Story While we’re only beginning chapter four, Mark’s gospel moves at a relatively fast pace. To this point, Jesus has called his disciples, healed a few people, and gotten himself in trouble, being accused of having a demon or being from the devil.
He’s in the area of his hometown but isn’t finding much support there. He doesn’t make things much better when his mother and brothers want to see him. Jesus responds that all those who are around him are his mother and his brothers.
While this may not make a bunch of sense to us at first, Jesus is letting us know that what he’s engaged in, his mission, is not just for his family, his immediate family, or his larger cultural family, the nation of Israel. Mark’s helping us to understand that who Jesus is and what he will do is for all people, in all places. That’s something that will be hard for Jesus’ countrymen to swallow.
Today, we’ve got a more significant chunk of text to look at. So, we’ll read a little, talk a little about it, and then read a little more. However, what’s to be clear is that the verses we read today belong together and are all about the Kingdom of God. More on what that means later.
And today’s texts are primarily parables. A parable is a story with parallels to life that tease the imagination into active thought. Sometimes the meanings to parables are straightforward; other times, they aren’t. Sometimes there are multiple meanings, depending on the setting and context of the parable. Today’s parables are all about the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God is, as the parables will tell us, extravagantly given and frustratingly successful, hidden yet revealing, mysterious in the way that it grows, and small and insignificant, yet full and life-giving.
Jesus and his followers are hanging about by the sea. Mark tells us a “very large crowd” has gathered. Literally, “the greatest crowd” has gathered. It’s so large that he hops into a boat and goes about a bit to put some distance between himself and the crowd so that they might continue to teach them.
Mark 4:1-20 – The Kingdom of God is Extravagantly Given Yet Frustratingly successful. Jesus begins the parable by telling the crowd to “Listen!” Actually, it’s “Look and Listen” or “take care of how you are paying attention to what I’m saying…” Just listening isn’t enough. You will need to work to perceive what Jesus is saying.
Then he tells the crowd about a farmer who went out into his field and threw seed all about.
This was the practice of the day. On average, one of every four seeds sown produces any kind of crop. To understand this parable a bit more, it needs to be known how exactly planting was undertaken in Jesus’ day.
The farmer would have a field he wished to plant. It probably was a field he had planted before. He would walk up and down the area he wanted to farm, throwing seed back and forth in a rhythmic pattern. After the seed had been thrown, he would come back and plow the seed under. The farmer never really knows on what kind of soil the seed will land. Some will land on the path, which was never intended to be plowed at all. Some will land on a patch of ground that has just a shallow bit of dirt. Others will fall among patches of weeds, and even though, in the plowing of the field the weeds get plowed under, some will spring back up and choke out the good seed.
The parable ends the way it started, with an admonition to listen well. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Not only does this neatly tie the story together, but it again stresses the point that not everyone who hears his message will genuinely understand what it means—more on that in a bit.
A little later on, when Jesus and his disciples were alone, they asked him about the parables.
Parables here are plural. We’re meant to understand that we didn’t hear all that Jesus said that day and that he used many parables, which the disciples did not understand. So, they’re asking for some help. They’re trying, at least!
“Parables are polysemic; that is, they generate new meaning in new situations. While a parable cannot “mean” simply anything (it is not a Rorschach blot), it has no one meaning that can be ferreted out by objective methods. It takes on meaning as it gently forces the hearer / reader to participate in the construction of meaning. This process can subvert the life-world of the hearer, opening up a new vision of reality. Parables thus often function by beginning in the familiar world of the hearer, but then they present a different vision of the world that challenges the everyday expectations of the hearer.”[1]
The point of this quote is to demonstrate that parables are meant to be disruptive. They’re meant to make us think in new ways, to undo what we believe is true so that we might see the truth of God’s kingdom.
This is what Jesus is getting at in verses 10-12. He’s not saying that the Kingdom only gets revealed to some, while others are kept in the dark. No, he’s saying there will, as there has always been, those who reject the message and so, are blind and on the outside.
Jesus then explains the parable. So, this is the kingdom of God, the beginnings of which are thrown about without regard to where they land. The kingdom of God is given extravagantly, wastefully, generously, and is frustratingly successful.
Mark 4:21-25 –The Kingdom of God is Hidden Yet Revealing After Jesus explains the parable of the sower, he moves on to tell two more parables and a saying.
This little section of the text we will skip and come back to a little later. After reading the other two parables, this saying of Jesus will become a little more intelligible.
Mark 4:26-29 –The Kingdom of God is Mysterious in the Way that it Grows Jesus then tells another parable. There is a farmer, and he goes out and sows his field with grain. He is relatively ignorant of how the seed is transformed from a dead little bit of stuff to a thriving, growing, multiplying stalk of wheat. Nevertheless, he rises each morning and goes to inspect his crop. It is a mystery to him, but each day he sees it grow, and one day he knows it’s ready to be harvested. So, he does so.
The Kingdom of God is mysterious, just like the seed and how it grows was mysterious for a first-century farmer. Don’t let the science of things now ruin the mystery. Perhaps a better analogy for us is that of the growth and birth of a child in a mother’s womb. How my unborn child grows and forms is largely a mystery, yet we’ll know when it’s time for the harvest.
Mark 4:30-32 –The Kingdom of God is Small and Seemingly Insignificant, Yet Full and Life-Giving The final parable that Jesus tells in this little section is the parable of the mustard seed. The mustard seed, Jesus tells us, is the smallest of all the seeds. For a lot of things in life, if something is small, it often remains small. We also tend to view items that are small as insignificant or trivial.
We think big things are important, but Jesus here compares the Kingdom of God to something small and seemingly insignificant, but yet grows into a great shrub. Not very often do we count shrubs as items of significant value or worth. Trees, on the other hand, grow very large, are majestic, and often provide life-giving fruits and nuts for animals and people alike. But Jesus doesn’t compare the kingdom of God to a tree. He compares it to a shrub.
Why? Because the mustard shrub is seemingly insignificant. No one expects it to be great, yet it provides shade and nest for the birds of the air. To us the mustard seed as an example for the kingdom of God is unexpected.
The kingdom of God is like the mustard seed; it starts in small and insignificant ways yet grows large and provides life-giving support for those who come to it for shade. Yet, at the same time, it isn’t what everyone is expecting.
Mark 4:21-25 –The Kingdom of God is Hidden Yet Revealing Let’s go back to the saying of Jesus in 4:21-25. At first, the phrase seems a bit odd. Jesus is bringing about a new kind of kingdom that is different than what everyone expects, except he is going to not give to those who don’t have? Suppose the parables we have already looked at are intended to encourage those who are actively involved in proclaiming the good news about Jesus. In that case, these four verses are meant to be an appeal to listen and look well.
The hiddenness, the mysteriousness with which the kingdom of God comes, is not to remain hidden or mysterious for long. If it’s hidden and mysterious, it will be revealed and explained. And so, Jesus invites his hearers to listen if they have ears. But the key is to be listening to the right things, to be watching and seeing the right things.
Jesus then says, for those who have much (who see rightly, more will be revealed to them) and those who have nothing (those who have not chosen to seek to hear and see) what they do have will be taken away from them.
So What…? Here’s what I think Jesus is getting at. The kingdom of God, which is here being introduced in the Gospel of Mark, is far different than anything anyone had expected. It doesn’t make sense to us.
It is lavish and extravagant, possibly even reckless in the way that it is scattered and shared. Its beginnings are small. Its workings are hidden underneath the soil, but yet somehow, it grows. And those who are seeking, who are learning to see and hear rightly, will find and have what God is doing in his Kingdom revealed to them so that they may participate alongside what God is doing.
There are lots of competing things to look at and to hear. Things which say, “No, this is the way of salvation.” “This is good for you and will make you feel better.” “This is what love is.” These voices claim to display for us what success looks like for the Kingdom of God, but they’re generally contrary to how Jesus says the Kingdom comes. So often, the Kingdom of God comes in ways that are contrary to the way we’ve come to believe the world works.
These parables worked to help folks rethink their worldview so that they might understand what Jesus was doing and then join in along with his mission. It’s harder, but not impossible, for these parables to do the same thing for us. But, at the very least, we can head Jesus’ admonition to look and listen well, striving to allow God’s word to us through Jesus to shape and rework our worldview.
The question becomes, how do we do that? I think it begins with a willingness to confess that how we feel about the world might be wrong. It starts with us coming to God in prayer, in worship, and our study of the scriptures, with an open and willing heart. As we do those things together, we should allow others to challenge our assumptions about what we are hearing and seeing.
A second crucial element is giving of ourselves for the sake of those we think are insignificant or who we might think have nothing to offer in return. In other words, we need to give lavishly, maybe even recklessly, of ourselves (finically, our time, and energy, etc.).
Finally, we need to constantly be engaged in a process of discernment with a small group of other believers. Gathering together over a shared meal, processing life, and our faith together in a spirit of humility might be the best thing we can do.
Critical Discussion Questions:
How does this text reveal to us the nature and character of God/What is God doing in this text?
Jesus is seeking to reveal to us how the Kingdom of God works.
What does holiness/salvation look like in this text?
In this context, I think holiness looks like allowing our assumptions and preconceived notions about the nature of the Kingdom of God to be challenged by Jesus. Too often, we come to stories like these, or Jesus’ life in general, thinking we know what it all means. The reality is that our understanding of God’s Kingdom has been shaped profoundly by our culture, which does not always reflect the true nature of the Kingdom. Holiness is being open to having the God who created us continue to shape and reshape our lives and the way we see the world.
How does an encounter with this story shape who we are and who we should become?
Encountering these stories means being confronted by things we do not understand and allowing God to reveal himself to us.
Specific Discussion Questions: Read the text aloud. Then, read the text to yourself quietly. Read it slowly, as if you were very unfamiliar with the story.
Often, parables like these are presented as isolated portions of the story detached from the larger narrative around it. The parables we’ve looked at today belong together. Take some time and identify some themes that are common in each parable or saying.
The first parable, the parable of the sower, is generally well known. What do you think it means, or how have you heard it taught in the past? What would you have thought about it if you did not have Jesus’ explanation later in verses 13-20?
Does the process of sowing seeds described in the first parable seem wise? Do you think it’s wasteful? Why or why not? What does that say about God’s Kingdom?
Why does Jesus tell his disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables.” Doesn’t Jesus want all people to know about his coming Kingdom? Why make it hard to understand?
In verse 22, Jesus says, “For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” What might Jesus mean? Is he talking about material things? Is he talking about spiritual things? Both?
In verses 26-29, the farmer watches in wonder as the plants begin to grow and produce a harvest. Why does Jesus tell this little parable? What can we learn about the Kingdom of God from it?
The final parable, verses 30-32, liken the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed and bush. The mustard bush wasn’t exactly a prized horticultural specimen. In fact, it was known to be invasive, quickly taking over the space in which it grew. Why would Jesus compare the Kingdom to a mustard bush?
What are some ways in which we might look and listen well for the Kingdom of God? Take some time and name some specific practices.
[1] M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary, ed. C. Clifton Black, John T. Carroll, and M. Eugene Boring, The New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 122.