Mark 4:1-9
The Farmer Who Threw Seed Everywhere
1Once again Jesus began to teach beside the sea, and such a large crowd gathered around Him that He got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people crowded along the shore.
2And He taught them many things in parables, and in His teaching He said,
3“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed.
4And as he was sowing, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it.
5Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.
6But when the sun rose, the seedlings were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.
7Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the seedlings, and they yielded no crop.
8Still other seed fell on good soil, where it sprouted, grew up, and produced a crop—one bearing thirtyfold, another sixtyfold, and another a hundredfold.”
9Then Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Berean Standard Bible
By this point the crowds had turned into a problem of management. Mark says Jesus got into a boat, pushed out a little way, and taught from the water while everybody else stood on the shore. It was not a retreat. The shoreline there folds in places into a natural bowl, and water carries sound, so a man sitting in a boat a short way out can be heard by a large crowd standing on the slope. He took the seat and let the lake do the work.
Then he told them about a farmer.
Sowing now means putting the seed exactly where you want it. Sowing then meant walking the field and throwing by the handful, and some accounts of ancient farming put the plowing after the sowing rather than before it. So some of what he threw landed on the footpath worn across the field, and the birds came and cleared it up. Some landed where a shelf of rock sat under a thin skin of soil, and it came up fast because the soil was shallow, and the sun scorched it. Some landed where last year's thorn roots were still in the ground.
Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the seedlings, and they yielded no crop.
He knew about the path and the rock and the thorns before he set out, and so did everybody listening to this. It was not carelessness. Scattering wide was how the job was done, and nobody in that crowd would have thought twice about it.
Which leaves one ground in four producing anything at all. Then comes the yield of that fourth one: thirty times what went in, sixty times, a hundred times, which is far past an ordinary harvest.
Isaiah had already said something close to this. God sets his word beside the rain and the snow, which fall and water the ground and make it produce, and then says his word will not come back to him empty but will accomplish what he sent it to do. The farmer in the story is neither careless nor anxious. He scatters like a man who already knows how it ends.
And then Jesus stopped.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
He had just told a story about people who hear without hearing, and he handed it over without doing anything to make it easier to hear. He does explain it at 4:10-20, to a smaller group, and that conversation is its own night. Tonight it sits the way the crowd on the shore first got it.
How We Know
The four grounds in this parable are the four you would walk across in one Galilean field. A beaten path where people cut the corner. A thin layer of soil over the limestone that lies close to the surface in that country. Thorns with tough roots that survive being turned under. And the good soil.
Seed reaching all four suits a practice in which the ground was worked after the sowing rather than before. The book of Jubilees pictures ravens taking seed off bare ground before it could be turned in, and the Mishnah's list of Sabbath labors names sowing ahead of plowing. Scholars differ over how general that order was, which is why this is a fit and not a proof.
- Jubilees 11:11, R. H. Charles translation; Mishnah Shabbat 7:2.
Questions
1 How many different places did the seed land, and what happened in each one?
AnswerFour. The path, where the birds took it. Rocky ground, where it shot up and then burned out. Among thorns, where it was choked. And good soil, where it grew. Only the fourth one produced a crop.
2 Why would a farmer throw good seed onto a hard path where it had no chance?
AnswerOn one reconstruction of ancient farming he scattered across the whole field and plowed afterward. He is not being careless with the seed. He is being generous with it.
3 Jesus finished the story and then refused to explain it. Why would he do that on purpose?
AnswerThe story is about people who hear without really hearing. Leaving it unexplained puts every listener in the position the story describes. The ones who want to understand will come and ask, and at 4:10 some of them do.
4 Has anybody ever told you something true that you did not want, and it just bounced off? What do you think was in the way? Then ask whether ground can change.
AnswerThe parable does not say how any of these grounds got the way they are, and we are not going to fill that in for it. But paths get plowed up, rocks get carted off, and thorns get pulled by somebody willing to do the work. Nothing here says the ground you are tonight is the ground you stay.
What This Means for Us
Most of us hear this parable and start grading ourselves, which is a fair thing to want to know and is not what the farmer is doing. He is not standing at the edge of the field sorting dirt into piles. He is throwing seed, including onto the parts he already knows are hopeless.
So throw some. Say the true thing to the person you have already written off. Tell somebody what God has done for you without first working out the odds. The results were never the sower's department, and they are not yours.
Prayer
Father, you send out your word without holding any of it back, on ground that will waste it and ground that will not. Thank you for being that generous with us. Show us honestly what kind of ground we are tonight, and if the answer is a hard one, do not leave us there. We are listening. Amen.