(4) Lastly, the great virtue of the parable is that it compels people to think for themselves. It does not do their thinking for them. It compels them to make their own deductions and to discover the truth for themselves. The worst way to help children is to do their work for them. It does not help them at all to do their maths, write their essays or work out their problems. It does help greatly to give them the necessary help to do it for themselves. That is what Jesus was aiming at. Truth always has a double impact when it is a personal discovery. Jesus did not wish to save people the mental sweat of thinking; he wished to make them think. He did not wish to make their minds lazy; he wished to make them active. He did not wish to take the responsibility from them; he wished to lay the responsibility on them. So he used the parabolic method, not to do his audience’s thinking for them, but to encourage them to do their own thinking. He presented them with truth which, if they would make the right effort in the right frame of mind, they could discover for themselves, and therefore possess it in a way that made it really and truly theirs.
From Earth to Heaven
Mark 4:3–9
‘Listen! Look! The sower went out to sow. As he was sowing, some seed fell along the roadside; and the birds came and devoured it. Some fell upon rocky ground where it did not have much earth; and it sprang up immediately, because it had no depth of earth, but, when the sun rose, it was scorched, and it was withered away, because it had no root. Some fell among thorns; and the thorns crowded in on it until they choked the life out of it, and it did not yield any fruit. And some fell on good ground; and, as it grew up and grew greater, it yielded fruit and bore as much as thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.’ And he said, ‘Who has ears to hear, let him hear.’
WE leave the interpretation of this parable until we come to the interpretation Mark gives us, and for the moment we consider it only as a specimen of Jesus’ parabolic teaching in action. The scene is the lakeside; Jesus is sitting in the boat just off the shore. The shore shelves gently down to the water’s edge, and makes a natural amphitheatre for the crowd. Even as he talks, Jesus sees a sower busy sowing seed in the fields beside the lake. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘The sower went out to sow.’ Herein is the whole essence of the parabolic method.
(1) Jesus started from the here and now to get to the there and then. He started from a thing that was happening at that moment on earth in order to lead people’s thoughts to heaven; he started from something which everyone could see to get to the things that are invisible; he started from something which everyone knew to get to something which no one had ever realized. That was the very essence of Jesus’ teaching. He did not bewilder people by starting with things which were strange and abstruse and involved; he started with the simplest things that even a child could understand.
(2) By so doing, Jesus showed that he believed that there was a real kinship between earth and heaven. Jesus would not have agreed that ‘earth was a desert drear’. He believed that in the ordinary, common, everyday things of life it was possible to see God. As Archbishop William Temple put it: ‘Jesus taught men to see the operation of God in the regular and the normal – in the rising of the sun and the falling of the rain and the growth of the plant.’ Long ago, Paul had the same idea when he said that the visible world is designed to make known the invisible things of God (Romans 1:20). For Jesus, this world was not a lost and evil place; it was the garment of the living God. Sir Christopher Wren lies buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, the great church that his own genius planned and built. On his tombstone there is a simple Latin inscription which means, ‘If you wish to see his monument, look around you.’ Jesus would have said, ‘If you wish to see God, look around you.’ Jesus finds in the common things of life a countless source of signs which lead men and women to God if they will only read them aright.
(3) The very essence of the parables is that they were spontaneous, of the moment and unrehearsed. Jesus looks round, seeking a point of contact with the crowd. He sees the sower and on the spur of the moment that sower becomes his text. The parables were not stories worked out in the quiet of a study: they were not carefully thought out and polished and rehearsed. Their supreme greatness is that Jesus composed these immortal short stories on the spur of the moment. They were produced by the demand of the occasion and in the cut and thrust of debate.
In his book, The Parables of Jesus, C. J. Cadoux said of the parables: ‘A parable is art harnessed for service and conflict . . . Here we find the reason why the parable is so rare. It requires a considerable degree of art, but art exercised under hard conditions. In the three typical parables of the Bible the speaker takes his life in his hands. Jotham (Judges 9:8–15) spoke his parable of the trees to the men of Shechem and then fled for his life. Nathan (2 Samuel 12:1–7), with the parable of the ewe-lamb, told an oriental despot of his sin. Jesus in the parable of the wicked husbandmen used his own death sentence as a weapon for his cause . . . In its most characteristic use the parable is a weapon of controversy, not shaped like a sonnet in undisturbed concentration but improvised in conflict to meet the unpremeditated situation. In its highest use it shows the sensitiveness of the poet, the penetration, rapidity and resourcefulness of the protagonist, and the courage that allows such a mind to work unimpeded by the turmoil and danger of mortal conflict.’
When we bear in mind that the parables of Jesus were flashed out spontaneously, their wonder is increased a hundredfold.
(4) That brings us to a point we must always remember in our attempts to interpret the parables. They were, in the first instance, not meant to be read but to be heard. That is to say, in the first instance, no one could sit down and study them phrase by phrase and word by word. They were spoken not to be studied at length and at leisure, but to produce an immediate impression and reaction. That is to say, the parables must never be treated as allegories. In an allegory, every part and action and detail of the story has an inner significance. The Pilgrim’s Progress and the Faerie Queene are allegories; in them every event and person and detail has a symbolic meaning. Clearly an allegory is something to be read and studied and examined; but a parable is something which was heard once and once only. Therefore what we must look for in a parable is not a situation in which every detail stands for something but a situation in which one great idea leaps out and shines like a flash of lightning. It is always wrong to attempt to make every detail of a parable mean something. It is always right to say: ‘What one idea would flash into someone’s mind on hearing this story for the first time?’
The harvest is sure
Mark 4:13–20 (The parable of the sower, continued)
‘Don’t you understand this parable?’ he said to them. ‘How then will you understand all the parables? What the sower is sowing is the word. The kind of people represented by the case in which the seed fell by the side of the road are those in whose case the word is sown, and whenever they hear it, immediately Satan comes, and snatches away the word that was sown into them. Just so, the kind of people represented by the case in which the seed was sown on the rocky ground are those, who, whenever they hear the word, immediately gladly welcome it. They have no root in themselves, but they are quite impermanent; and then, when trouble or persecution happens because of the word, they immediately stumble and collapse. Then there are the others who are represented by the case in which the seed was sown among thorns. These are the people who hear the word, but the anxieties of this world and the deceptive attraction of wealth and the desires for other things enter into them and choke the life out of the word, and it never gets a chance to bear fruit. The kind of people who are represented by the case in which the seed fell on good ground are such as