Paying Attention To How the Message is Received
[1] Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. [2] And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: [3] “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. [4] And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. [5] Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. [6] And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. [7] Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. [8] And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” [9] And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Mark 4:1–9 ESV Read More
Jesus is gaining more and more people every day, to the point that He has to start strategically setting up a better place to preach! He is now teaching from a boat that is a little bit offshore with the crowd wrapped around Him. If you’ve ever hollered from a canoe in a small lake, you’ve heard your voice carry over water. This is a genius move and gives Jesus a chance to hunker down and teach more people a little deeper.
With that, He tells the parable of the sower. This is a popular parable which immediately means we have to focus on it more so we don’t gloss over it. He was teaching everyone a lot of things in parables and this was just one of them. Since the Kingdom of God is such a deep, rich, and complex thing, Rabbis would tell a lot of parables to help people see different parts of it.
In Jesus’ day there were not tools sold at every corner Home Depot and Ace hardware to help plant seeds. During planting time, a farmer would get all kinds of help from as many people as he could to prepare a field and spread out the seed. Often times it would involve carrying a pouch or a fold of your shirt full of seeds and a lot of throwing. There would be rows plowed by mules or oxen or even men pulling a plow, but they didn’t have the machines we have for even planting or spreading.
They also didn’t have herbicides and hybrid crops, so you’d have to wait a couple weeks before you saw anything grow. It might be even more weeks before you could tell what was a weed and what was your crop. Since so many people were planting this for their food supply, they would watch it closely. Imagine paying attention to a seed’s progress like your life depended on it! That’s where these folks were. If they weren’t the farmer, they were asking the farmers how the crops were doing, because if the farmer failed, the whole region would struggle.
Paying attention to things takes extra work. It’s easy to hand out a flyer or give away a cheap Bible, but it takes extra effort to pay attention to the recipient. I had a case of Bibles to give away once, and after I was halfway through, a man said: “How can anybody read this?” I thought he was having a spiritual conflict until I opened it up to show him. The cheap Bibles I was giving away for free had 6pt type and the text was separated into 3 columns on a page! The print was harder to read than the ingredients on a Twinkie and I was handing them out to people over 50!
The sower sounds like he sows his seed like a madman with all of this going all over the place, but he doesn’t. He gives out the good news (the seed) and then he watches to see it grow. Just like this section is prefaced with Jesus going to extra trouble to put out a boat a little off the shore so more people could hear, we need to pay attention to how our message is coming across. We need to be sensitive to how we sow the seed and then watch and observe the way it grows.
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