Another article for the local paper...

The Parable of All Parables

Preaching through the Gospel according to Mark we have come across the parable of all parables, The Parable of the Soils, given by Jesus.  To those in the church world and coming up through the Sunday School or catechism you would probably be able to give the basics of this story.  There are hard, rocky, thorny, and good soils.  Maybe you remember drawing this out in a Sunday School class with your classmates with those big crayons.

Reading the passage this time, I had a couple phrases that jumped off the page as if I had never seen them before. 

The first is in verse 13 of chapter 4 of Mark.  And He said to them, “Do you not understand this parable?  How will you understand all the parables?”

Jesus is pointing to this parable of the soils as foundational to us as Christians and the church to understand if we are going to understand the 60+ parables he gives us through the Bible.  All the other parables are based upon this parable.  As you hear the other parables you will refer back to this parable.  We need to understand this beyond just the four soils and the outcomes of where the seed is scattered by the sower.  What is Jesus saying here that is foundational to the church and to the Christian life?

The second phrase that jumped off the page is found in verse 14 of the same chapter of Mark.  “The sower sows the word.”

The person is identified as a sower.  He is identified as a sower as a descriptor of what he does.  He is in the act of sowing and so he calls him a sower.  The man is driving the tractor in the field and so we can him a farmer even though we don’t know anything more about him.  We see his action and we give him this title or name.  The person in the parable is a sower who is sowing seed.  The sower is the method in which the seed gets sown.  Hold onto that thought.

Can we go the other way and say that if someone is not sowing seed that he is not a sower?  If someone is not actively being seen sowing seed then one would give him or her another title or name and not that of a sower?  We get this title or description because of what we are doing.

The sower/person is sowing the word.  Jesus lets the disciples and followers in on what the seed represents, the word of God.  The sower is someone who is actively spreading the word of God.  This person is seen speaking to others about the gospel of Jesus Christ.  They are talking about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  The seed is the message that is getting sown.

The remainder of the parable is about what happens when we sow the word.  When we actually spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, this is how the listeners will respond.  We spread the seed but God tills the soil.  Only God can change the hearts of men and women (the soils) but our responsibility is to sow the seed.  Here are my questions.

Have we abandoned the method that Jesus set before us?  The method is that we actively spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Would Jesus give our churches or us that title of actually sowing because we actually are?  Have we resorted to other methods?  Are we looking for someone else to do this or more concerned about how we look and come across than actually what we are saying?

Have we abandoned the message that Jesus gave us to give through his very life?  The message is not about feeding the poor or being a good neighbor or citizen or giving back or paying forward (all these are good and worthy of our activities in increasing measure) but a message that God gave Jesus to be our Savior so that we could answer his call to follow him.  Has the message of the sower gotten lost in all the other messages that are coming out of the church?

Are we truly sowers?