The Crowd
Today we
get to shift from the Jewish leaders and their response to His authority to look
at the crowd and their response to His authority. We get several great parables and then a very
familiar traditional story. Let’s start
with the parable of the soils.
The Four Soils
Jesus
makes it clear. There are four soils:
hard soil (path), rocky soil, thorny soil (weeds), and good soil. Obviously the goal is to be the good
soil. But here’s part of the point of
the parable. How does one know that they
are good soil? There is a harvest:
thirtyfold, sixtyfold, or a hundredfold.
The thing that ultimately differentiates between the good soil and all
the others is that there is a harvest.
The scale of the harvest is far less important than the presence of a
harvest in the first place. Want to read
this parable and feel good about yourself?
Ask yourself what spiritual harvest you are involved in and you’ll have your
answer.
However,
if there is no harvest, perhaps we should look at what other type of ground
there might be.
- The path has no time for the seed – the Word of God that God plants in us. The path rejects the seed and it is soon snatched away. I’m guessing that if you are reading these words then you are not the path.
- The rocky soil is not “soil with rocks in it” but rather soil that has a “very shallow layer of topsoil an inch or so above a hard bed of limestone.” We know this because this kind of ground is common in the area of Israel. In this soil, the seed is planted and it grows really well for a little while before its roots encounter the hard stone. Then it stops growing well because the roots cannot find much depth. In our life, it is easy at first to accept Jesus. But then it becomes hard to seriously apply our faith to life. As it becomes hard, people of this soil type decide not to endure the challenge and we wither and die – going back to the ways of the world.
- Finally we have the thorny soil. This is a soil that is ready to grow, but the seed has company. The seed can germinate and it can even grow. But the thorns around it take up all the nutrients and choke out the seed. These people are the ones who genuinely seem interested in God but who are simply too easily distracted to do anything meaningful for the faith. These are the people who start off with good intentions but seldom ever follow anything through to its completion. There is all kind of potential, but the potential never has any long-term focus.
When
dealing with this parable, it is bad to assume that one is good soil. We should want to be the good soil, but it is
bad to assume that we are. We need to
genuinely ask: is there a harvest? If
there is a harvest, then we are good soil.
But if there is no harvest, then we need to ask ourselves why there is
no harvest. Are we rejecting some part
of what God is telling us? Are we simply
not willing to endure the discipleship process and let it come to a lifelong
series of meaningful ends? Are we far
too interested in the things of this world to genuinely grow in Christ?
Lamps and Baskets
Then we
have the parable of the lamp and the basket.
This passage is all about hiding things and revealing things. People do things in the dark because they
don’t want to be discovered. People do
things in the light because they want them to be seen – hopefully in a good way
as a role model. In these words Jesus is
telling us that we have the opportunity to do things in the light
(righteousness) or to do things in the dark (sin). To those who spend their time on this earth
doing righteousness and following God’s ways, more will be given (eternal
life). To those who spend their time on
this earth pursuing their own desires (sin), then even the life that they do
have will eventually be taken away.
The Mystery of Faith
The next
pair of parables talks about the mysteries of faith. Who among us can know how faith grows? No, with endurance we are faithful to God’s
ways day after day. It is only when we
are faithful for days upon weeks upon years do we look back and see how we have
been changed by God! But even then we
cannot explain it. Defying explanation
our faith grows large – far larger than anything we could have ever
accomplished on our own.
I know
this is absolutely true in my life. I
can’t remember a time in my life that I didn’t believe in God and God’s love
for me. But I can’t explain the process
from being that little child of innocent and unwavering faith to the man I am
now who wrestles with doubts and understanding but is still resolute in belief. How did God take that you boy who could only
recite what he was told and turn him into a man who consistently writes daily
devotional blog posts? The only
explanation is through the mystery of daily faith development. God does the slow daily growth that I don’t
even feel happening but of which I can see the evidence when I look backwards
in my life.
Parables in General
Before
coming to the last story, I want to talk a little about parables. We hear these parables and think of them as
comforting stories that increase our faith.
And … they do. But let’s look at
the concept of a parable a little more deeply.
What does Mark 4:33-34 tell us?
Jesus only spoke to the crowds in parables. He used many parables. Furthermore, we know that Jesus had to
explain everything in private to His disciples.
This means that when Jesus taught in parables, people didn’t get
it. If anyone was going to get it, it
would be His own disciples! So we can
have confidence that the crowds didn’t understand Him in general. What we think of as cute teaching lessons that
help us understand the faith better were actually stories that confused
people! If fact, this was intentional on
Jesus’ behalf! Don’t believe me? Go back and read Mark 4:11-12.
So, if
parables are not meant to make our understanding easier then what is the point
of the parable? Simply speaking, the
parable is a tool for weeding out true believers from people who confess belief
but who don’t really have it. To return
to the soils parable, the parable is a tool to see who is good soil and who is
just a pretender type of soil.
How do we
know this? Well, look at what the
disciples of Jesus do. The disciples of
Jesus come and seek out further explanation.
The disciples hear something that confuses them and they come and get
the answer. They pursue Jesus! What does the crowd do? The crowd comes, gathers, sees a few
miracles, hears some teaching that they don’t understand, and goes back to
their ordinary lives. Does not God call
us to pursue Him?
Therefore
we can see the parable serving an incredibly important purpose. The parable teaches us to pursue God – to
pursue Christ. The parable teaches us to
wrestle with faith and always come back for a greater understanding. The parable teaches us how to be good
soil. For those who do not wrestle and
do not pursue … the parable reveals who those people are.
Calming the Storm
At last we
turn to the story of the calming of the storm.
Now, I’m going to go quickly through this story. First, notice that Jesus intentionally leads
His disciples into this storm. After
all, He’s God. He knows a storm is
coming and He tells the disciples to get into the boat. Those people in the world that think God is
calling them into a nice, stable, and comfortable life need to reexamine this story
– and all the other stories of His life and the lives of His true disciples.
Second,
Jesus falls asleep. Jesus is not worried
about the future or about the fate of His disciples. All things rest in God’s hands. God is in control. Those who struggle with letting God be in
control need to sleep in the middle of more thunderstorms so God can be in
control. I can stand to learn this
lesson better.
Finally,
the disciples have to come to Jesus. The
disciples need to realize how much their worrying and their human understanding
simply cannot solve the problems of life.
All of God’s disciples need to learn humbleness and patience and
faith. Only God can solve the problems
of this world. Another lesson I can
stand to learn.
In the
end, this chapter has a great unity of flow to it. Last chapter we saw the religious struggle
with Jesus’ authority and reject it.
This chapter we see the crowds interact with Jesus’ authority and become
ambivalent towards it. This chapter we
also see the disciples’ wrestling with Jesus’ authority and they begin to learn
to embrace it and pursue it.
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