Saturday Afternoon Musing
This may not be new to you, but it was to me.
I have been meditating on Mark 4:1-20 and Jesus’ parable of the four soils. Sometimes hearing is better than reading (silently).
Over the last few days, I have gone outside (into the heat) and read it out loud two or three times. Stephnie was out of the house running some errands today and the house was silent and I read it again, out loud a couple of times inside, avoiding the heat that was outside. Each time it struck me that, too often, I/we read the Scripture too quickly with little imagination, little engagement with what the atmosphere was like in the ears of Jesus’s first hearers, or even, what Jesus might have been thinking as He taught and delivered His various parables to the individuals who heard Him.
I have a suspicion. I think Jesus might have spoken these words much slower than a typical public reading cadence. I think there might have been an underlying sadness to His delivery. He spoke of the lavishness of God’s giving of His Word and the Gospel. It is like a farmer, a sower, who spreads out his seed everywhere he can hoping some of it will find good soil and produce a harvest. And yet, most of the seed falls into places (hearts) that do not produce a harvest. If you are a farmer, a sower, that is heartbreaking. Nothing permanent and life giving, life sustaining happens from much of the seed that is sown. All of the Sower’s lavish sowing produces little because the soil did not “receive” or “accept” the seed. It couldn’t bless the lives of the hearers of His words because they would not accept it.
I think that is sad. More, I think it is tragic.
How many of us are under the delusion that we have received the Word, because we go to church, or read our Bible, or pray, or go to retreats or Bible studies but there is no real fruit in our lives? And what is the fruit? Fruit is life giving. Fruit contains nourishment for life. And there is something else that fruit contains–seeds.
In other words, if the seed of the gospel is truly planted in our hearts, we produce nourishment for ourselves and others but we also produce seed for future harvests for the gospel and the kingdom of God. Which means of course, that Word-receivers become Word-givers. We receive the Word, and become Sowers of the Word to others.
Maybe that isn’t earthshaking to you, but it at least a good reminder.
I think in the next couple of days I might record my own English language version of HOW Jesus might have spoken this parable, complete with the sadness I think I see in the passage, and repost this article with the link.
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