Parables Beside the Sea (4:1–34)
Again Jesus began to teach by the lake (4:1). Jesus’ power exerts such a magnetic attraction that he speaks from a boat to crowds massed on the shore. A sloping amphitheater-like inlet lies halfway between Capernaum and Tabgha and has excellent natural acoustics, allowing someone to be heard easily on the shoreline. Jesus may have used this cove in teaching the crowds.
He taught them many things by parables (4:2). Parables are not simply illustrative yarns or earthly stories with heavenly meanings. The Hebrew mashal provides the backdrop for Jesus’ parables. It “can mean a dark, perplexing saying that is meant to stimulate hard thinking.”86 The parables are “the opposite of prosaic, propositional teaching” and “attract attention by their pictorial or paradoxical language, and at the same time their indirect approach serves to tease and provoke the hearer.”87 They reveal the mystery while hiding it at the same time because a listener can only understand them by daring to become involved in their imaginative world. Even then, understanding the parables requires special help (4:33).
Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed (4:3). In the Greco-Roman world, sower was a stock symbol for a teacher, sowing for teaching, seed for words, and soils for students.88 These parallel ideas contrast with Jesus’ parable. The Hellenistic writers compare farming to learning and refer to cultivation, toil, achievement, reward, and virtue. What stifles the seed from growing is a lack of intellect. The interpretation of Jesus’ parable does not attribute the loss to some intellectual deficit. The failures are caused by cosmic forces—Satan snatching the seed; social forces—withering under persecution; and ethical breakdowns—temporal anxieties and the lure of riches. The reason for the failure of the seed is the lamentable spiritual state of the hearer’s heart, not the lamentable state of the hearer’s mind.89
A second difference is that sowing in Scripture is a metaphor for God’s work. God promises to sow Israel to begin her renewal. In 4 Ezra 8:6, the seed is understood as spiritual seed. God says, “For I sow my law in you, and it shall bring forth fruit in you, and you shall be glorified through it forever.”90 The reference to sowing, therefore, brings up three motifs. (1) It recalls God’s promise of an end-time Israel planted by God. According to the vision in 1 Enoch 62:8, “the congregation of the holy ones shall be planted [lit., sown], and all the elect ones shall stand before him.” (2) Since sowing is a metaphor for God’s work, this parable does not illustrate the effect that any teacher may have on pupils as in the Hellenistic parallels. It defines Jesus’ ministry and implies that he comes as the end-time sower to renew Israel. How one responds to his teaching decides whether one will be included in God’s kingdom. (3) The seeds sown are not just nuggets of wisdom. The seed is God’s word, and God says, “It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:11).
Some fell along the path…. Some fell on rocky places…. Other seed fell among thorns (4:4–7). The parable pictures a farmer working marginal ground using a broadcast method of sowing where seeds fall everywhere—on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns. What field in Palestine did not have its rocks and thorns and thistles? All seed sown does not prosper (4 Ezra 8:41), but against formidable odds, the miracle of a harvest will occur.
Some have tried to explain away the seeming carelessness of a farmer who casts good seed on the pathway, on a rocky substratum, and among thorn bushes to make the parable more realistic and less allegorical. They argue that plowing did not precede sowing, and the sower would later plow the seed into the ground. It would not help to plow thorns under, however, since they would only sprout up again. A pathway established by villagers would only be trampled down again.
Sowing did not always precede plowing.91 One expert maintains that sowing may precede plowing only if the soil is silty or loamy and will form an even tilth when plowed. “Under any other soil conditions sowing in unploughed stubble would be condemned by any competent authority as a wasteful and slovenly proceeding.”92 This comports with the exhortation in Jeremiah: “This is what the LORD says to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem: ‘Break up your unplowed ground and do not sow among thorns’ ” (Jer. 4:3).
It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times (4:8). The harvest numbers do not refer to the bulk yield of the whole field. That was calculated from the proportion of the amount of seed sown to grain threshed. The varied yield refers instead to the numbers of grains produced by individual plants. Pliny mentioned that wheat with branching ears yielded a hundred grains.93 Modern agronomists assert that wheat normally produces “two or three tillers under typical crowded field conditions, but individual plants on fertile soil with ample space may produce as many as 30 to 100 hundred tillers. The average spike (head) of common wheat contains 25 to 30 grains in 14 to 17 spikelets. Large spikes may contain 50 to 75 grains.”94 Wheat grown in ancient times approached these numbers. Strabo wrote that a deputy governor of a region in Africa reported to the emperor the incredible result of 400 shoots obtained from a single grain of seed and sent to Nero also 360 stalks obtained from one grain. He then reports that “at all events the plains of Lentini and other districts in Sicily, and the whole of Andalusia, and particularly Egypt reproduce at the rate of a hundredfold.”95
The secret of the kingdom of God (4:11). Because the parables are characterized as secret, everyone needs Jesus’ interpretation to unlock the mystery. The word translated “secret” is “mystery.” It does not refer to something baffling or unintelligible but to something that could not be known except by divine revelation. Behind this concept is the Old Testament idea of God’s secret that cannot be discovered by human wisdom but can only be revealed by God. What was once hidden—how God is establishing his sovereignty over the world—is now being revealed.96
The idea that many remain in the dark is familiar in Jewish apocalyptic (“You do not reveal your mysteries to many,” 2 Bar. 48:2–3). We find a similar idea expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The wicked are those who have not inquired nor sought God “to know the hidden matters in which they err.”97 The outsiders’ unbelief is therefore not caused by the parables’ obscurity but by their unwillingness to try to stretch their minds around Jesus’ unconventional visions of God’s kingdom. Insiders want to know more and come to him to ask for clarification.
Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them (4:15). Ancient Jewish texts also liken Satan to a bird or birds.98 Second Enoch 29:5 pictures Satan’s expulsion from heaven as resulting in his flight: “And I threw him out from the height with his angels, and he was flying in the air continuously above the bottomless.”
Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? (4:21). Lamps were associated with gladness and marriage and were also important in the religious life of the Jewish household.99 The Sabbath lamp was lit at dusk since fire could not be kindled on the Sabbath (Ex. 35:3), the Day of Atonement, or the Passover. The words of the prophets are likened to a light shining in a dark place (2 Peter 1:19). In 4 Ezra 12:42, Ezra is compared to a lamp in a dark place (and a haven for a ship saved from a storm).
ANCIENT OIL LAMPS
With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more (4:24). This parable affirms that those who do not hear rightly will become have-nots who lose everything. Those who hear well will receive more explanation and understanding. A rabbinic tradition professes:
Observe how the character of the Holy One, blessed be He, differs from that of flesh and blood. A mortal can put something into an empty vessel, but not into a full one. But the Holy One, blessed be He, is not so; He puts more into a full vessel, but not an empty one; for it says, “If hearkening you will hearken” (Ex. 15:26), implying, if you hearken you will go on hearkening, and if not you will not hearken.100
A man scatters seed on the ground (4:26). Jesus again compares the things of God to the everyday world of a farmer in the only parable peculiar to Mark. It reflects a Palestinian perspective. The farmer first sleeps and then rises because the day begins in the evening, not in the morning.
All by itself the soil produces grain (4:28). The seed holds within itself the secret of its growth that follows an appointed order of development that cannot be hurried or skipped. This parable expresses the belief that the growth of plants is the wondrous work of God. His purposes will be fulfilled in his way and his time.
It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground (4:31). The mustard seed was proverbially small (see Matt. 17:20, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed”). The Mishnah uses the phrase “even as little as a grain of mustard” to describe the smallest possible quantity.101 It requires 725–760 seeds from the black mustard to make a gram.102 The parable contrasts the mustard bush’s microscopic beginning with its lush outcome. The kingdom of God is something present and yet something that will be transformed and is therefore yet to come. The present activity of God, “not the plausibility of the evidence, guarantees that great ending.”103
Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade (4:32). The mustard bush was cultivated in the field (Matt. 13:31) and grown for its leaves as well as its grains. Wild mustard (charlock) was unwelcome since it was almost impossible to get rid of it. Pliny claims that “mustard … with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”104
The NIV translation of the verb kataskēnoō as “perch” is based on the assumption that the mustard bush was hardly a suitable place for the birds of the air to nest. It is a fast-growing annual plant that grows to a height of eight to ten feet. Spring is the time when birds build their nests, but the mustard has not yet grown large enough for the birds to build nests in its branches.105 It is assumed that the birds are attracted to the bush by the seeds. But the verb means to dwell, lodge, or nest. The noun form kataskēnōsis is used for bird nests in Matthew 8:20 and Luke 9:58. The image recalls Old Testament texts. Daniel 4:12, 21 refers to a tree in which “the birds of the air” have nesting places. In Ezekiel 17:23 and 31:6, God promises to plant a noble cedar on the mountain height of Israel that towers over all the trees of the field, and in its boughs “birds of every kind will nest.”106
The “birds of the air” was a transparent symbol for the nations of Gentiles.107 The image of lodging or shelter appears in Joseph and Asenath 15:6 for the incorporation of the Gentiles in the people of God. After Asenath is converted, an angel appears to her and tells her that she will be given the name “City of Refuge, because in you many nations will take refuge with the Lord God, the Most High, and under your wings many peoples trusting in the Lord God will be sheltered [kataskēnousi].”
This background may point to more subtle meanings hidden in the parable of the mustard bush. The tree mentioned in the Old Testament is planted on a high and lofty mountain (Ezek. 17:22), and its top reaches to heaven so that it is visible to the ends of the earth (Dan. 4:11, 20). When one is talking about the kingdom of God and birds of heaven lodging under the protection of trees with great branches, the Jewish listener was conditioned by Scripture and tradition to think in terms of the salvation of pagans through Israel’s triumph.108 Does this parable cleverly undermine notions of grandeur with its jarring image of a mustard bush?
The Stilling of the Storm (4:35–41)
Let us go over to the other side (4:35). The inclusion of “other boats” means that the group of insiders surrounding Jesus was not limited only to the twelve. The Sea of Galilee was also known as the Sea of Tiberias (John 21:1) and the Lake of Gennesaret.109 It is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide. Going across to the other side of the lake is mentioned in Mark 4:35; 5:1, 21; 6:45; 8:13. Josephus describes the Jordan River as “cutting across the Lake” so that the river’s entry and exit points “formed an imaginary line which determined whether a location was ‘on the side’ or ‘on the other side’ of the lake.”110
THE SEA OF GALILEE
Choppy waves on the sea.
They took him along, just as he was, in the boat (4:36). An ancient boat was discovered buried in the silt of this lake during a prolonged dry season. It has allowed us the opportunity to picture exactly the kind of boat Jesus and his disciples would have sailed. Carbon 14 testing dates the boat from this time period, 120 B.C. to A.D. 40. An oil lamp inside the boat was dated to the mid-first century B.C., and coins from A.D. 29–30 were also found. The boat measured 25.5 feet long, 7.5 feet wide, and 4.5 feet in depth. It had a deck in the bow and the stern and could be powered by sails or by four oars. It normally would have a crew of five with a capacity for ten passengers or in excess of a ton of cargo.111
A furious squall came up (4:37). Two extensive valleys on the western side of the lake funnel wind onto the lake. Westerly gusts can arise in the afternoon, turning the placid lake into a high sea with waves soaring up over seven feet.112 The lake also is 682 feet below sea level, which makes it susceptible to downdrafts when “cool air from the Golan Heights meets the warm air coming off the lake, and these contribute to sudden and unpredictable storms.”113 Sudden storms are therefore familiar sailing hazards.
Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion (4:38). Jesus has probably fallen asleep under the stern deck, which affords the most protection from the elements and keeps him out of the way of those sailing the vessel. The “cushion” is probably a sandbag used for ballast. Two types were used: a sack of a hundred to a hundred and twenty pounds; and a pillow of around fifty pounds.
The storm at sea should be read against an Old Testament backdrop. Jonah was in a deep sleep in the midst of a storm that terrified the sailors. In Psalm 107:23–32, imperiled sailors cry out to the Lord in their trouble, and he “stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed.”114 The incident reveals that Jesus has mastery over the sea, the place of chaos and evil, as does God. Jesus awakes to muzzle the sea in the same way he rebuked demons (1:25; 3:12; 9:25).115 His sleep during the storm contrasts with the disciples’ terror. God “grants sleep to those he loves” (Ps. 127:2), and Jesus’ sleep reflects his serene trust in God, who watches over him.116