1 Again he began to teach by the lake. Such a large crowd gathered around him that he got into a boat on the lake and sat there while the whole crowd was on the shore by the lake. 2 He taught them many things in parables, and in his teaching said to them: 3 “Listen! 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. It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep. 6 When the sun came up it was scorched, and because it did not have sufficient root, it withered. 7 Other seed fell among the thorns, and they grew up and choked it, and it did not produce grain. 8 But other seed fell on good soil and produced grain, sprouting and growing; some yielded thirty times as much, some sixty, and some a hundred times.” 9 And he said, “Whoever has ears to hear had better listen!”

10 When he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 He said to them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those outside, everything is in parables,

12 “so that although they look they may look but not see,
and although they hear they may hear but not understand,
so they may not repent and be forgiven.”

13 He said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? Then how will you understand any parable? 14 The sower sows the word. 15 These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: Whenever they hear, immediately Satan comes and snatches the word that was sown in them. 16 These are the ones sown on rocky ground: As soon as they hear the word, they receive it with joy. 17 But they have no root in themselves and do not endure. Then, when trouble or persecution comes because of the word, immediately they fall away. 18 Others are the ones sown among thorns: They are those who hear the word, 19 but worldly cares, the seductiveness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it produces nothing. 20 But these are the ones sown on good soil: They hear the word and receive it and bear fruit, one thirty times as much, one sixty, and one a hundred.”

21 He also said to them, “A lamp isn’t brought to be put under a basket or under a bed, is it? Isn’t it to be placed on a lampstand? 22 For nothing is hidden except to be revealed, and nothing concealed except to be brought to light. 23 If anyone has ears to hear, he had better listen! 24 And he said to them, “Take care about what you hear. The measure you use will be the measure you receive, and more will be added to you. 25 For whoever has will be given more, but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.”

26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is like someone who spreads seed on the ground. 27 He goes to sleep and gets up, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 By itself the soil produces a crop, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 And when the grain is ripe, he sends in the sickle because the harvest has come.”

30 He also asked, “To what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use to present it? 31 It is like a mustard seed that when sown in the ground, even though it is the smallest of all the seeds in the ground— 32 when it is sown, it grows up, becomes the greatest of all garden plants, and grows large branches so that the wild birds can nest in its shade.”

33 So with many parables like these, he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear. 34 He did not speak to them without a parable. But privately he explained everything to his own disciples.

35 On that day, when evening came, Jesus said to his disciples, “Let’s go across to the other side of the lake.” 36 So after leaving the crowd, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat, and other boats were with him. 37 Now a great windstorm developed and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was nearly swamped. 38 But he was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. They woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are about to die?” 39 So he got up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Be quiet! Calm down!” then the wind stopped, and it was dead calm. 40 And he said to them, “Why are you cowardly? Do you still not have faith?” 41 They were overwhelmed by fear and said to one another, “Who then is this? Even the wind and sea obey him!” (Mark 4, NET).

Mark’s gospel, out of the four, is the gospel of action. It feels like a blur; as you read through it, everything is happening “next” or “suddenly” or “then.” It really clips along. And here, we get Mark relaying, in this rapid fashion, a sequence of teachings that Mark compresses into an afternoon, but that probably are developed and repeated over a series of days and weeks, maybe the whole 3ish years that Jesus was walking with his disciples.

Mark relates a pattern that Jesus followed where he gives a parable to a crowd, but then does a little extra unpacking to his disciples. Mark, likely learning from the apostle Peter, gets the privileged position of hearing these teachings and Jesus’s explanations through the later eyes of his followers whose minds have been enlightened and enlivened to remember and to communicate the teachings of the great Teacher under whom they were privileged to sit.

Framing all of these teachings is this sort of cryptic note from Jesus that he’s teaching in parables to slightly obscure things, so that people whose hearts and minds are sensitive to what God is doing will understand, so that the people who he explains things to, and who the disciples explain things to, will learn the language of parable that Jesus is using, will be challenged to learn to think about spiritual things the way Jesus does, and will get it. Conversely, people who aren’t trying to follow God will only see the difficulty in thinking about Truth through these stories.

Jesus gives four parables in this chapter, but only explains one. I think the other three become quite sensible though if your imagination is enlivened by working through the first one and meditating on what Jesus is saying. That parable of the sower is a classic one, many people would say one of his greatest, and is very frequently applied to how people respond to hearing the gospel. God’s word is the seed, and it falls here and there, but only in soil, hearts and minds, soft to receive and cultivate it, does it grow up into a plant that bears much fruit, that is a life where one responds to God’s call to salvation.

But I don’t think this is the only application. When we examine the “soil” of our hearts, I think we see areas where our hearts and minds are ready for God’s transformative power. But don’t we also find areas where we find it more difficult to change, where we struggle with trusting God, frankly, where we love our sin? And this happens to “saved” people too, not just to people who haven’t yet put their hope in Christ’s death and resurrection. We still struggle with our sin even though we’d agree that we’re maybe not supposed to. Don’t we find those weeds (cares for this world) still choking our spiritual growth? Don’t we still find spots where we respond to Satan’s lies rather than to the truth that God through His Word and Holy Spirit would have us believe? Don’t we still find rocky ground where God’s truth isn’t really penetrating?

We, all of us, are called to salvation, but God isn’t done with us at that point. He calls us to sanctification, to a process where we learn to love His law and meditate on it, where we learn to trust Jesus with all our cares and abide in him, where we learn to walk in the Spirit rather than in the flesh. What this means sometimes is putting up spiritual “scarecrows” to help us combat the spiritual forces of evil, to give our spiritual friends and mentors permission to help us pull weeds and prune branches to promote sustained growth, to invite the Lord to reveal the rocks we let linger in the soil of our hearts so that we can work them loose and allow Him to remove them and find a new depth of trust in Him. God doesn’t bully us into this. Jesus invites us to reflect on the soil of our hearts and to ask Him into this process.

Two of the other parables we get in this chapter are also about seed and in them we see two pictures of how hope and faithfulness come together. In the one, we see the fruit of what happens when one is diligent with their soil and the harvest is made ready, and in the other we’re invited to meditate on how even the smallest bit of faith, faith small like a mustard seed, can grow into a massive plant that can provide shade and shelter for many. I like that these agrarian images are paired with an encouragement to show one’s light, to make visible what’s going on in one’s life as it will all be laid bare anyhow. In the middle of the chapter, verses 23-25, we get this warning that what we’re attending to will demonstrate the quality of our spiritual walk and, to mix the metaphors together, that if we work to cultivate our soil, we’ll experience more spiritual fruit, but that if we attend to wasteful and frivolous things, even what we have might be taken from us.

Mark is ultimately a man of action though, and all this teaching ends up underscored in this chapter by one of the most remarkable of Jesus’s miracles. Mark continues to explore this imagery in chapter 5. At the end of the chapter, we find Jesus asleep in the boat with his friends after a long day of sharing about God’s kingdom with the crowds that want to hear from him. You can imagine the mental weariness that he willingly took on as part of incarnating as a man after a taxing day of teaching and debating and explaining. Up come the wind and the waves and the usually placid Sea of Galilee becomes the wild and waste, something like the chaos waters over which God’s Spirit hovers in Genesis 1. The disciples, understandably, are afraid of being out in the deep water when it’s behaving chaotically. Their lives are in peril! But they haven’t yet fully internalized just Who it is they’re following. They wake Jesus and, just like in Genesis, he speaks to the waves, he speaks to the wind, and imposes order on the chaos by his Word. “Just who are we following?”

Even if they were afraid of the chaos waters, even if you’re afraid of the chaotic world in which we live, this is the Christ. And his parables don’t scream at you in rage; they calmly invite you to submit the chaos of your heart, the rocks that cause shallow growth, the weeds that overgrow the good plants, the scavenging birds that come to steal your faith and trust, and to give them all over to Him. It is good to be rebuked by such a Lord. Later in Mark (chapter 9), we get another sequence where the disciples aren’t entirely understanding. They’ve tried to help a man whose son is being tormented by a demon, and they can’t do it. Jesus shows up and the man asks Jesus to do something, to help. Jesus challenges everyone there by saying that belief in God makes all things possible. The man’s response is so relatable: “I believe; help my unbelief!”

As you examine the soil in your heart this week, may you too be bolstered in your faith. May you also be gently rebuked for those spots where you’re harbouring unbelief. I pray you get what you need to help your spiritual garden grow, whether that be accountability with peers or mentors, strategies to reinforce your trust in God’s Word, or help digging up the rocks that make your soil shallow. I pray you recognize in Jesus Christ, the One who calms the storms, the One who has destroyed the power of sin and hell and death and invites you to share His victory, the One who gently calls you to His rest.