This far in the Galilean ministry, Jesus appears to have devoted considerable attention to the northern lakeside of Gennesaret, then moved south along the eastern edge of the lake, and then crossed over to the southwestern side. While the Twelve departed for miscellaneous unnamed villages and towns all across the greater Galilean region, Jesus encountered a more provincial audience, meaning in this setting that he began to minister among more of a mixed population of Jews and Romans, people of the province. An important difference between this provincial audience and the previous ones—these people generally come from peasant farming, not from fishing or from synagogue leadership. We see Jesus adapt to their everyday life experience right away, and this will have great implications for what now develops in his ministry: Jesus starts to use the parable as a potent teaching device.
The Parable
Our English word parable has Greek etymology and means most literally the same as its Latin-based twin, juxtaposition. All parable means is para (=alongside) + ballō (=set), as in, a set-aside. In other words, a parable is an analogy.
English from the 1500s complicates this, just a smidgen. Because of folks like Shakespeare, the English of that time treated parable as synonymous with proverb, and so we see the King James text in several places refer to Jesus “giving them a parable” and then proceeding to state a proverb, a moral saying. So we can’t just count up all King James references to “parable” and consider those the parables of Jesus—the original text actually distinguishes between true-to-form parables and proverbs. Not all “parables” in the King James are actually parables.
Regardless of whether we acknowledge Jesus as Savior of the world, the historical figure Jesus absolutely revolutionized the genre of the parable and became the world’s foremost parabolist. No one in history has perfected the parable as well as Jesus. His parables represent poetic, provoking, and deep statements on the kingdom of God, the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the ethic to love, poverty, and societal failures.
A Contradiction?
In the gospel narrative, Jesus delivers his parable of the sower. Afterward, disciples express some confusion and ask Jesus to interpret the parable for them. Mark, Matthew, and Luke have Jesus responding with a quote from Isaiah 6 that is written out like so: “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive … lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.” This sounds like Jesus is saying he uses parables to entrap people in their own hard-heartedness, to avoid healing certain people. I’ll admit: I’ve heard repeated interpretations at church that haven’t sat well with me, as though Jesus intends to favor some people and punish others, which seems at odds with so much of Jesus’s behavior, teachings, and atonement.
My own feelings softened and mind eased after examining Isaiah 6 in both its earliest Hebrew and Greek versions. Whether you take the Hebrew Masoretic text or the Greek Septuagint as the definitive representation of Isaiah (or even the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls), it’s quite clear that Isaiah does two things: (1) he speaks of God’s commission to him, Isaiah, and not about some future messianic figure; (2) he describes the effect of the people of Israel choosing not to open their eyes and ears.
Here’s one translation that gets closer than the King James version of the gospels’ quotations of Isaiah 6: “Go and say to this people: Indeed you must hear but you will not understand, indeed you must see but you will not know.” In other words, Isaiah’s audience must hear, but Isaiah is being told that the people will not understand; Isaiah is commanded to prophesy anyway. If we consider all of Isaiah 6, indeed even all of Isaiah, we’ll notice a theme that Isaiah develops. He rather consistently predicts failure, saying how despite God’s efforts to rejuvenate Israel, the people of Israel would neglect God and despise prophets. Within that context of Isaiah predicting his own prophecies’ failure to convince Israelites of their relationship to God, the effect that Israel’s heart becoming resistant to healing emerges from a preemptive rejection.
It’s like the episode of Jesus teaching in his hometown synagogue and saying how his neighbors would one day ask him to perform great miracles as he would do in Capernaum, and then saying how he wouldn’t, alluding to those neighbors rejecting him. But the people took this prediction not as a prediction, but rather as Jesus rejecting them. We readers can see after the fact how their reactions to Jesus proved Jesus correct. Isaiah will preach and prophesy, but he knows based on God’s revelation, that Israel would turn stubborn against his message. This isn’t the same thing as God saying to Isaiah, “I don’t want to heal them, so let’s confuse them so I won’t have to.”
For Jesus to cite Isaiah 6 and connect this to parables offers something intriguing: Jesus anticipated rejections and basically said that the parable didn’t obscure his teachings but rather made them more intelligible and plain to his mixed audience. By using analogies to everyday things, no matter who was in the audience, everyone could relate and could hear the message. They hear, they see—this much Jesus could guarantee. But whether they would understand and know would depend on their embrace or rejection of the message.
Jesus couldn’t make things more direct and intelligible than with his parables. Whereas the antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount/Plain relied on some familiarity with the Torah, the parables could be comprehended by anyone in Jesus’s immediate audience. So, when disciples still wished for the deeper meanings, Jesus told them the parables weren’t designed to communicate technicalities but rather to be readily accessible. “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.”
Sidenote on “mystery”—The word “mystery” has taken on different meanings in today’s English than at Jesus’s time. Back then, the word referred to rituals of a foreign religion. For example, Greek worshipers of Zeus referred to Egyptian rituals performed to Osiris as “mysteries,” and Jewish people throughout Rome spoke of Roman cultic rituals as “mysteries.” This didn’t mean anything mysterious by today’s concept, but rather stood for rituals that one didn’t participate in. It’s like me referring to Hindu rope-swinging festival rituals or to Muslim pilgrimage rituals; since I don’t participate in these religious acts, I could say in the ancient Mediterranean sense that such are “mysteries” of Hinduism and Islam. This context makes much better sense of Jesus telling Jewish followers that they are already familiar with the rituals/mysteries of the kingdom of God whereas non-Jewish people don’t readily understand those rituals. So, Jesus spoke in parables—in analogies, in stories—not like he did in synagogues where he quoted prophecies and Torah and then gave clear commentaries. I might translate this passage as saying “You all already know the inner workings [or ceremonies or routines or rituals] of the kingdom of God, but those others don’t, and so I tell them everyday analogies.”
Rather than plying the parables with esoteric, subjective speculations, Jesus has actually presented us with plainness not intended for deeper speculation. We’ll notice when Jesus explains the parable of the sower to disciples how he doesn’t venture into vague, mysterious, esoteric symbolism, but has a clear and consistent analogy at play that peasant farmers could understand quite easily.
Interpretive Methodology
After being asked to explain the parable, Jesus said to the disciples, “Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?”
Jesus here behaves as though his audience ought to discern the analogy without explanation. And what’s more, in effect he announces that all parables should be plain to understand. How then will we know all parables? We’ll have to learn from Jesus’s method of interpretation, his hermeneutic that we can apply to his other parables.
The structure of Jesus’s parables helps us recognize Jesus’s hermeneutic. In each parable, Jesus situates an analogy using plain, evident things. Then he narrates some kind of effect or outcome. And then he delivers a punchline, something intended to provoke questions or to provoke moral action. Sometimes the punchline goes unstated because it’s supposed to be obvious; our minds naturally fill in the conclusion.
- Setup: plain, evident things that give the parable’s premise.
- Context: the immediate audience knows this, so it goes without detail or explanation.
- Punchline: some kind of provocation toward questions or moral action.
Because of the distance of time and space, we’ll not always operate with accurate context, even though Jesus’s immediate audiences could pick up the context right away. In the case of the parable of the sower, all Jesus has to say is “there went out a sower to sow,” and a particular scene is understood; for us, we’ll not readily pick up on references to commercial farmsteads, typical sowing technique, and taxation that are evident in the context. But if we know the context, we’ll see the ready analogies Jesus employs.
Parable of the Sower
Mark and Luke say that Jesus taught a multitude by the lakeside, presumably near or around Tiberias. The number of people was large enough that he sat in a boat while the audience stood on the shore, an arrangement that created a kind of natural amphitheater. And then Jesus “taught them many things by parables” and said, “Hearken.” Given what we’ve established about Jesus’s instructional design in using parables, this invitation to hear and actively engage what Jesus was about to say seems significant. Hearing opens and closes the parable: here he tells them to “hearken” and he concludes the parable by saying, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Clearly, Jesus intended the audience to pay attention aurally to this story of a sower.
The story went like this (I’ll paraphrase, but won’t take liberties): A sower went out to sow seeds, and as he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side and fowls came and devoured them up. Some seeds fell on rocky ground where the dirt was shallow, and they quickly sprouted, but when the sun was out, the seedlings were scorched because they had no roots and they withered up. Some seeds fell among thorns, and when the plants began to grow, they were choked by the thorny plants and yielded no fruit. Other seeds fell on good ground and yielded an increasing harvest, first thirty times the previous harvest, then sixty times, then a hundred times.
Setup
The story sets up a simple premise: a peasant farmer went out into his fields to scatter seeds. We expect the effect to follow this premise, something about seeds, or plants, or harvests. This indeed will be part of the takeaway of the parable. But let’s ask about the everyday, regular, evident things that factor into this setup: there’s a farmer, there are seeds, there’s ground. From the surrounding context supplied by the gospels, we know that this particular audience will readily understand farming, scattering seeds, and ground conditions that yield or not a good harvest. So far, the premise appears totally plain.
Context
Here’s where some historical context—known to the audience but not necessarily by us—will factor into Jesus’s analogy. First, sources indicate that peasant farmers throughout the province of Judaea at the time did not plow the ground prior to sowing seeds. They tended to plow ground in fallow sectors, meaning, they churned up the dirt with plows in between seasonal uses of certain plots of ground. When they started sowing, these farmers tossed seed over each patch of ground they would use for the season. It was more economical to scatter in bulk rather than trouble themselves too much over dropping seed within precise grids, so every farmer in the audience could understand without further description how seeds would land in spots with almost no chance of harvesting fruit. It’s like me with my lawn broadcaster: I load it with fertilizer and run it across my grass, and I’m utterly unsurprised that I could have scattered some of it over grassless patches.
Second, peasant farmers in the region very often worked within arrangements with farmsteads, sometimes collections of farmsteads operated by a wealthy commercial farmer or rather a kind of ancient farming dealer. They lived a harvest cycle that meant a portion of their yield went to the farmstead collection to be sold at markets and exchanged for goods and property. The typical peasant farmer had barely enough yield to support a family and worked the least desirable land, since more fertile areas went to more affluent agrarian families.
Third, peasant farmers lived under three levels of tribute: (1) Roman taxation of land and people; (2) Herod’s collection of taxes on road usage, rents, and customs; (3) temple taxes called a “tithing” collected from harvest surpluses. Under this much tax burden, peasant classes of all occupations usually fell into debt to survive and would be compelled into day labor and begging by creditors demanding repayment. Upwards of 90 percent of peasant farmers in Jesus’s audience would have experienced day labor on top of their farm work or begged for money at some point in the previous year. This was an immediate, everyday hardship of just about everyone who listened to Jesus tell this parable the first time.
Fourth, harvest yields year-over-year never doubled. Not remotely. Depending on seasonal weather, peasant farmers could hope for matching the previous yield or perhaps exceeding it by 10 percent, but about half of harvests were measured at a net loss by farmsteading collectors.
Punchline
Given the setup (which applies directly to the people in the audience and their everyday experience) and the context, what punchline remains in this parable? It’s the yield, which sounds preposterous: thirty-fold?! In the Greek, we get clear progression between yields, not reduced to “some” as it appears in the King James. In other words, as I paraphrased the parable above, the first yield was 30 times the previous yield; and then the next yield was 60 times; and then finally a yield a hundred times. This is beyond exponential. The numbers jump out as impossible. No farmer in the crowd would have ever heard of such a thing. A hundredfold yield of fruit? But that’s the punchline: seed that fell on good ground grew beyond anything anyone could expect, giving fruit in such abundance no one would have counted such an increase.
As I’m sure those ancient farmers wanted to know, I want to ask—How can I get that good earth?
In terms of Jesus’s running theme of using parables to describe the basileia (=kingdom/dominion) of God, we hear a story about peasant farmers finding good ground—God’s good ground. The dominion of God offers fruit in abundance, impossible harvests well beyond the oppression of Rome, the Herodians, and farmstead collectors.
Jesus’s Interpretation of the Parable
When disciples asked for Jesus to explain the parable, he laid it out this way (again, I paraphrase but without taking liberties): The seeds scattered by the sower are analogous to “the word.” People hearing the word receive it differently. Some are like the ground on the wayside that hear the word, but then, like the fowls, the Accuser comes and accuses them, and whatever place they gave in their hearts to the word closes up. Others are like the rocky ground that hear the word and receive it with gladness and endure for a time, but without deeper root, after affliction and persecution arise because of the word, they are offended. Others are like the thorny ground that hear the word but the cares of the world, the deceit of wealth, and lusts for other things choke out the word. Finally others are like good ground that hear and receive the word, and they bring forth fruit thirty times greater than before, then sixty times greater, than a hundred times greater.
If we remember the story’s intent as a plain analogy, then Jesus’s interpretation remains plain as well. It’s clear that we are ground by analogy, and Jesus is the sower. The punchline, then, provokes a big question: what type of ground are we? Do we hear Jesus’s message and receive it? Or do we only receive it temporarily? Or do we care more for the things of the world, or for wealth, or lust after other things? Or do we fear affliction and persecution for acting on Jesus’s word? Or do we give into accusation or temptation and try to please others and leave Jesus behind? What kind of ground are we?
Do we have ears to hear Jesus? Do we have hearts to receive his word?
If we can hold to Jesus and his word in the face of affliction, persecution, accusation, temptation, and aspiration, we may find ourselves living more abundantly in Christ than we could have possibly imagined. The harvest within us can yield the fruits of Christ to a degree impossible by our reckoning.
Sources
- John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus; Probing the Authenticity of the Parables (New York: Doubleday, 2016).
- Ernest Van Eck, The Parables of Jesus the Galilean: Stories of a Social Prophet (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016).
- David B. Gowler, What Are They Saying about the Parables? (New York: Paulist, 2000).
- John S. Kloppenborg, The Tenants in the Vineyard: Ideology, Economics, and Agrarian Conflict in Jewish Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).
- Bernard B. Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989).