The Receptive Heart

Context

Mark’s gospel is concerned with presenting the interaction of Jesus with His hearers and their various responses. It quickly becomes obvious in Mark’s gospel that the people were keen to hear Jesus but the established leadership in the form of the Pharisees are very much against Him.

Interactions with a voice

Mark 1:7 John the Baptist preaches

Mark 1:11 God speaks to His Son

Mark 1:12–13 Satan speaks with Jesus (Matt 4:1–11)

Mark 1:14–15 Jesus begins preaching the gospel

Mark 1:16–20 Jesus calls His first disciples

Mark 1:21 Jesus teaches in the synagogue

Mark 1:24 The demons speak to Jesus

Mark 1:25 Jesus rebukes the demons

Mark 1:34 Demons forbidden from speaking

Mark 1:35 Jesus prayed

Mark 1:39 Jesus preaches throughout Galilee

Mark 1:40 The leper speaks to Jesus

Mark 1:41 Jesus shows compassion with words and actions

Mark 1:43 Jesus strictly warns

Mark 1:45 The leper tells everyone the great news of Jesus

Mark 2:2 Jesus preaches in Capernaum

Mark 2:5 Jesus forgives sins with His words

Mark 2:14 Jesus calls on Levi (Matthew) to follow Him

Mark 2:25–28 Jesus teaches on the Sabbath by referring to Scripture

Mark 3:1–6 Jesus heals on the Sabbath

Mark 3:12 Jesus sternly warns the demons

Mark 3:28 Jesus warns of forgiveness of sins being impossible for blasphemy of the Holy Spirit

Mark 4:2–3 Jesus teaches and commands that we listen

Mark 4:9 Jesus commands that we hear (same word as Mark 4:3. In the v.3, second person plural; in v.9, third person singular).

Silence [1st slide]

Mark 1:25 – Jesus rebukes the demons.

Mark 1:44 – Jesus commands the healed leper.

Mark 3:12 – Jesus warns the demons.

Mark 5:43 – Jesus commands Peter, James, John, and the girl’s parents.

Mark 7:36 – Jesus commands the crowd after the deaf & mute man is healed.

Mark 8:26 – Jesus commands the blind man.

Mark 8:30 – Jesus commands His disciples.

Mark 9:9 – Jesus commands Peter, James, and John.

Mark 11:33 – Jesus refuses to answer the religious leaders.

Mark 14:61 – Jesus says nothing, cf. Luke 23:9.

When Jesus Speaks [2nd slide]

When Jesus speaks in Mark 4:1–9, He begins and ends His parable with the same word—listen/hear. Although translated differently in the English, they are the same word with only the person and number changed. Thus, the parable is set out for everyone: everyone is commanded to hear/listen to the parable. However, at the end of the parable, the response is commanded from the individual. All may hear the gospel but how will one understand/respond?

So why listen to Jesus at all? The answer is found frequently in the opening three chapters. Jesus demonstrates power over all kinds of diseases and illnesses and can even cast out demons. More than that, when He rebukes the demons for speaking, they obey Him. Furthermore, this is shown in contrast to His stern warning to the leper whom He heals. Whereas the demons are commanded to be silent and obey Him, the leper is commanded to be silent but cannot contain the experience of Jesus in His life.

Thus, we see Jesus’ power over the spiritual world, but that He can only control us when we fully submit to what He has told us. If we do not, if our freewill is not arrested by His command, then there is no more that He can do. His will is only exercised over us when our will is submitted to His. This is especially important when compared to the command given to the demons and their response.

Mark’s gospel makes use of this command to remain silent and the subsequent responses to it. Whereas demons must obey Him, humans are shown as a mixture of either ignoring His command or obeying His command. In Mark 5:19, the once demon possessed man is told to tell everyone what has happened, and in Mark 16:7, the news of the resurrection must be told!

One possible explanation for these commands is that the demons knew Jesus in His divine form before His incarnation. Their testimony at that time could not be tolerated. Of course, as Mark records their testimony in his gospel, they end up declaring Jesus as Lord. Therein lies the rub for us: the demons knew Jesus to be the Son (Mark 3:12), but we can only know it as a consequence of His resurrection!

So why forbid any human from giving their testimony that Jesus is the Son of God during Christ’s life? It speaks to a plot device of Mark noted especially in Mark 7:36 where the more He commanded silence, the more they ignored Him. However, the reason goes much further than that.

He Is Risen! [3rd slide]

Upon revelation of the resurrection of Jesus and the years that followed, the church could barely contain itself from telling others about Jesus. An encounter with the now resurrected Jesus was not necessarily a personal one like the disciples’ experience in Mark 16, nor like Saul’s on the road to Damascus in Acts 9. Yet, each one of us has a personal one when placed in the context of the forgiveness of sins.

So then, do we tell, or do we keep silent?

For us, the former is the only acceptable response. We cannot keep silent because we are not commanded to keep silent. On the contrary, we are commanded to tell, Mark 16:15–16.

This then is the context of Mark 4:1–9 and the parable of the seed/soils/sower. We view it as a lesson with a focus on the types of soils when in fact it is a parable of the farmer’s actions in sowing the seed. The recipients of the seed are secondary to the behaviour of the who has the seed in the first place.

An Historical Awareness

The sower makes no distinction as to where the seed is scattered: he throws it about. This is a startling contrast to the traditions of a poor 1st century farmer in Palestine.

[Video: Planting seed]

Seed is precious and each one counts. To aimlessly cast it onto the hardest surfaces knowing only too well that the birds will have it before the echo of its fall ends is profligate. To cast it into poorly prepared ground is wasteful too. To allow it to sprout and not monitor the ground for weeds that would choke it is lazy.

However, that is Jesus’ point.

[Video: Scattering seed]

Our job as Christians is to spread the seed with no thought as to where it lands. It is not our precious commodity that must be carefully and sparingly sown and nurtured where we can expect the best results. That is not what the parable is teaching.

Doing that misses the point of the parable. We face multitudinous opportunities to share the gospel, but we make judgments about whom we may expect to respond or not. If we are honest with ourselves, we may be judging someone of not being worthy of the gospel. That goes against the grain of this parable. (No pun intended!)

How do we compare with the leper? He was told to be silent, but he told everyone to the point that Jesus was instantly recognisable, Mark 1:45, and couldn’t go anywhere in that region without being mobbed.

How do we compare to those who saw the deaf man healed, Mark 7:36? The more He commanded them to keep quiet, the more they told others what they had witnessed.

The contrast then is with those demons. They were in a time and place where their sins could not be forgiven, they had nothing to offer that could glorify God, and they were not only commanded to keep silent, but powerless to resist His command.

Are we as easily silenced at the demons?

Surely the same is not true of us? We are commanded to tell. We are to scatter that seed that is the word of God. Caring for and nurturing those who hear and respond to the gospel is part of our lives as Christians, but it is not to Mark 4:1–9 that we turn for guidance on that. Instead, it is a reminder to us to listen to what Jesus is saying: be a sow-sow Christian!

[4th slide: sow-sow Christians]

Why Are We Here?

We are to provide the greatest story ever told to anyone and everyone. We must proclaim it. We have a super-abundance of this seed that is the gospel, so why are we so frugal with it? We can understand the poor farmer stretching out his stock of seed that determines whether or not he survives the next winter, but us? Seriously?! We skimp when it comes to the message of the gospel. The parable of the sower is telling us we don’t need to do that. Indeed, our only job (in this context) is that we sow it. The rest is up to God.

[Video: Germinating seed]

And that is the most important point in this. In this brief parable in Mark 4:1–9, we discover one of the greatest truths there is: it is God Who makes the seed achieve greatness. When it lands on the good soil, it makes its most important impact because of God! When we sow like an impoverished farmer, we deny God the opportunity to do what He does best. God takes something seemingly dead and useless and makes it grow. Who are we to judge God’s word as incapable of making a difference to a hearer’s life. It is God Who gives the increase (1 Cor 3:6)!

The leper didn’t sin when he told others. It may cause us to scratch our heads and wonder why he did the opposite of what Jesus commanded. He is not there as a chin-scratcher for the reader, nor is he a sinning by telling good things about the Messiah. Instead, he is a reminder of the experience of Jesus in the heart of the one whose life has been changed forever by Him.

What of ours? Remember this about the parable of the sower: it still applies. Its message is not only about the preaching of the gospel to the lost. It is also about the continuing message of the gospel for the saved. We are in Christ, and we are hearing His message—now! How do we respond to it? What are our hearts doing with His message even now? Do we barely contain our response to the outpouring of His love? Do we shout from the hills every time we hear the name of Jesus preached and the glory of God magnified? Or do we look for the excuse, the command to be silent to exempt us from our duty as Christians to sow the word of God and pray for a harvest?

Conclusion

This year has been the year when we said, “Grow.” Today is the penultimate lesson in this series. In two weeks, Adam will conclude this series, but don’t think that the arrival of 2022 is the end of the call to Grow! It isn’t. Instead, 2021 has been the call to listen. That’s where growing begins. God wants us to grow in this area of our lives and to become sowers of the seed that is the word of God. Not only we are to hear this parable, but in hearing it, we are to think about it and allow its message to gestate in our hearts. We are to listen to Jesus and obey His voice. We are to give others the opportunity to become a part of this amazing family that is His church and make known to them His power and willingness to save humanity from sin.

Grow in this ministry and do it by being a sow-sow Christian. [5th slide: sow-sow Christians]