When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that,
“‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”
Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?”
….
“Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”
He said to them, “Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand? For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open. If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear.”
“Consider carefully what you hear,” he continued. “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”
Mark 4.10-13, 20-24, NIV
The artificial gaps in our English translations of the Bible are designed to aid reading, by breaking scripture into discrete story elements. Unfortunately, like any element of any translation, they are based on assumptions. And assumptions are sometimes plain wrong.
For example, anyone looking at the NIV version of Mark chapter 4 sees “The Parable of the Sower”, and its explanation, followed by the parable of “A Lamp on a Stand”, and then “The Parable of the Growing Seed”, and so on.
As a result, not only do we miss that the comments about the lamp are part of the explanation of the first parable, but it becomes that much easier to miss the detail, and why it matters. So please suspend your disbelief for a moment, and let’s unpack some of this.
The disciples ask Jesus why He always speaks in parables, and He says it is to stop ordinary people understanding what He is saying, lest they repent.
Just pause a moment, and consider what a monumental statement this is. Jesus comes because God so loves the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son so that… but the Son isn’t planning on letting anyone except His disciples to understand what He is saying. Really?
No wonder we get ourselves in such theological knots. Before Jesus went to the cross, it was critical that the Enemy had no idea what was going on, so Jesus regularly indulged in “misdirection for effect”. Jesus never said a thing that was untrue, but He often very deliberately withholds part of the truth, primarily to keep Satan in the dark.
Let’s walk back over that field. The disciples ask why Jesus speaks always in parables and He first tells them that
Ὑμῖν τὸ μυστήριον δέδοται τῆς βασιλείας τοῦ θεοῦ
Mark 4.11, SBL Greek NT
To you has been given the mystery (a technical term, relating to secret knowledge in a religious context) of the Kingdom of God.
And you can imagine the disciples all nodding knowingly to one another, “yes, the mystery of the Kingdom of God, yes I am all over that… umm… which mystery exactly…”
Jesus had spoken the truth, but the disciples couldn’t have told anyone the mystery because they hadn’t seen it, yet. You could say it was the secret of Emmanuel: God with us. In the same way that Jesus was with the disciples every moment of the day and night, soon God’s own Spirit would soon dwell permanently in them – and in any and every other person who believed in Jesus. So yes, they have been given the mystery, but they have no idea.
What about every one else. Doesn’t Jesus say they are not to understand? Well He quotes Isaiah 6.9-10, which was addressed to Isaiah himself, about Israel – and is clearly a provocation. If I say to my child, “well we wouldn’t want you to ever learn how to read…” that might be unwise parenting, but the intention of the provocation is clear – “of course we want you to learn to read!” Likewise God: of course He wants Israel to repent and be healed.
So why does Jesus use this scripture to misdirect everyone’s attention? I think it is clear who His target is. Satan knows scripture inside out, but can’t understand it because he has blinded himself to the goodness of God. Satan is ultimately the one who cannot understand or perceive, and who will not be saved. But if he understood God’s plan in Jesus, he would be able to thwart it (Paul says this explicitly in 1 Cor 2.8).
But that is only the beginning. Look at the end of Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the Sower. What is special about the good soil people? According to the Greek,
οἵτινες ἀκούουσιν τὸν λόγον καὶ παραδέχονται καὶ καρποφοροῦσιν ἓν τριάκοντα καὶ ἓν ἑξήκοντα καὶ ἓν ἑκατόν.
Mark 4.20, SBL Greek NT
“These hear the ‘word’ and receive from it for themselves and bear fruit, the one thirty, the one sixty, the one a hundred.”
Hold onto that thought, because it is about to become very important. The disciples may not have got the connection to the lamp at the time, but we need to!
Remember, Jesus has spoken about parables being used to hide things; now He says “it isn’t like you bring a lamp into the room so you can hide it under a bucket or bushel, but rather to put it on a menorah (lampstand).”
The message is “Yes, I told you that parables are to hide things, but things are only hidden to be revealed, and concealed to be bought to the light.” And of course it more than that. Parables are probably the stickiest kind of story there is – they are exceptionally memorable and repeatable, so they stick in people’s memories. Do they need a bible commentary to understand them? Not actually. In fact, according to Jesus, the thing is, when you hear the ‘word’ (and my use of quotes is deliberate: Goethe noted long ago that λόγος is the most untranslatable word in Greek – here it could be story or matter or account or thing or idea or…) do you receive from it? Because that is what leads to you bearing fruit. And I do not believe that παραδέχονται (receiving from it for yourself) is as much a matter of academic understanding or cognition as it is about the heart and the spirit.
So parables conceal… but things are only concealed to be brought to the light. And parables are about whether or not you receive from them. The disciples had managed as usual to ask exactly the wrong question: “what does it mean”; Jesus answered them, but actually for all His other hearers the seed had already been planted. Their ability to receive something from it was not limited to whether someone gave them the key. As long as it stayed in good soil in their heart, it would uncover itself in time and grow.
I would say that what Jesus said a moment later was more important than His patient walking of the disciples through the “meaning of the parable”. He said, not what the NIV suggests, but rather the wonderful, “Βλέπετε τί ἀκούετε.”
“See what you hear.” In other words, “don’t just hear what I say; see it!”
Jesus is saying that the kind of cognition that, say, the scribes and Pharisees, indulged in, was not what mattered – trying to understand scripture as a series of legal statements. It was actually in the process of visualising what Jesus was saying that it would start to give them what they needed to receive. And it is as that inner picture changed that His next statement kicks in: with the measure you measure with, it will be measured to you, and handed over (or “and more besides” – both options are credible).
In other words, as you visualise what you hear and receive from the word, you will change, so that the measure you use will no longer be that of the old you, but of the renewed you; and so you will start receiving according to that changed measure, which in turn changes you more and so on.
As conspiracies to overthrow an illegitimate regime go, this is the most subtle and the most powerful. What seem like children’s stories do the hardest thing in the world; they change people permanently.
And in summary, Jesus says: “whoever has (ie received from the word), they will be given more. But whoever does not have (who has failed to give the word a point of contact) – even what they have will be taken away.”
And that is both a wonderful promise and a salutary warning.
Seeing the Kingdom 