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Knowledge, Faith & Seed Sowing

I'm still fascinated that, after all these years, the gospel passage in Mark 4 still applies, the verse concerning the parable of the sower when Jesus says: "do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any parables?" We still do not understand.

The usual explanations are too Pelagian or predestinarian. Of the former, God is passive after the sowing - all depends on our effort to receive the word of God and protect it. Of the latter, all depends on the type of soil we are - sorry about your luck if the birds eat the seed on the way down before even getting to your soil!

N.T. Wright writes in Jesus and the Victory of God,

"Of all the oddities about the parable of the sower, perhaps the strangest is this: there is stil no agreement on what it was originally supposed to mean. [Bultmann: 'the original meaning of many similitudes has become irrecoverable' - citing this parable as an example.] Considering the important place it occupies in all three synoptic gospels, and by common consent in the teaching of Jesus himself, this should be regarded as an indication that historians have not yet caught up with something fairly central in Jesus' career. Leaving aside at this stage the vexed question of what the parable meant to each of the synoptic evangelists... I suggest that the context of the kingdom-announcement provides a way forward.

I propose that, in Jesus' use of it, the parable...tells the story of Israel, particularly the return from exile, with a paradoxical conclusion, and it tells the story of Jesus' ministry, as the fulfilment of that larger story, with a paradoxical outcome."

Now that's a mouthful, 'eh? Wright goes on to well defend his proposition at length. There's no way to sum up ten pages in a couple paragraphs but in part he says that the parable is retelling the story of Israel, with numerous sowings of varying success:

"Israel's god is acting, sowing his prophetic word with a view to restoring his people, but much of the seed will go to waste, will remain in 'exilic' condition, being eaten by birds (satanic forces, or perhaps predatory Gentiles), or lost among the rocks and thorns of the exilic wilderness. The eventual harvest, though, will be great...

The paradoxical prophetic 'sowings' of the 'word' were being recapitulated in Jesus' own ministry. The satan was at work to snatch away the seed. Many were called, but few chosen; many sown, few harvested - though the harvest itself would be abundant. The explanation functioned as a challenge to 'those inside', who had been grasped by Jesus' words. They must persevere, and become those who bear fruit. In them the destiny of Israel would be realized."

Later I happened to be reading a book by Erasmo Levia-Merikakis who writes of Jesus healing two blind men:

"We cannot doubt that, at bottom, it was the Spirit who had attracted the two men to Jesus as if by 'instinct', despite their blindness. This living contact comes first; then the healing; and last of all knowledge; and nothing can short-circuit this structure of the total act of faith. Gnosis is wholly at odds with pistis when divorced from it as an autonomous endeavor. Gnosticism can lead only to charlatanism, pseudoilluminism, or political upheaval, while faith leads to an interiorly transformed life."