WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert October 2, 2005

Mark 4:1-41 Can You Hear?

Maybe this has happened in your house too? A few year ago, as my hearing began to deteriorate, my wife would sometimes say to me “you’re not listening!” I would respond: “it’s not that I’m not listening, I can’t hear.” If I was feeling especially righteous or defensive, I might say rather grandly “deafness is not a moral issue, it’s a physical one” – to which she quite reasonably replied; “so get yourself a hearing aid.”

You will have noticed in this passage that to Jesus, not hearing “the word” was a moral issue. As crowds gathered to hear him, he began his parables by saying “Listen!” And to drive home the point of his stories, he would often say “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Whether you could truly “hear” the word that Jesus was preaching about the arrival of the kingdom of God depended on whether you were actively listening – which meant more than hearing, it meant receiving and acting on “the word.”

Mark gathers here a group of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God, linked by the themes of the necessity of listening, and of the word as a seed. What do these parables, and the miracle of Jesus’ stilling the wind and waves, tell about Jesus? What do they tell about the crowd, the critics, and the disciples? And what do they tell us about who Jesus is and what it means to be his disciple?

1) Jesus the Teacher

Mark often refers to Jesus as a teacher and preacher, but gives us little of his teaching compared to, say, Matthew or Luke. But here are three parables that have in common the idea that the word, and the kingdom, are like seed that has been sown. The most famous of them is “The Sower,” which Jesus apparently regarded as fundamental: “If you don’t understand this one, how will you understand any of them?” he asks of his disciples.

You know the story and its application well. The same sower spreads the same seed in many different places, but the results are vastly different. Why? Because the soils are different. In each case, people “hear” the word of God, but in 3 out of 4 cases it fails to produce a crop in their lives – in various ways. Some seed never germinates: the birds eat it, Satan snatches it away; the reference is no doubt to the Scribes and Pharisees and others of Jesus’ critics where his words never get a hearing. It was “in one ear and out the other,” as one of our proverbs has it. And there is no doubt these people are morally culpable. They do not listen.

A second group hears and receives Jesus’ words with joy, but they don’t last. It’s all show, all enthusiasm, the word can’t put down any roots. Under the surface, these people are stony, and more resistant than they appear to be. And when the sun gets hot, the little shoot of the word of God in their lives quickly wilts. God’s word sounds good as long as the going is good, but if there’s trouble, forget about it, and him. Someone gets sick, someone dies, and trust in God goes out the window. No roots.

The third group also hears, and takes in the word; and it starts growing. But the shoot of belief has to compete with work and family and finances and vacations and the “busy-ness” of life. Soon it gets squeezed out of the calendar. “We used to worship but now we don’t have time...” Some growth occurs, but there is still no crop because the weeds win the battle for light and air and water and nutrients.

But one group hears, receives, grows and matures, and in the autumn of life when all the sun and rain and food has been gratefully absorbed, they produce a crop, a harvest; they reproduce the seed from which they began 30, 60, 100 times over! From a tiny beginning, they produce amazing amounts of new seed. They are, in the words of another parable, like the tiny mustard seed that grows into a large shrub and provides shelter for others in its branches.

What is Jesus saying? What’s the point? To the crowds, it ought to be clear: “what kind of soil are you?” Are you hearing, growing, producing fruit? Or do you never hear, quickly fade away, or get choked by the “worries of life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things”? And what about you and me? Where are we in our Christian growth? How did we hear the word? Did we never “get it”? Did we have it but quickly lose it? Has it been choked over the years? Do you remember what it was like to be a new believer in Jesus? What happened to that joy? Or have you never believed, despite hearing the words over and over? Who closed your ears? Why do you allow the seed to be stolen away every time?

The point to recognize, of course, is that you can change. Jesus is not saying “well, that’s the way things are; some people don’t ever mature;” he’s saying, by implication, “Listen, and become a good soil yourself.” But to those who are already his disciples, Jesus’ message is slightly different. To them, the question is why the opposition to Jesus is growing so rapidly. To them, the parable of the sower says not only “what kind of soil are you, are you growing?” but also “do not fear, there will be a harvest; some people will respond; they will produce a huge crop. You can trust this is so because God is at work, secretly, making the seed grow in the life of believers until the harvest.”

2) The Secret Kingdom

Jesus makes clear that how you listen, whether you truly “have ears to hear,” makes all the difference. But there is something else going on here. Jesus is also intimating that the kingdom that he has begun is in some ways a secret kingdom. In him God’s kingdom is now present in the world, but only as a seed.

So his disciples must expect that the “harvest” of the kingdom is still a way off. And they must expect that the scattered seeds of “the word of the kingdom” will not all germinate or grow or mature. How Jesus acts and what he teaches will for a while be marked by this “secret.” He will tell people, and demons, not to say who he is. And his teaching will be intentionally “veiled” in parables. To many listeners, they will just be charming stories, but that’s all. Parables will conceal as much as they reveal. At this stage of Jesus’ ministry, only a few people will “get it,” only a few will understand what he is asking of them.

It will not always be this way: there will come a time when what is hidden will be revealed clearly. As Mark’s narrative hurries along, it becomes clear that everything is pointing towards the question the frightened disciples ask in the boat: “Who is this?” – and to its answer, which will be revealed in several stark moments of clarity and new revelation. But for the moment, the parables serve the function that the prophet Isaiah had foreseen: most of Israel would be “seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing, lest they might repent and be forgiven.” Isaiah, and Jesus, and Mark, see this as both the intention and the result of the way God speaks. A few will hear, a few will see. Most will not.

God’s message is designed to be heard by those “with ears to hear.” He does not force his revelation on anyone. There is a hidden-ness, an ambiguity, that is quite intentional. Blaise Pascal in his Pensées said that in Jesus’ coming “there is enough light for those who want to see, and enough darkness for those who don’t.” It comes down to whether you “have ears,” or “eyes,” or in other language, whether you “have faith.” Even miracles done before your eyes may produce in you only amazement or fear, and not faith. Even disciples who have heard the word and are beginning to grow can find themselves scared to death, wondering aloud why Jesus seems not to care about their situation. “We’re drowning, and you’re sleeping! Don’t you care?” Jesus, of course, is sleeping in peace and in trust of his Father’s care – quiet on a pillow in the back of a boat that is being swamped. It’s the only time the Gospels mention Jesus sleeping, and he does it peacefully in the middle of a storm in small boat. That’s what it means to trust God!

3) Can You Hear?

So are we among the indifferent and distracted crowds? Among the stone-deaf critics? Or among the disciples, making slow growth toward maturity?

Can you hear the word? Do you know what it is? Has God’s love and plan for you, and why Jesus came, and what he did, all come together – crystallized - so that you can say “I know what the gospel of Jesus Christ is”? Or is the word still too foreign, like another language? Is it stuck in the past, in the 1^st century, or in the stately English of the King James’ Bible? Is it so old that you can’t take it seriously? Or have you just heard it so often over so many years that it no longer means anything? Have you heard the parables recited over and over so that you know them by heart, and they no longer touch you anywhere? Have you erected a shell around you that stops anything “getting to you” – especially anything that could produce guilt, or imply a need for a change of heart and direction in your life at this stage? Are you, in other words, quite content with the little faith within you, and see no need for it to grow any bigger? Is the real issue for you complacency, or boredom, or fear? What stops you, what stops me, from becoming truly fruitful disciples of Jesus?

Or maybe you still can relive that moment when the light first shone in, and you want more of it. Maybe you can sense that the small foothold that faith has in your life is not “all there is.” Maybe you wonder what God has in store for you, for your future, for your family? Those who “have,” says Jesus, will be given “more.” For you is the parable of the mustard seed. Start small – Jesus did, with a little group of Galilean fishermen. After three years he had maybe 100 real disciples, fewer than are in this room. Now his followers number in the billions.

Some Christians I have known have grown to be great trees: their faith and witness and love are like branches in which other people now rest and learn. What God can do in your life has yet to be seen, because if you are a person of faith, someone “with ears to hear,” he is not finished with you yet, and he will not give up nurturing and tending and pruning you until he produces in you the harvest that he planned when he first planted that seed in you.

How’s your hearing? Can you hear the word? Are you paying attention? Do you need a hearing aid? Or surgery? Pray for your ears to be opened.

Let us pray...