Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

With the aid of a world that lay before his hearers’ eyes every day he depicts the coming of the reign of God and in doing so makes clear something about its very nature: the reign of God is happening already in the midst of people’s ordinary, familiar, everyday surroundings. It does not arrive in apocalyptic thunder and lightning, not in a grand act of God that no one can resist, but in the same way as a mustard bush grows.

The reign of God grows in secret, in what is little, in what is inconspicuous, because God wants the old world to transform itself freely into God’s reign. In his parables about seed Jesus portrays a silent revolution, and the best symbol for it is growth. It happens in silence. Growing things make no noise.

Sowing People

But let us return to the parable of the sower.⁵ It was explained allegorically, even in the early church, that is, each individual part of the parable was applied to a piece of current reality. We can read that already in Mark 4:13-20. The wheat that is sown became the word of the Gospel placed in the hearts of the hearers. That was a lovely and appropriate interpretation.

Of course, if we look to the Old Testament to find what could have been meant there by the metaphor “God’s sowing,” we discover not the sowing of the divine word but the sowing of people—with the reference always being to Israel. This is particularly clear (apart from Zech 10:9 and Hos 2:25) in Jeremiah 31:27: “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals.” God has indeed scattered the people of God among the nations but now is sowing them again in the land of Israel in the time of salvation that is to come, so that they may once more become the true people of God. Against this biblical background the parable of the sower probably did not speak originally of the sowing of the word, even though it was later so interpreted, but much more likely of the sowing and growth of the true, eschatological Israel.

This is also abundantly clear in the later allegorical interpretation of the parable, that is, in Mark 4:13-20. It is true that there the seed is first interpreted as the word of God: “The sower sows the word.” But from then on the text suddenly begins to speak quite differently. To see that, of course, one must not follow one of the smoothing and harmonizing translations of this passage. The Greek text, literally translated, says in verses 16, 18, and 20:

These are those who are sown on the rocky ground…

Others are those who are sown amid thorns…

Those are they who are sown on good ground…

But this means that the early church’s reading of Jesus’ parable first interprets the seed as the word of God, then turns around and suddenly reads the seed as a sowing of people. Two fields of imagery are mixed together. Thus the early church’s interpretation still had a feeling for the idea that the original background for the parable of the sower was the sowing of human beings.

Thus the parable corresponds exactly to what we have already seen in chapters 2 and 3. For Jesus the reign of God has not only its own time

but also its own place to become visible and tangible. It is first perceptible in Jesus himself but then also in Israel, which Jesus gathers as a new community around himself. So also the parable of the sower looks to Israel, which is now being confronted with the reign of God.

The Workers in the Vineyard

The parable of the sower speaks of the new sowing, the growth, and the abundance of a new society within Israel, and so do other parables, for example, the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1-16):