Ordinary #11B (Mark 4:26-34)

I have found this chapter of the Gospel of Mark particularly interesting ever since my childhood, because much of it speaks of planting and growing and harvesting. I grew up in the city, where a few flowers and a blade of grass were about all the flora we ever saw. Buildings were gray, streets were gray, sidewalks were gray. But on weekends, and particularly on Christmas vacation, we would go to the farm where my father grew up. There the sky was blue, the soil was reddish brown, and everything in between was green. To see things grow, to go out early in the morning and help hoe the bean fields—this was fun! For years my dream was to study agronomy. Mark 4 intrigued me then, and in many ways it still does.

Earlier in the chapter there is the story of a sower who seems to scatter seed ruthlessly, with little care for where it falls. At our farm, when it was time to plant corn or beans, we would walk along the furrows with a stick, poking holes into the soil and carefully placing one or at most two seeds in each hole. In the parable a yield of a hundredfold seems extraordinary. If we only got 100 kernels or beans for each one we planted, we would be very disappointed. Eventually I learned that in earlier times a quarter of the crop had to be saved as seed for the next year and that it was only with the introduction into Europe of native American crops—beans, potatoes, maize—that yields of 100 to one were considered feasible.

After the story of this strange sower there are words about lighting a lamp and putting it up high, on a lamp stand. This made little sense in my childhood home, where you hit a switch and the light came on. But at the farm it did make sense, because we had to light a kerosene lamp and hang it high.