Is Jesus’ parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-9) best understood as providing (pre-)capitalist advice about how to think about monetary investments? Is it a divine guide for growing your portfolio?  Is it instructing us to consider the market and plant our wealth where it is most likely to grow – thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one hundred-fold?

There are certainly people today who have read it that way.  If you’re a hard-core capitalist who sees everything in economic terms then it would make sense that this is how you think about the parable.  (Understanding Jesus as the “greatest businessman who ever lived” has been around for a century now; see Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 1925 – one of the best selling non-fiction books of the 20^th century!).

But what if you want to understand the parable in Jesus’ own context?

In that case, yeah, not so much.  This is not a guide to how to run your business or choose your investments.  When you look at the details, it is actually quite the opposite.  The parable, among other things, attacks those concerned with wealth and the accumulation of possessions (see Mark 4:19).

Before getting to what the parable really is about, I’d like to mention one of its most intriguing features.

To start:  my students almost NEVER catch why Jesus is said to have told it in the first place, even when they’ve read it ten times.  That, in fact, is true of virtually everyone I know.  And that’s because Mark’s explicit explanation of why Jesus told it (and the other parables) is the exact opposite of what everyone expects.

Ask almost anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Jesus’s parables:  Why did he tell them? Invariably, in my experience, they will reply that Jesus was using parables to tell simple stories to help people understand deeper spiritual principles.  He was providing them with an aid to understanding, so that his teachings about God would make better sense.

That’s the reverse of what Mark says.

Here’s the deal.  The parable of the sower is the first parable Jesus tells in Mark’s Gospel.  A man sows seed on the ground; some falls on the path and gets eaten by birds, other falls on rocky soil and doesn’t develop strong roots and so gets quickly withered by the sun; other falls on thorny soil and gets choked out by the weeds; but other falls on good soil and reproduces itself 30-, 60-, 100-fold.

That’s all he says.  He walks away from the crowd, and his disciples and those with them are confused.  Uh, why are you telling us this?  It’s something we all know.  It happens all the time.  Of course that’s what happens when a farmer sows seed.  Uh, duh…  So what’s your point?

Jesus replies in a completely unexpected way.  So unexpected that some people have to read the explanation a dozen times before they see what it says.  Jesus does not say he has told the parable so people will understand his message better.  He says he tells parables so they will NOT understand.  Really.  Look at it.  Here’s the passage:

¹⁰ When he was alone, those who were along with the twelve asked him about the parables. ¹¹ And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, ¹² in order that

‘they may indeed look but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’ ”

See it?  V. 12.  Why does Jesus tell parables to the crowds?  In order that they hear what he says and not understand.  Otherwise they would repent and be forgiven.

Whoa.  Really?  Yup.  Mark (unlike the other Gospels) portrays Jesus as the teacher no one understood, right up to his death.  And he kept his teachings secret, to all but the insiders.  OK then.

But, luckily for those who have pursued the matter and asked (and luckily for us readers), Jesus goes on to explain the parable (Possibly Mark is trying to show that those who pursue their understanding of Jesus, instead of simply having a superficial view of who he was and what he stood for, are the ones who will “get it”.)

Scholars have long debated if Mark’s explanation of the parable is actually what Jesus meant when he said it, or whether, instead, the explanation is just Mark’s interpretation.  I doubt there’s a way to know for sure.  One thing we can say with certainty is that, in Mark’s view, the parable is NOT about investment strategy.  Jesus indicates that the “sower” represents a person who preaches the true message of God.  There are lots of people who hear, but they are of different kinds and circumstances.  These are the different “soils” – most of them not receptive to the word being spread among them (so that it does not take root and grow); others are indeed receptive (so that it grows and increases many-fold).

And so, in the explanation Mark provides, some hearers are hard headed/hearted and the teaching takes no root; they are like a well-traveled path that doesn’t receive the seed: Satan steals it away before it even starts to grow.  Others are quick converts and take to it, but once they start experiencing pressure and a bit of persecution for accepting the truth of God, they turn away from it. They are like thin soil over solid rock; they welcome the teaching at first but it doesn’t take deep root and withers.

Others are in a situation where the seed can’t grow to fruition because there is too much else to choke out its teaching.  They are focused on things of this world – accumulating wealth and possessions – and the word is choked out.   But some are receptive to the word and it grows and they bear lots of fruit – themselves producing seeds that will lead to more converts.

Mark’s interpretation is precisely against having a worldly-wise investment strategy in a capitalist state.  Those who make up the good soil have no concerns for this world and its pleasures.

So it’s not a piece of good capitalist advice.  On the other hand, I don’t think we can say it is an “anti-capitalist” parable in any tangible real way either.  Jesus can’t be opposing something that doesn’t exist, and capitalism would not show up for another seventeen centuries.

BUT, if one wants to know how the parable might be relevant to the concerns, interests, and perspectives of modern speculators and investors, well, it shows that Jesus thought people should not be concerned with the things of this world and the niceties that can be had with resources and wise investments.

It’s ceaselessly interesting to me that people who want to enjoy all (or many) (or even just some) of the pleasures of life and believe in Jesus assume he must have wanted the same thing for them.  But why?  Why should he be interested in your comfort?  My sense is that he wasn’t.  He was concerned about a future kingdom that was coming to those who rejected the things of this world in anticipation of true goodness that would come only to those committed to God.  This may not be the Jesus people today want to worship, but that’s not the same thing as saying it is not the historical Jesus.  Whether anyone much wants to follow (or worship) a Jesus like that is an individual choice.