A WHOLE MAN

“And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.” Mark 13:37  I am not sure who coined the phrase ‘there are no stupid questions’, because the reality is that there are some stupid questions. I learned that first hand growing up when a teacher I had, in an effort to get more engagement from her classroom, told us that there are no stupid questions and asked us to ask her any questions we had on the topic we were studying. We were all allowed to write down our questions on a sheet of paper, fold them up, and toss them into a hat. Each question drawn received an adequate response. However, when my question came up the response from my teacher was, “Ok, I was wrong, there are some stupid questions,” and then she proceeded to the next question as if mine was never asked. You can imagine how glad I was that we had written down our questions. And just as there are some stupid questions, the same can be said of certain interpretations of Scripture. For example, consider the passag...

26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”  Mark 4:26-29  In the fourth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, we read four parables related to the Kingdom of God. And all but one parable can be found in one or more of the other Gospels. The parable of the soils can be found in Matt 13:1-23 and Luke 8:4-15, the parable of the lamp is recorded in Luke 8:16-18, and the parable of the mustard seed may be found in Matthew’s Gospel; chapter 13:31-35. However, the parable of the growing seed is unique and exclusive to Mark’s Gospel and its meaning is not explained to us. In this parable, we read about a sower who sows seed in the field and then goes to bed. He seemingly pl...