Parables 1: Mark 4:1-20 page 1

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Come with me on a journey into my past, into the dim and distant past of my childhood. I was walking with my parents in Edmonton, north London, where we lived. We were going along a road near the turning where my Dad grew up. He pointed to the opposite side of the road.

"When I was a boy," he said, "that used to be farmland."

I found it difficult to believe. Even at that age I knew that London was a place that had expanded, but I was astonished that as comparatively recently as my father's childhood the urban area where we lived had been quite rural. It was a journey into another world, a rural world.

It's a journey that probably sounds familiar to many residents of Medway, especially on the fringes it somewhere like Rainham. And it's still a live issue today, when we see the recent plans by developers to put housing on the Capstone Valley.

But come with me in this parable on a much more dramatic journey. Yes, it's a trip into rural farmland, but it's not even to the kind of farm with which some of us might be familiar. This is the agriculture of first century Palestine. The Industrial Revolution is centuries away, so put away your images of tractors and combine harvesters. Here the land is tilled using animals and hand-made contraptions, and the sower scatters seed by hand.

Come with me to a parable that we think is familiar. We have heard it and read it since Sunday School. We think we know it. But instead let me suggest that the parable knows us. I don't want us to read the Bible: I want the Bible to read us. We're not going to put the parable under a microscope and then dissect it: that puts us in a position of power over the text. Instead let the story address us. Let us enter imaginatively into the key characters and elements of the parable and let them speak across the centuries and the cultures.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.