How does the story end? We might ask instead: how would it end today? Probably on a high moral note. For example: the second embezzlement is also discovered, the crook loses everything and goes to prison. Moral: crime does not pay! At any rate, that is how the story was told in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recent decades, however, it would probably have been given a social touch, criticized the unscrupulous nature of the exploitative landowner, described the behavior of the manager and the indebted tenants as a bitterly necessary defense, and so made a story of social heroes out of the crime tale. In that case also the story would have turned out to be highly moral.
But what is so baffling is that Jesus’ story does not end morally at all—neither according to bourgeois or antibourgeois morality. We can see how little the story was aimed at moral teaching in Jesus’ mind by the fact that he does not even tell the end. That remains open; it is not interesting.
Apparently this story of a swindler is about something else entirely. The first commentary added to the tale is still aware of this: Jesus praises the criminal manager—“the Lord” is obviously Jesus and not the injured landowner—but what he applauds is not his crime but the consistency and initiative with which he rescues his own existence.
In his own terms the manager acted very consistently. He had no illusions. He considered his opportunities quite soberly. He used his mind. He engaged his whole imagination and, after calculating everything, he proceeded quickly and as efficiently as possible.
That—Jesus wants to tell his listeners—is just how you must act in the face of the reign of God. It is offered to you, now, today. But it will only come to you if you engage your mind, your imagination, your passion, your whole existence. By far the best explanation of the parable is given in the last of the commentaries: “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Luke 16:13).
That is: those who want to live in the reign of God can only have God as their master. Only God may they serve—with their whole will, all their strength, their whole lives. If they have other masters besides God they are divided, pulled here and there, have no drive. Then they do not really engage, they risk nothing, they do things only halfway. Then their lives lack all inner strength and all the brilliance that belongs to the reign of God.
The swindling manager did nothing halfway. He went all the way. He risked everything and invested everything. For that, and only for that, Jesus admires him and says: if only my disciples—on their own terms—would act as sensibly as this manager!
So Jesus in his parables not only depicts the world of the good and respectable but also that of the shady and the hypocritical, the swindlers and the tricksters. He does not depict a holy and intact world. Not even the world of children is polished up. In the parable of the “children playing” Jesus tells how a group of children cannot agree what to play. There are a bunch of spoilsports who are not happy with any suggestion. They don’t want to play wedding, but they don’t want to play funeral either. Nothing pleases them. There is a loud argument, and in the end no game is played at all. The spoilsports have succeeded. Those who wanted to play say to them: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn” (Matt 11:17). The following commentary is then given: they didn’t like John the Baptizer with his asceticism and preaching of repentance. Then came Jesus. He ate and drank with the sinners, but they didn’t want him either and called him “a glutton and a drunkard!” (Matt 11:18-19). The parable of the children at play shows how closely Jesus observed everything. He knew that children already practice the bigger quarrels of adults. And he must have had painful experience of the disunity in the people of God, the rivalries among the various groups in Israel and the strife over his own person.
The Parable of the Sower
Jesus observed his surroundings carefully and lovingly. In the so-called parable of the sower (Mark 4:3-9)3 the enemies of the seed are first depicted: the birds who peck up part of the seed; then the rocky ground bearing only a thin, quickly drying layer of soil; then the thistles that grow tall and smother the sprouting wheat so that it cannot develop grain. And yet: “other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold” (Mark 4:8).
This parable has created great difficulties for modern interpreters. These are connected in the first place with the notoriously incorrect translation of the parable’s ending. The Greek does not have “thirtyfold, sixtyfold and a hundredfold,” but rather “a part [of the grain sown on good ground] yielded thirty, part sixty, part a hundred.”
A hundredfold yield? That seemed to many interpreters very far from reality, well outside any ordinary experience. Jesus was exaggerating, pushing the soil’s yield into the realm of fantasy because he wanted to say that the reign of God, with its abundance, surpasses all human experience.
But did Jesus really inflate his parables, or similitudes, in that way? His audience were altogether familiar with this subject. Most of them were small farmers, tenants, and day laborers in agriculture. If Jesus had told unrealistic stories about their own realm of activity he would have deprived his parables of any persuasive power. In fact, the parable of the sower achieves the pinnacle of its realism at the end, with the series thirty, sixty, one hundred, for this series incorporates the biological phenomenon of “stocking.” What is that?
Grain, as it germinates, first produces only a single shoot. But at a very early stage the lowermost nodes, far beneath the earth’s surface (the so-called stock nodes), push out side shoots that cause the main stem to branch out beneath the earth. Thus in normal cases a single grain produces an entire “stock” of two to five stems or even more. As far as the number of stems in a “stock” is concerned, Jesus remains in a realistic average realm. Because he has to schematize within the narrative he works with a top figure of three stems, reckoning a yield of thirty grains per stem. That too is normal and close to reality. Before the intensively hybridized types of wheat grown today came into general use the average number of grains per ear even in Europe was not much more than thirty to thirtyfive.
In this similitude Jesus describes the situation of a farmer who had sown a field, a part of the stony ground of the Galilean hill country. Many of the grains thus sown yielded nothing. Flocks of birds following the sower, ground interspersed with rocks, and tenacious weeds were at fault. But part of the seed sown fell on good soil. Of that, part produced thirty grains per seed sown—that is, there was no stocking. Another part produced sixty grains per seed sown—a stocking of two stems. Still another part produced around a hundred grains per seed sown—here there was a stocking of three stems.
In this way the unusual sequence thirty, sixty, a hundred (one hundred for ninety) is immediately obvious. There is no question of a rupturing of reality. Quite the contrary! Jesus was a very sober observer who allowed himself no flights of imagination, but told stories with a love for detail and a positively biological exactness. The same could be demonstrated in many other parables.
And what did Jesus mean by the parable of the sower? What did he want to tell his listeners? As in many of his parables, here again he speaks of the reign of God, which is coming. It has already been sown. In fact, the wheat is already growing. The reign of God has many enemies, however, and they seem overwhelming. And yet, despite all these enemies and opponents, the reign of God will come to pass. The work of God will succeed. It will bear fruit. In the end a rich harvest will be produced.
Why So Many Parables about Growing?
At this point it is time for a reflection. Why did Jesus tell so many parables about seeds and growing? The gospels contain not only the parable of the sower but also the ones about the weeds among the wheat (Matt 13:24-30), the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32), the leaven (Matt 13:33), and the seed growing secretly (Mark 4:26-29). Apparently with the aid of this materi
al Jesus was able to clarify some aspects of the reign of God now becoming reality that seemed crucial to him. This narrative material gave him the opportunity to depict not only the unstoppable growth of the reign of God but also the shockingly minute and hidden character of its beginning, and even more: the superior power of the opponents who threaten the work of God from beginning to end.
Thus Jesus deftly avoided the path opened by Jewish apocalyptic. The latter was also deeply touched by Israel’s miserable situation and the power of God’s opponents in history. Most apocalypticists, however, drew a different conclusion. For them it was no longer imaginable that God could still succeed in a world so depraved. Therefore they said that God’s promises could no longer be fulfilled “in this world,” “in this age.” God would have to intervene with visible power in history, destroy the old world, and create a new one, the “new age.” Only there could God’s promises finally become reality.4
Jesus is no apocalypticist. He can, of course, make use of apocalyptic images, but he does not teach an apocalyptic system. Above all, he never succumbs to the dualism of many apocalypticists, the system of two worlds succeeding one another and sharply distinct one from the other. One can see that especially in the material of his parables of growth. This is everyday material. For example, in Mark 4:30-32, Jesus speaks not simply of the world tree (as in Matt 13:32 // Luke 13:18-19) but instead about a common mustard bush. He takes his imagery from the vegetable garden. And he talks about what a housewife in Israel did every day: grinding meal, kneading in leaven, and baking bread. He tells also about the paltry fields of ordinary people in the hill country of Israel where the soil is thin, there are almost no fenced-off paths, and thorns and thistles are nearly ineradicable.
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):
It is with the kingdom of heaven as with a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius for the day, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, “You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” So they went. When he went out again at the sixth and ninth hours he did the same. And at the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing around, and he said to them, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They said to him, “Because no one has hired us.” He said to them, “You also go into the vineyard.” When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.” When those hired at the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, “These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the [whole] day and the scorching heat.” But he replied to one of them, “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or is your view evil because I am good?” (Matt 20:1-15)
Here Jesus tells a story weighed down with joylessness. It apparently takes place at the time of the grape crush. The grapes are ripe and must be harvested as quickly as possible. Otherwise it would be hard to explain why the landowner would seek workers all day long. We cannot sense in this parable the least bit of the happiness that filled the days of the crush in ancient Israel. Here are none of the glad shouts that rang out over the vineyards, none of the greetings and blessings exchanged by passersby with the vineyard workers (Ps 129:8). The parable presupposes a grey and sober world of work in which labor is only a grind.
The reason should be clear: Jesus’ parables offer us an astonishingly vivid picture of the social conditions in Palestine in the first century. The times when free farmers in Israel harvested their own vineyards with joy were long past. Most had long since lost their land to large landowners. The Romans demanded such enormous sums that every operation had to produce a high added value and thus was forced to economize. This meant that agricultural operations had to be large and required cheap labor, either slaves or wage workers. Very few family farms could maintain themselves. So the majority of former farmers now worked as day laborers. They were hired in the marketplace in the morning and paid in the evening. Work went on from sunup to sundown, from daybreak to first dark.
There is thus no reason to look askance at the “workers of the first hour” who demanded a just system of payment. From their point of view they were quite right. A denarius was certainly not a bad day’s wage. But if the last, who have worked only a single hour in the cool of early evening, receive just as much as they themselves who have toiled many hours in blazing heat, that is not only unjust but also inhuman. It degrades their labor. That is the logic of the “workers of the first hour.” Are they right?
Every society, even the worst slaveholding regime, depends on the fact that at least a certain degree of justice is preserved. Otherwise, the society will collapse. To that extent we can understand the wrathful protest of the one who makes himself the spokesman for the others, and to that extent the ending of the parable is in the first place “impossible.” Only when we have made ourselves aware of all that do we acquire access to the real meaning of the story, because here two worlds—or two different forms of society—collide.
On the one hand the parable describes the old society soberly and realistically, the society that repeatedly gains the upper hand even where Jesus is attempting to gather the people of God anew. There it is every person for himself or herself. There everyone struggles for her or his own existence. There people are envious when someone has more. There we find unending conflict between those “above” and those “below.” But rivalry exists in the same way—perhaps even more—between those who belong to the same social class. Their comparing of themselves to one another leads to constant mistrust and ongoing power struggles.
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