Bible Commentaries

Mark 4:8

The mate of an American whaler, Mr. Whalon, was captured by the cannibals of Hiva-Oa, one of the Marquesan islands, and rescued bravely by the intervention of a native Christian, Kekela, who was subsequently rewarded by President Lincoln for his gallant charity. Mr. Stevenson, in his volume In the South Seas (pp89 , 90), quotes an extract from Kekela's letter of thanks, adding, "I do not envy the man who can read it without emotion".

After telling of the rescue, Kekela proceeds: "As to this friendly deed of mine in saving Mr. Whalon, its seed came from your great land, and was brought by certain of your countrymen, who had received the love of God. It was planted in Hawaii, and I brought it to plant in this land and in these dark regions, that they might receive the best of all that is good and true, which is love.... This is a great thing for your nation to boast of, before the nations of the earth. From your great land a most precious seed was brought to the land of darkness. It was planted here, not by means of guns and men-of-war and threatenings. It was planted by means of the ignorant, the neglected, the despised. Such was the introduction of the Word of the Almighty God into this group of Nuuhiwa."

References.—IV:10-20.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—Mark I-VIII. p139. IV:11.—George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, p71. IV:11 , 12.—W. Leighton Grane, Hard Sayings of Jesus Christ, p19.

One Thing, Everything

Mark 4:13

There is a great philosophy in this inquiry, as there is in every inquiry propounded by the Son of God. If you know one, you know all. There is a master-key which opens all the locks; if you fail to lay hold of the master-key you will be fumbling round the locks all your days and never open a single cabinet or a single drawer. That is the great teaching of the text. If you do not know this parable you will know no parable at all.

I. What great lessons this text suggests! See the unity of Christ's teaching. To our poor half-educated eyes the teaching often seems to be disjointed, but who gave us the final vision, what right have we to say that this is correct, and that is only partially correct, or to make any such foolish judgments upon the great scheme of God? You say about a certain Mark 4:14

The sower who casts in the seed, the father or mother casting in the fruitful Word, are accomplishing a pontifical act and ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and gravity, for they are labouring at the kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing, whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls. Man is a husbandman; his whole work, rightly understood, is to develop life, to sow it everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this Divine mission the great instrument is speech. We forget too often that language is both a seed-sowing and a revelation.

—Amiel's Journal, 2May, 1852.

In describing the impression made by Millet's picture, "The Sower," Theophile Gautier writes: "Night approaches, unfurling its grey veil over the brown earth. The sower, covered with dingy rags, a shapeless cap on his head, goes forth with rhythmic steps, scattering the grain in the furrows, followed by a flight of greedy birds. Although bony, emaciated, and thin under his livery of misery, life flows from his generous hand; with a superb gesture, he who has nothing scatters far and wide the bread of the future."

Mark 4:15

Set beside this verse the following entry in Wesley's Journal for1746: "Fri. May30th (Bristol). I light upon a poor, pretty, fluttering thing, lately come from Ireland, and going to be a singer at the playhouse. She went in the evening to the chapel, and thence to the watch-night, and was almost persuaded to be a Christian. Her convictions continued strong for a few days; but then her old acquaintance found her, and we saw her no more"

Mark 4:16

The man should move towards God in Christ in knowledge and understanding, taking up God's device of saving sinners by Christ as the Scripture holds it out; not fancying a Christ to himself, otherwise than the Gospel speaketh of Him, nor another way of relief by Him than the Word of God holdeth out.... I mean here also that a man be in calmness of spirit, and, as it were, in his cold blood, in closing with Christ Jesus; not in a single fit of affection which soon vanisheth. He that receiveth the seed into stony places, the same is he that heareth the word and anon with joy receiveth it. A man must here act rationally, as being master of himself, in some measure able to judge of the good or evil of the thing as it stands before him.

—William Guthrie of Fenwick.

References.—IV:16 , 17.—"Plain Sermons" by contributors to the Tracts for the Times, vol. ii. p49. IV:17.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No2846.

Mark 4:19

"Happy (said I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyres; it came to an end from a variety of reasons, decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps."

—R. L. Stevenson, Vailima Letters.

References.—IV:21.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Mark I-VIII. p148. IV:21-26.—H. Hensley Henson, Christ and the Nation, p227. IV:22.—A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p181. IV:24.—W. Farquhar Hook, Take Heed What ye Hear, p15. W. L. Watkinson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv1898 , p252. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No2512. IV:25.—E. S. Talbot, Keble College Sermons, 1870-76 , p29. W. Lock, ibid. p240.

Spiritual Development

Mark 4:26

I. The beginning of religious life is always an awakening to the greatness that underlies the littleness of our ordinary existence. Now, Christianity was just the greatest of all such awakenings of mankind to the true meaning of life.

II. It is the more remarkable that Jesus Christ, who is in one sense the greatest revolutionist the world ever saw, should so constantly present spiritual life to us, not as the inroad upon our being of something entirely new, but simply as an awakening to something that was always there; not as a sudden revolutionary change by which the link between the past and present was snapped, but simply as the further development and manifestation of a principle which was working in human life and history from its first beginning.

III. And this view of the development of Christianity out of the past is naturally accompanied by a similar view of its future. Several of the parables of the kingdom of God are parables of evolution, in which processes of the spiritual life are compared to the organic processes of nature. We have here a parable which, perhaps more fully than any of the others, brings before us the idea of a spiritual evolution in all its various aspects. By the illustration of the growth of the wheat to the harvest, it calls attention, on one hand, to the quietness, continuity and naturalness of the process whereby spiritual life is developed, which makes it almost entirely escape notice while it is going on; and, on the other hand, to the wonderful transforming power of that process, which we discover when, after a time, we compare the later with the earlier stages of it. A Mark 4:28

The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade, then the ear, then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear.

It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than what is vainly called accomplishment... So cultivate observation, energy, handicraft, ingenuity, outness in boys, so as to give them a pursuit as well as a study. Look after the blade, and don"t coax or crush the ear out too soon, and remember that the full corn in the ear is not due till the harvest, when the great School breaks up, and we meet all divisions and go our several ways.

—Dr. Brown, Horœ Subsesivœ.

Mark 4:28

Epictetus, at the close of his humorous, sensible remonstrance addressed to people who hastily rush into the use of the philosophic garb, employs this figure thus: " Mark 4:30

What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun—it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields.... Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.

—Emerson.

With What Comparison

Mark 4:30

Man must have comparisons. He is a born parabolist; it may take another kind of man to put the parable into shape, but the parable, as to its substance and essence, is in every child and every heart. He is always seeking for a likeness, a comparison, something which will tell of something else than itself. It is peculiarly and eternally so in the kingdom of God; it takes up all other subjects, and uses them by first mocking them, by bringing them, in some instances, into ridicule, in order that it may point out the greatness of something else quite beyond words and quite beyond the region of visible picture. We must discover in this, as in all other respects, the way of the Lord.

I. God first belittles that He may afterwards magnify. That is the effect of all great examples. If you have been living amongst little folks you are no doubt a little creature. This is the Lord's way; He takes us into a new atmosphere, a new relationship, and measures us by a new standard. Comparing ourselves with ourselves we become very wise; but comparing ourselves with God, we are foolish and men of no understanding. When the Lord magnifies Himself against us it is not really to reduce us, but to bring us into that temper of mind in which we can receive a just revelation of our own personality; He reduces us to nothingness in our own esteem that He may afterwards put us together again, and begin by the power of the grace of the Cross to build us up in the true manhood.

II. God makes use of contrasts that He may reveal the Source of all strength. Here is a great work to be done, and God calls to it little children. The picture is a picture of ridicule; we say, Where is the proportion? This great work is to be constructed, and a number of little children have been called to do it. God's way! God hath chosen the weak things of this world, God hath chosen the foolish things of this world, God hath chosen things that are not, that no flesh should glory in His presence, but reveal Himself as the true source of strength.

III. God uses the partially impossible to magnify the essentially impossible. The great Teacher says, Heaven and earth shall pass away—meaning they shall not pass away—but My word shall not pass away. The mountains shall melt—yet they will not melt—the meaning Mark 4:34

These were unreported interviews; these were secret conferences. We do not speak our best things in the public air; our whispers are costlier than our thunder; they may have more life in them, more tenderness, more poetry. We cannot report what we have heard, except in some poor dull way of words. That is hardly a report at all. To hear any man tell over what he has heard you say, that is punishment! He may speak your very words, and leave out your soul with the best intention, he may report the interview upside down. Communications are not in words, except in some rough, commercial, and debtor-and-creditor way. Communications are in the breathing, in the looking, in the touching, in the invisible and the inaudible.

I. Jesus Christ had two speeches. The one to the great multitude. For them He had toys and stories and miracles and parables; He knew them well, He knew precisely what was adapted to their receptive power and their then state of intellectual culture. He always took out with Him toys enough to amuse and interest and haply instruct the gaping mob. To hear Jesus you must wait until He comes into the house; let Him read the Scriptures to you when your number is but small. His greatest tones are in the minor key; the way in which He finds the heart is a way of His own; never man spake like this Man.

II. I live with Christ, and He has taught me that there are two ways of reading everything. Sometimes I have thought my Lord partly amused at the greatness of us when we were really least. I am not quite literally sure, but I think I have sometimes seen the outline of a smile upon His face as He has watched the development of what we call our civilization. He has spoken very frankly to me upon this matter, He has told me that civilization must be very carefully watched, or it will become our ruin; He says that civilization unsanctified is a breach of the very first commandment of the decalogue.

III. Jesus takes us one by one, according to our gift and function, and talks to us alone. What lovely, tender, inspiring talks we may have with our Lord! We come out of them filled with His own inspiration, and enriched with His own patience and forbearance. We, being young, inexperienced, and foolish, want to have everything settled tomorrow. Jesus says, It takes a long time to make a rock; I have been a million ages in making this little pebble at the bottom of the stream, and thinkest thou that a man can be made in no time? If it required a million ages to make half a dozen smooth pebbles, how long will it take to make a redeemed and sanctified Church? Be patient, take larger views of things; the whole process is going on; there are firstborn sons in knowledge, as well as in nature; firstborn sons in prophecy and revelation and Mark 4:38

Our worries always come from our weaknesses.

—JOUBERT.

Reference.—IV:38.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No1121.

Mark 4:39

While it is a portentous fact that England still needs, at this stage of history, to be terrified into morality and religion by the threat of temporal retribution, it must be ever a lowering of Carlyle in the scale of greatness that he taught rather like his own Mohammed than like the Master of Light "What can you say of him," asked Ruskin, "except that he lived in the clouds and was struck by lightning?" a beautiful and true summary of the man's spirit in deed as in word. But struck by lightning he was; he could not wield it with impunity. How much less could he say to the storm raging all through his century, "Peace, be still!" He spoke mighty words, but he had little in common with that dove-like brooding spirit which drew forth strength out of sweetness, and was able to hush the great waters and rebuke the waves. Facta est tranquillitas magna. That is the miracle which Carlyle never wrought on himself or any man that sought his aid.

—From Dr. W. Barry's Heralds of Revolt, p73.

See Wesley's Journal for26 July, 1736.

Mark 4:39 with6:50

You have of course remarked the rise from the first storm-calming to the second.... One of the points of difference Mark 4:39

We are as safe at sea, safer in the storm which God sends us, than in a calm when we are befriended by the world.

—Jeremy Taylor.

Personality and Power

Mark 4:39

In the thirty-seventh verse we read, "And there arose a great storm of wind"; in the thirty-ninth verse we read, "And He arose... and there was a great calm". This is the poetry of life. There is a storm side, and there is a side of great calm.

When Jesus Christ arose there was a great calm. Not only because He rebuked the winds and the waves, but because, primarily and wholly because, He Himself was calm. Peace brings peace; repose is mastery. He arose—but the wind had risen: the wind will retire when its Master arises. Do not consider or concern yourselves about the wind, the storm, the screaming, hurrying tempest Hope thou in God; thou shalt take thy Saviour's peace as part of thine own tranquillity: My peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth give I unto you; peace, be still; peace, be not afraid. We have a derived peace; tranquillity of our own we have none, but we have the whole river of the grace and peace of God flung through our hearts, and we are at peace because we build our tents for a night by the river of peace.

I. Let us take it in the matter of those little angers, vexations, and bitternesses, that trouble our uncertain and peevish life. When the great Christlike considerations come up, rise in the soul, instantly the anger falls away and a sweet calm supervenes. You were not to be reasoned with in the moment of your anger; you felt that you were superior to all argument; in fact, you felt that there was no argument except your own; you looked down with a kind of contempt upon those who thought they could argue you out of your mean condition of mind. They could do nothing with you; but when Christ arose, when you remembered what He was, what He did, what He is, what He expects, you were ashamed; and for anger there came great Christly love. It is just as true, therefore, of us as it was of the sea.

II. Take it in the matter of anxiety. Some people are dying of care, thought; they wonder what will happen tomorrow, in anticipation they meet all the difficulties of the next seven years. They set themselves little problems in moral arithmetic, asking, If this should be equal to that, and a third thing should affect both the things now in opposition, what will possibly happen this day five years? The Lord does not ask you to be arithmeticians in that sense; in fact, very little arithmetic will satisfy the Lord. We do not want all this anticipation and multiplication of difficulties and dangers, losses and crosses. We may never live to see tomorrow; some men die in the night-time; in some nights the bridge is lost that connects the days. What then? Watch; be vigilant, be sober; expect the Lord: the great watchword of the Lord's Church should be, The kingdom of heaven is at hand! The worlds touch one another, not by material tact, but by magnetic, sympathetic, inexpressible relation and ministry. All the wrinkles upon your face were made by thinking about tomorrow.

III. Take it in the matter of social strife. Let Christ arise; Christ will settle all your social disputes, all your trade strikes, all your collisions, oppositions, and competitions. Let the Spirit of Christ work; let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus: and when the Christ Spirit rises in our hearts we will meet one another in mutual apology, in large concession, in noble charity, in generous justice. The storm is not still until Christ calms it, and when He calms it no power can ruffle it again, it is still and tranquil under the sovereignty of Christ.

—Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. iv. p50.

References.—IV:39.—R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p23. IV:40.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No1964. IV:41 (R.V.).—J. Jackson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxiv1903 , p260. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No1686. V.—J. McNeill, Regent Square Pulpit, vol. ii. p177. V:1-20.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No2262. J. Morley Mills, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxv1904 , p234. W. M. Taylor, The Miracles of Our Saviour, p212. Archbishop Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord, p125. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Mark I-VIII. p177. John Laidlaw, The Miracles of Our Lord, p218. V:1-24.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No2507. V:2.—H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii1898 , p123. V:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No2507. V:7.—Ibid. vol. li. No2966. W. Ralph, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxii1907 , p309. V:15.—W. P. Balfern, Lessons from Jesus, p81. V:17.—W. Gilbert, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxvii1905 , p134. V:17-19.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No2262. V:18 , 19.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Mark I-VIII. p186.