Sixtus Robert Lecture

Kenneth W. Cardwell, FSC

April 15, 2023 (revised after delivery)

Title: The Creating Word

Topic: The Hermeneutics of Charity

The title of this talk, “The Creating Word,” refers to a conception I find in Genesis and in Mark. Most of us know that the One whose name we should not use loosely created the world we live in mostly by commanding that it take its present arrangement—heavens above, waters below; dry land here there, seas over there. Some parables in Chapter Four of Mark’s Gospel allude to the Creation Story. The arrangement of these parables—indeed the arrangement of the whole Sermon on the Sea—rests on the arrangement of days during which creatures were made and the world was sorted out. So much for the title.

The explanatory note, “The Hermeneutics of Charity,” well, somewhat at a loss for words, I picked that phrase to give the lecture a bit of intellectual class. That word “hermeneutics” does the job, I hope. I borrow it from a very good book, from which I quote:

The God Hermes is the patron of thieves, merchants, and travelers; of heralds and what the heralds pronounce, their kerygma.

Hermes is cunning, and occasionally violent: a trickster, a robber. So it is not surprising that he is also the patron of interpreters. Sometimes they proclaim an evident sense, like a herald; but they also use cunning, and may claim the right to be violent, and glory in it. The rules of their art, and its philosophy, are called “hermeneutics.”

The second part of the explanatory  note, “of Charity,” declares—not the object of the interpretation: I will not be trying to interpret Charity or “charity”—but a property of a kind of hermeneutics, a kind of interpretation. In the old days we used to be advised to interpret the words of our brothers in the most charitable sense possible. There was also a closely allied “principle of charity”: read the words, hear the words so that they make the most sense possible.  In Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” someone in the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount is having trouble hearing the sermon and asks his neighbor, What did he say?

Man: I think it was, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"!

Gregory's wife: What's so special about the cheesemakers?

Gregory: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.

Gregory employs the principle of charity, but he does so to little good effect because he starts from a misapprehension. The problem started with the first man. He had ears but he did not hear. Had he thought just a bit and applied the principle of charity he might have come up with “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Useful things have been said about a “hermeneutics of suspicion”; and I wanted to say something useful about a contrary hermeneutics. Wanted to, but decided not to. For I don’t find in myself these days much power of systematic thinking. Instead, I have decided to provide us with an example, as far as I can, of the hermeneutics of charity at work. It will be up to you to discern the assumptions I am making and to organize your thoughts on how to practice the hermeneutics of charity.

I don’t want us to get bogged down in method. There may be no method for interpreting the written or spoken word.  

My goal is to start a conversation in which we think about interpretation—not in the sense of interpreting from one language to another—but in the sense of moving from hearing and seeing words (and sentences and parables and narratives) to hearing someone help us understand them.

Together we have been or will be looking at Chapter Four of the Gospel According to Mark. In that chapter, Jesus gets in a boat and tells a parable or two to a crowd onshore. And then when he was alone those around him with the 12 asked him about the parables. His response, as Mark reported it, scandalized many, including, perhaps Matthew and Luke. Jesus said, “For those outside, everything comes in parables in order that looking, they look, and do not understand and hearing they hear and do not comprehend” (Mark 4:11, 12). “But in private to his own students,” Mark wrote, “he explained all things” (Mark 4:34).

If this were a liturgical event, I would now have to ask those of you who are not baptized Christians to clear out; for I am going to speak, as Mark does, in the name of Jesus and give you a private oral interpretation of the written public words visible in the Gospel. Included: I will interpret the private interpretation Jesus gave to the parable he spoke to the crowd.

I will do that in three parts. First, I will explain the numbers attached to the first parable—30, 60, 100. Second, we will pass to the first parable, the Parable of the Sower, sometimes called the Parable of the Fourfold Field and rather hastily give it a look. Third, I will reveal the two texts that govern Mark’s selection and arrangement of the parables and their attendant sayings and narrative framing. Then, if there is time, I will return to the sower.

Before I do any of those three things I want to point out a number of difficulties that confront us as we try to make sense out of what we read in Chapter Four. For the moment, I’ll just list them, more or less in order as we start making our way through the chapter.

      1. Why does Mark call the lake of Galilee a sea?

      2. Why does Mark write so clumsily. Why say Jesus sat on the sea and the crowd were on the land next to the sea? Doesn’t Greek have a word for shore?

      3. Why does the parable say the sower went out to sow and not say what the sower sowed?

      4. How can Jesus be said to be alone and others be around him with the 12, apparently in a boat (not to mention the crowd on land)?

      5. What is “the mysterion of the kingdom of God” that has been given to those around him with the 12? (It is at least a mystery.)

      6. What is the logos that the sower is said to sow?

      7. Why does the explanation not say who the sower is?

      8. To what element in the parable does the “these” (plural) by the side of the road correspond? (And similarly with the three following interpretations in which there are a “these,” “others,” and, a “those.”)

      9.  Why do the two parables about the lamp and measuring appear in this  collection of parables mostly about growing things?

      10. And why do they appear in this in this apparently unordered order?

Ten is enough for now. You need to bear these oddities in mind. That way, my explanation will at least seem necessary and maybe even not so bizarre.

Part One. Numbers

A sower goes out to sow. Skipping the crop failures, I go to the good earth and the numbers. There the sowing yields fruit, “coming up,” anabainonta, and increasing; and it brought—one, thirty; one, sixty; one, one hundred. The text is a bit shaky here. Apparently a scribe early on found the presence of three one’s unsettling;  but the numbers thirty, sixty, and one hundred are firm.

The same numbers turn up when Jesus interprets the parable.

Now one hundred is a good place to finish a counting of just about any good thing. Jesus later on in this Gospel will promise the 12 that if they give up what they have in this life, they will receive a hundredfold in this life (en tôi kairôi)  and in the coming age (en tôi aiôvi tô erkhomenôi), life without end (zôên aiônion). Ten is the fullness of number, the All, as Aetius said. Ten times ten is the fullness of fullness.

Commentators usually first say about these numbers that, of course, the numerical sequence cannot be taken as a mere report of actual agricultural yields of some particular crop. They are a (typical) oriental exaggeration. Actual crop yields . . . blah, blah, blah. The commentators then go on to say that the numbers that Jesus gives and Mark writes down do not make a regular sequence. The next step: the 30, 60, 100 result from an underlying regular sequence. Either Mark has taken thirds of one hundred, 33 1/3, 66 2/3, and rounded off. Or Mark started with 30 and added 30 and added 30 again—30, 60, 90. But instead of 90, Jesus (or Mark) threw in an extra 10 as an expression of “divine exuberance.” I’ve also seen the underlying principle given as doubling, namely, 30, 60, 120, with the 120 replaced by 100 to make a fitting conclusion. These three interpretations all take the visible sequence, recognize its failure to achieve numerical regularity, and then propose an underlying, hidden and regular sequence, that has been monkeyed with according to some non-numerical principle in order to produce the result that we see in the Gospel.

Questions about these interpretations: Why start with 30? Why express the yield in thirds? Why keep the 100? Why hide the generating sequence, whatever it may be?

The sequence in the Gospel does not make sense on its face—I agree. An unwritten sequence should be found lying behind the apparent sequence—I quite agree. The apparent sequence has modified the unwritten sequence to achieve some rhetorical effect—I disagree.

Here's a fourth reading, mine. You have to do a bit of arithmetic. Here we go. Count: one, two, three, four. That’s the sequence of counting numbers. Add them: one plus two plus three plus four. That’s a series. The sum is ten.

Now take the partial sums of the series. One. One plus two—three; one plus two plus three—six; one plus two plus three plus four—ten. Make a sequence out of the partial sums: one, three, six, ten. Leave one alone and multiply the rest by ten. We get the sequence thirty, sixty, one hundred.

The sequence one, three, six, ten, gives the first four triangular numbers.  Greek elementary instruction spent much times on sequences. The sequence of counting numbers is the most basic. The sequence of triangular numbers comes next. The sequence of square numbers next after that. The triangular numbers will be familiar to those whom Nicomachus introduced to ancient arithmetic.

The hidden basis of the visible sequence is the once-upon-a-time-familiar sequence of triangular numbers.

Since we are seeking arithmetical consistency, should the first member of the sequence also be multiplied by ten? Yes, if we were multiplying pure numbers. No, because we are multiplying yields. And one is not a yield. We are multiplying what the one yields.

“Who has ears, hear.” The phrase is standard rabbinic language alerting those hearing it that there is a teaching concealed behind the plain face of the plain meaning of the passage. The sequence of counting numbers up to four makes a far more fitting basis for the numbers in—as I like to call it—the Parable of the Fourfold Field. I think it is the solution to the mathematical problem.

It provides a glimmer of hope that other questions about the parable’s elements might have answers as indisputable as the solution to a simple arithmetic problem. It leaves open the question, of course, what is being multiplied? what is increasing? Leaving those questions for later, I ask us, Does my interpretation make more sense? And if so, what is sense that it should come in quantities of less and more?

For various reasons—the novelty of triangular numbers; the complicated three-stage manipulations—you might not be persuaded that I have hit on the one, correct, and only explanation of the thirty, sixty, one hundred. Let me add some relevant historical trivia. The Tetraktys is the name given to the four-member series, sometimes represented by a triangular array of alphas, starting with one, next row two, third row three, fourth row four.

α

α   α

α   α   α

α   α   α   α

This figurate number, whose value is ten, is the fourth of the triangular numbers. It has a name because, the story goes, when the Pythagoreans inducted a new member into their community, they did so swearing “by him who gave the Tetraktys.” This swearing-in was a liturgy, a sacrament, in Greek, a mysterion, a “mystery.” The oath was also a great secret, one of those secrets known to virtually everybody, or at least to anyone who cared about such things.

Recall that Jesus, alone, with those around him with the 12, tells them that they have been given “the mystery.”  We are meant to understand “baptism.” The climactic moment of Baptism, whether it took place in a ritual bathtub or in a flowing river, was the moment the baptized person “came up,” out of the water. The verb, anabainein, appears twice in the parable: the weeds “came up,” and whatever was sown on good soil bore fruit “coming up” and increasing (numerically) as thirty, sixty, one hundred.

Now I would not be so confident that my reading gives the better sense for the number sequence (if not its fullest meaning) except that the Gospel elsewhere shows that numbers matter to its author. Mark puts a numerical puzzle into the mouth of Jesus who asks his 12 whether they remember how many baskets of leftover bread they brought back when he and they fed the five thousand with five loaves and how many basketfuls of bread they brought back when he and they fed the four thousand with seven loaves. He does not ask them to add the five loaves to the seven loaves; but Mark may be inviting his readers to come up with the number. Which is, of course, twelve.

Mark is, as his best modern commentator noted, as a writer, among the tribe of the number obsessed. That does not of course mean that he is a Pythagorean, neo- or otherwise. But Mark left a clue that he is sympathetic to a man of Pythagorean leanings. Jesus cured many, but we do not learn their names. We do learn the patronymic of one, the blind man outside Jericho, Bar Timaeus, “son of Timaeus.” Now the name “Timaeus” is not Hebrew, but it is good Greek. It is the name of a philosopher in a Platonic dialogue of the same name. That dialogue begins, “One, two, three, where is the fourth of those, O Timaeus, who were with us yesterday?” This dialogue was, according to a scholar of the literature, the only Platonic dialogue that every Greek-educated person could be counted on to know. Timaeus believes the world is made from or according to number. Mark names his blind man in Aramaic and Greek, Bar Timaeus, and tells us that “bar” means “son of.” Perhaps we are meant to understand that Bar Timaeus is the son of the dialogue. And, just maybe, he is a philosopher who throws off his philosopher’s cloak to follow Jesus on the Way.

I hear and see the Tetraktys lurking behind the numbers Jesus gives. Not as the greater doctrine, but as an companionable doctrine, that generates everything from numbers and numbers from the One. Mark wanted to put specific numbers to an increase. And he wanted a sequence that would reveal its principle of order at a level more fundamental than the numbers that first meet the eye. The first four counting numbers are, as it were, the foundation of the sequence, the foundation hidden until the beginning of the world. At which time, counting began.

& & & &

Part Two. The Parable and Its Interpretation

The Parable

Some observations, from above, as it were; for we must now make haste. A narrative surrounds the Parable of the Fourfold Field, more usually known as the Parable of the Sower. Jesus spoke the parable publicly; those studying under him (“disciples”) did not understand it; he explained why he spoke in parables; then he began privately to illuminate the parable. And Mark gave us a public, written, version of this move from public preaching to private explanation. Would it not be fitting that just as the public parable was expounded in a private gathering, so too this whole narrative of public and private teachings now become public as the written Gospel of Mark was itself expounded in private? Just as the irregular sequence of numbers, subjected to the charitable reading, pushes us to look for something not written in the text, the troubled surface of Mark’s Sermon on the Sea, treated charitably, invites, almost demands, that there was an unwritten account that made sense out of the troubles.  Just as Mark shows Jesus help the 12 apply allegory to make sense out of the key sowing parable, so too, I think, the charitable reading of Mark says, this was written to be accompanied by an unwritten explanation.

Neither seed nor seeds appear in the parable. Justifiable interpretations supply seeds as the subject of what fell beside the road, what fell on the rockiness, what fell into the weeds, and what fell on the good earth. But Mark does not write that the sower went out to sow seed or seeds on the land. Why not? A guess: Mark had a parable from the mouth of Jesus about a sower sowing seed, and Mark wanted the sower to be sowing, but he wanted what was sown to be logos. The parable, as Mark understands it, is a logos about logos. And the logos is one, not many. Whereas seeds are many, like those from whom the logos is snatched by the birds, dried up by the sun, or crowded out by the weeds. So Mark left “seed” unsaid. (Perhaps, in addition, Mark did not want this logos to be confused with the Stoic logos spermatikos, the creative source of the cosmos.)

The Interpretation of the Parable.

Mark speaks in the name of Jesus and tips his own presence by the shift in the tense of the verb to say. Instead of the repeated elegen’s, in this instance Mark writes eipen.  The trope is familiar to us from the Revelation of John: “Jesus says this to the church in Corinth…”.

I will not go into the interpretation beyond pointing out that anyone brought up inside the church of Mark would know persons whose reception of the word was suffocated by the cares of the world. The interpretation Mark puts in the mouth of Jesus expresses a principle; begin your interpretation with what you know. Start from home.

One last observation about the parable. In the interpretation the sower is not identified. And the word, the logos, is not said to be “the word of God.” In fact, in all of Mark’s Gospel you will not find the express ho logos tou theou, “the word of God,” except once. And there it appears when Jesus criticizes the priests for clinging to their traditions and justifying their petty self-interest by appealing to the word of God. The phrase is effectively in their mouth and not in the mouth of Jesus.

 Mark, speaking as Jesus, offers allegory as a method to begin making sense of the image of the sower. We know the story is not a newspaper report: it opens with a characteristic “went out.” In the OT of the trees looking for a king, they first of all “went out.” The parable exists in a place external to the time and place of the narrative.

The allegory assigns “other things” as interpretants of the parable’s things. And if allegory at first succeeds, it finally fails rather spectacularly. We are given a few partial and puzzling identities. With which to do the best we can. On our own.

There is certainly more to the interpretation than the application of an agricultural simile to the life of a chaotic and initially disorganized new religious society. I do not know much more about that “more.” What I do think I know is that Mark put the parable and its interpretation into a framework that shows us what direction our own interpretations should take.

& & & &

Part Three. The Parables Selected and the Parables Arranged

The setting in which Mark has Jesus tell this parable clues us to the private and secret nature of another teaching. And this one also involves counting. This time, we must count not one, two, three, four, but one, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth—and the Sabbath. And we must count to seven and then to eight. You know where the first count comes from. In case you do not instantly catch it, Mark has left us a few clues. In the Discourse from the Boat, Mark has Jesus separate himself on “the sea” from the people left back on “the land.” He speaks to them about a sower sowing on land. In “The one who sows went out to sow” (ho speirôn speirai) can be heard a faint echo of the Greek of Genesis where on the Third Day, the earth itself was “seeding seed” (speirôn sperma). This natural sowing occurred on the same day God separated land from sea.

Now Greek has a word for shore. Mark does not use it. Nor does he use the good Greek word for lake, which is what the so-called Sea of Galilee actually is. Instead he three times refers to the “sea” and once to the people on the “land.” The division of sea and land might not “pop” at once; but it should when Jesus tells his audience to hear about a sower sowing. Aha! Genesis! The scribes of Mark’s day knew that Genesis harbored secrets. An especially important secret: God did not create the grass. Instead, he left it to the earth to bring forth grass. And it did. The Hebrew runs, if I recall correctly, “the earth grassed grass.” What was the meaning of this delegation of creative power to the earth? A secret. Note that one of our parables, the next-to-last, tells of a man who sows seed on the earth. The seed grows and ripens and the man does not know how it does so. And “automatically” the earth bears fruit.

I have to speed up. A chart, to be explained.

Here is the secret—rather the two secrets—of Mark’s principle of arrangement. For the moment consider only the top portion:

      GENESIS                          LINK                        MARK

Third Day (Part One) separation land (One)

Separate land from sea and sea Land and Sea

Third Day (Part Two) sower, seed, sowing (Two)

Earth brings forth plants plants bringing forth their kind Parable of the Sower

in their likeness   (a likeness)

Day One separation (Three)

Separate light from dark (those in the) light separated Purpose of the Parables

from those in the dark

Second Day separation (Four)

Separate waters above from Logos (above) is The Parable Explained

waters below seed and plant (below)

Fourth Day King N. dreams the tree of (Five)

Creation of great lights heaven with sun and moon in The Lamp

named sun and moon its branches -placed in order to shine

in order that they shine --the obscure is made clear

Fifth Day King B.: the moving finger (Six)

Creation of fish and birds who writes “it is numbered and Sayings of the Measure 

“increase, multiply, and fill seas measured and taken away” and Dispossession

and heavens” -- filling measure full -with the measure measured; given and taken away

Sixth Day (Part One) King N.’s dream; (Seven)

Cattle, reptiles, wild beasts                  the tree is cut down; Seed Growing and the 

                  a man-ox eats grass with man does no work 

beasts for seven years                      (on Sabbath?)

  -a kingdom like a man

Sixth Day (Part Two) King N.’s dream (Eight)

Male and female in the image interpreted as a likeness: Mustard Seed

and likeness of the One who the tree is the king and -a likeness of and parable 

speaks the kingdom of a man about the kingdom of God

One commentator looked at the selected parables and their order and judged that they wouldn’t have been so disparate and disorderly if Mark had not been hampered by a previous arrangement. Indeed, there was a previous arrangement. He was not hampered by it; he was inspired by it.

Mark is looking for eightfold forms to express the numerical total of the name Jesus, which is eight hundred eighty-eight. He is doing so because the followers of Jesus worship him on the eighth day, the day on which Day One returns, the day of illumination, the day of resurrection. The eighth day is also the day of circumcision, the day of naming, the day of cleansing, the day for cure offerings. The eighth day is the day for the celebration of the power of the name of Jesus. For lack of time to probe these claims, I ask you to suppose these eights enter into Mark’s thinking.

For his primary pattern of eight, Mark took the six days of Creation and divided the doubly-creative third day and the sixth day each into two pieces and then he counted the days as one, two, three, four, and five, six, seven, eight. And then, as if to throw those outside off the scent, Mark opened the Sermon on the Sea with the two pieces of the third day—the separation of earth from sea, and the earth bringing forth plants. Recount these as three and four. In the Creation account on the second part of the Third Day, God commands the land to bring forth plants—seed-bearing plants with their seed within them. Because Mark begins the sermon with a parable about a sower sowing, Day One and the second day have been skipped. They are not omitted; they find a new order in Mark.

In the sermon, Day One comes next. In the boat, Jesus is kata monas like a Monad, like a One, when he says (the only historical present in the Sermon) why he speaks in parables. The purpose, he says,  is to separate the illuminated from those in darkness—the work of Day One. The work of the second day suggests what follows. The interpretation must pair off with separation of the waters above from the waters below. The logos is like rain that falls and does not return above before it has fulfilled its task. Those who hear the interpretation receive a heavenly, higher, understanding. Those who do not are stuck with the lower reading, with the uninterpreted and not understood plain sense of the parable. Waters above, waters below.

So, the order in the sermon is three, four, one two. And the sections previous commentators have pointed out as impossibly breaking the narrative order of the piece now appear as intentionally reordered.

Now in Genesis comes the fourth day, renumbered five in Mark’s recounting of eight. On which day God said “Let luminaries come into being…for illumination of the earth…so as to give light upon the earth. . . . And God made the two great luminaries … and God placed them in the firmament of the sky/so as to give light upon the earth.” Mark matches them with the saying about the lamp, which Mark has chosen for the fifth spot. It comes not to be hidden under a bushel basket or bed but on a lampstand. It comes in order to shine. Hold on to this lampstand for just a bit.

And then comes as sixth the saying: “…the measure you give will be the measure you get.” More literally and less smoothly: “with the measure you measure with, it will be measured to you.” And then follows; “For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Here we find no joy in the Genesis scheme. Mark tells us again, “Let those who have ears, hear; those who have eyes, see.” Something there is here to be both heard and seen.

My ears hear as my eyes see the famous Writing on the Wall: mane, mane, thekel, upharsin. And I hear a chiming of syllables in “en hô metro metreite metrêthêsetai humin kai proste / thêsetai humin. Hos gar ekhei, dothêsetai autôi. kai hos ouk ekhei, kai ho ekhei arthêsetai ap autou. Compare: mane, thekel, upharsin. Mark has put two sayings together to mimic what the moving finger wrote on the wall in Belshazzar’s palace—the wall next to, or perhaps opposite the lampstand. The facticity of what Jesus actually said, and the constraints of Greek vocabulary and grammar, and Mark’s own Greek fidelity to what Jesus in Aramaic said, do not permit a closer mimicry. But then part of the pleasure of detection is that the original should not be perfectly obvious. We are asked to see and hear because the directive and ordering element is an occasion for interpreting something seen.

The eight-box grid comes from Genesis and Mark uses it to position his narrative and the sayings and parables of Jesus. The content of the Genesis days governs the choice of the parables to fill boxes one through five. Then comes a segué: the Book of Daniel takes over. Five ushers in six and the dream of king Nabuchodonosor (Nebuchadnezzar) about a tree that reaches to heaven. He sleeps and wakes. Awake, he tells his dream to Daniel. Who interprets the great tree as a likeness for both a kingdom and a man. His dream is an agricultural dream, involving a tree cut down and an ox eating grass.

Now commentators point out that basileia, “kingdom,” has a temporal sense, not discernible in our more geographical-tasting “kingdom.” “Reign” might be better except that it loses the spatial flavor altogether. Joel Marcus, asking himself about the Sermon says, brilliantly, I think, ““The central, unspoken question that the parables in [the Markan parable chapter] answer, . . . is: what time is it in the world?” (Mark, 1:288). Daniel, apocalyptic to the core, asks this question most pointedly in the great image of the world tree and the king reduced to eating grass.

Let me make a few more literary, or at least non-arithmetical, remarks. The last two parables Jesus introduces with mention of “the kingdom of God” first, directly, “Such is the kingdom of God, as if a man sowed seed on the earth . . .” and then, interrogatively, “How shall I liken the kingdom of God, in what parable shall I put it?” Two things present in each introduction: the notion (implicit and then explicit) of likeness; and the thing being likened, the “kingdom of God.” Present in the parable of the Sower was the example of interpretation through allegory. The King dreams; Daniel interprets it as an allegory.

The man, like the king, “sleeps and wakes.” This detail derives from the need to connect the parable of the seed growing secretly to the vision of the king asleep and then awake. When the time is ripe, some unspecified “he” “sends (apostellei) the sickle” just in the King’s Dream an angel was “sent” to cut down the tree. When is the time of reaping? The king-tree is cut down and he crops grass for seven years. His and his kingdom’s restoration comes in the eighth. The tree of the King’s Dream reached to the heavens, the sun and moon were in its branches (another link to the fourth day, box five). Its branches were 30 stadia long. (There’s a suggestion for the opening number of the harvest.) The kingdom of God is like and unlike the kingdoms of this world. The world tree is the largest and the mustard seed is the smallest of growing things. The allegorical interpretation of the great tree throws into high relief the allegorical interpretation we make of the mustard seed likeness in Mark. Mark has made Jesus contrast the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man.

Now don’t be shocked. I don’t expect you to believe the account I have just given you about the arrangement of the eight puzzle pieces. You just might, but more likely you have your doubts. And I think any purely reasonable interpreter should have doubts about the interpretation I have sketched. Even were I to marshal more assertions, more collateral evidence, I think most of you would be shaking your heads. Which leads me to think that Mark knew he had not piled up enough clues to tip the balance of belief. The interpretation I have given you is, I think, “underdetermined.” And I think that that is deliberate. You, the woman or man outside, are not supposed to see on your own the arrangement I have just shown you or believe it when shown. Were you inside, the authority of the interpreter would supplement the external evidence gathered from the public face of the texts.

Mark has reserved the fuller understanding for those who have committed themselves to the Way and come inside the circle “around Jesus with the 12.” Baptized, they are in communion with a community of readers. In that community, an authorized interpreter would have additional persuasive power. The ethos of the speaker interpreting the living word when added to the interpretation you have just heard, would persuade and convince. Still, even if you are not inside, and you are merely a very charitable reader, you may recognize that the greatest sense the sermon can have requires recognizing in its background the already written but not named accounts from Genesis and Daniel—why then although you do not know it, you are already inside.

Oh. I see from the time in the world that my time is almost up. Lest we spend the question period with you asking me to explain the parable of the Fourfold Field, let me say I really don’t fully understand it. And, furthermore, I don’t think Mark fully understood it either. I think he found it open-ended and offered an interpretation that was under-determined. He put it into a fairly complex setting that he himself had modeled on an ancient foundational text. And the texts that inform the arrangement and constrain Mark’s selection of the sermon’s contents—these two texts, the Creation Account and the King’s Dream (with the attendant Moving Finger), create the groundwork for the subsequent verbal work of both Jesus and Mark.

Mark’s arrangement adds a level to the interpretation of the sermon. It points to the foundational texts beneath the narrative and the parables Jesus spoke. The ground beneath the parables makes them point upward, to the heavens. The repeated deeds, sayings and parables of Jesus—these constitute the first rung of a ladder set on the ground of earlier texts. The unknotting of the allegory provides a second rung. Mark’s arrangement, a third rung, allows the climber to see the ground on which the ladder stands. A fourth rung: What went on inside his church we can only guess by analogy with what Jesus did in the boat. In the public Gospel Mark created an interpretive space through which we climb, onward and upward, as if on a ladder, meeting the angels of God descending and ourselves joining with those ascending. The descending angels, at least, give us some confidence that the ladder is not itself infinite, that it has a top, and that that top is leaning on something.

So I hand the question back to you as a handful of questions: What is it to interpret a text charitably? What are the characteristics of an interpretation that “makes more sense”? What have I been assuming in this, my attempt at a charitable interpretation? And just what is this logos the sower is sowing? Could sowing be interpreted as interpreting? Could the logos sown and growing and increasing be intelligibility gained by charitable interpretation? Is the parable of the Fourfold Field a parable about charitable interpretation? If so, who is the sower?

Finis