This session opens the series, and it has three tasks. It introduces the parable as a way of teaching. It introduces the Kingdom of God as a coherent reality. And it begins to form participants in the disposition of receiving the Word. Jesus answers the question “What is the Kingdom?” with four parables instead of a definition. They are gathered here from the parable discourses of Matthew 13 and Mark 4: the Sower, the Growing Seed, the Mustard Seed, and the Leaven. Read together they form a single picture of how the Kingdom comes into the world. The Word is sown (the Sower). It grows by a power that is not the worker’s (the Growing Seed). It begins small and becomes large (the Mustard Seed). It transforms what it touches from within (the Leaven).
The chief Old Testament background for the session is Daniel 2 and Daniel 7. There the Kingdom of God arrives as a stone that becomes a mountain filling the earth. It also arrives as an everlasting kingdom given to the Son of Man, Jesus’ own favorite name for himself. That background matters in the discussion, so it is developed once, in full, under Old Testament Roots below. With the group, open it by discovery rather than lecture. Brant Pitre develops this Daniel connection at length. In a real sense the parables of this session are Daniel 2 in narrative form.
The leader’s task in this session is to instill wonder rather than to deliver a lecture. The Kingdom is a reality to enter rather than a topic to analyze.
When the disciples ask Jesus why he teaches in parables (Mt 13:10), he says that knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom has been given to them and not to others. He quotes Isaiah 6:9-10 directly and presents the parables as the fulfillment of that prophetic word (Mt 13:11-15). The parable both reveals and conceals. It opens to those who hunger to understand and closes to those who do not. This is not arbitrary. A parable rewards attention and cannot be skimmed. The hearer has to engage and wrestle with the image until meaning emerges. The Kingdom cannot be received passively, and the form of Jesus’ teaching is itself part of the teaching.
The Sower is one of only three parables Jesus interprets directly (Mt 13:18-23; cf. Mk 4:14-20; Lk 8:11-15). The seed is “the word of the kingdom” (Mt 13:19). The four soils are four conditions the Word meets, and each matches a human disposition we can recognize:
The Catholic exegetical tradition, the Church’s tradition of interpreting Scripture, reads the parable on several levels. At the literal level, the four soils are four kinds of hearers responding to Jesus’ preaching, and by extension to all preaching of the gospel. At the moral level, St. Augustine and others apply the parable to the interior life of every Christian. They recognize that the same heart can be path, rocky, or thorny in different seasons (cf. Confessions VIII.12, where grace breaks open even a resistant will). This pastoral application is faithful, but it should not displace the literal sense. Jesus is first describing four responses to his message.
St. John Chrysostom stresses the responsibility of the hearer (Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 44). The seed is the same, the Sower is the same, and the intention is the same. What varies is the soil. His challenge is hard to hear. He tells us not to blame the Word, the preacher, or the season, but to ask what kind of soil we are.
Curtis Mitch and Scott Hahn, in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament commentary on Matthew 13, add a dimension from salvation history. Israel has long been the field where the Word was sown through the prophets. The four soils describe Israel’s varied response, which now reaches its decisive form in the response to Jesus.
This parable appears only in Mark (4:26-29). The man scatters seed, sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed grows “of itself” (Mk 4:28). The Greek is automatē, the source of our word “automatic.” The harvest comes, and the man puts in the sickle. The parable corrects two opposite errors. Against passivity it insists on the harvest, a real ingathering that will happen. Against frenzied activism it insists on the hidden agency of God, because the Kingdom grows by a power that is not the worker’s. St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes operative grace (by which God moves the will) from cooperative grace (by which the will, once moved, moves with God). This distinction sheds light on the image (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, a. 2). The Growing Seed can be read, by analogy, as an image of operative grace in narrative form. The farmer’s work is real but secondary, and the growth is the Lord’s.
The Mustard Seed (Mt 13:31-32; Mk 4:30-32; Lk 13:18-19) addresses how insignificant Jesus’ movement appeared. It was a handful of fishermen and a wandering rabbi with no political power, a Kingdom that looked too small to matter. Two Old Testament backgrounds are essential, and both are developed under Old Testament Roots below. One is Daniel 2, where a stone “cut out by no human hand” becomes a mountain filling the earth. The other is the prophetic image of the great tree with birds nesting in its branches (Ezekiel 17:22-24; contrast Daniel 4:10-14). In the discussion, do not explain these to the group. Let the group read them and find the connection. (A botanical note: the plant is most likely Brassica nigra, black mustard, which was common in first-century Palestine and can grow into a shrub of eight to ten feet. Mishnah Kil’ayim 3:2 reflects rabbinic awareness that mustard behaved like a shrub in cultivation. Jesus’ point is the disproportion between the smallest beginning and a tree-like result. He is not making a claim about absolute size.)
The Leaven (Mt 13:33; Lk 13:20-21) describes the same dynamic from the inside. A woman takes leaven and hides it (Greek enekrypsen, “she hid”) in three measures of flour until the whole batch is leavened. This detail is significant. In Israel’s ritual law leaven is excluded from Passover and from most grain offerings (Ex 12:15; Lev 2:11), though it is permitted in the thanksgiving offering (Lev 7:13). In later usage it often serves as an image of corrupting influence, and Jesus himself uses it negatively elsewhere (“the leaven of the Pharisees,” Mt 16:6). Here the image is reversed, and the Kingdom is what works invisibly until the whole is changed. The Leaven is paired with the Mustard Seed (Mt 13:31-33; Lk 13:18-21), and the two form a complete picture. The Mustard Seed describes outward expansion, and the Leaven describes inward transformation. The Kingdom grows in both directions at once, outward into the world and inward into every life it touches.
These passages are the deep roots of Session 1’s parables. Their images lived in Israel’s Scriptures and would have been familiar to many of Jesus’ first hearers. This is the one place they are developed in full. In the discussion the group will read the key ones and find the connection for themselves. Reading them alongside the parables shows that Jesus takes up images already given and announces the fulfillment of promises centuries old.
The seed of the Sower is the Word of God of which Isaiah speaks, and that Word carries within itself the power of divine intention. It should not be mistaken for generic religious teaching. The Word will accomplish God’s purpose. The open question is what kind of soil receives it.
Daniel’s vision is the closest Old Testament parallel to the Mustard Seed. It shows a kingdom that begins as a stone and ends as a mountain, “cut out by no human hand,” which is to say that human empire-building did not produce it. The Mustard Seed follows the same pattern of small beginning, universal scope, and divine origin.
God himself plants the sprig that becomes the sheltering tree. Jesus says the Kingdom is like a mustard seed that becomes a great shrub where birds nest. The Church’s exegetical tradition has long heard in this image Jesus identifying his own movement as the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s promise.
The tree in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is an earthly empire, vast and sheltering, and it is then cut down (Dan 4:14). When Jesus uses the same image of birds in branches, the contrast suggests itself. Earthly empires, however vast and sheltering, are cut down (Dan 4:14), while Daniel elsewhere promises a kingdom that “shall never be destroyed” (Dan 2:44). Read together, the images point to a Kingdom that will become universal and, unlike every earthly empire, will not be cut down.
Jesus quotes this directly to explain why the parables both reveal and conceal (Mt 13:14-15). The parables fulfill Isaiah’s prophetic word. They reveal the Kingdom to those who hunger to receive, and they harden those who resist. The form of the teaching is itself both a judgment and a mercy.
Method: Direct quotations appear in quotation marks with a specific source citation. Sometimes a Father’s teaching is faithfully represented but no single quotable line fits the exposition. In that case it is given as paraphrase, without quotation marks, with citation to the work where the teaching appears.
St. Augustine’s pastoral conviction, expressed throughout his sermons and his works on grace, is that no soul is permanently fixed in its present condition. The same heart that has been a footpath in one season can be plowed open by suffering and grace and become fruitful. He recounts his own conversion in Confessions VIII.12, and for him it is the standing witness of this truth. The resistant will can be turned, and turned decisively.
From the opening of the Confessions (I.1): “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” In the end, the good soil of the Sower is the heart that has stopped trying to rest anywhere except in God.
In his Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 44 (on Mt 13:1-23), St. John Chrysostom develops the responsibility of the hearer. The seed is the same in every case, the Sower is the same, and the Sower’s intention is the same. What varies is the soil. He urges his congregation not to blame the preacher, the Scripture, or the season for the unfruitfulness of their own hearts. They are to examine the soil.
He also makes a pastoral point. The Sower does not avoid sowing on hard ground, rocky places, or thorny soil. He sows the seed everywhere. This implies hope, for the rocky might become rich, the wayside arable, and the thorns cleared. The Sower’s indiscriminate generosity is itself a form of hope.
St. Thomas Aquinas treats the parables in his Commentary on Matthew and gathers the Fathers in the Catena Aurea. On the Mustard Seed, a recurrent theme among the Fathers gathered in the Catena is that a small origin is no measure of a great destiny. The Kingdom’s humble beginnings in Galilee are no argument against its universal scope. On the Growing Seed, his teaching on grace sheds light on the parable. In Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, a. 2 he distinguishes operative grace (by which God moves the will) from cooperative grace (by which the will, once moved, then moves with God). The Growing Seed can be read, by analogy, as an image of operative grace in narrative form. The man scatters and sleeps, and the seed grows by a power he does not produce.
“… ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent, and believe in the gospel.’ ‘To carry out the will of the Father Christ inaugurated the kingdom of heaven on earth.’ … This gathering is the Church, ‘on earth the seed and beginning of that kingdom.’”
“Everyone is called to enter the kingdom. First announced to the children of Israel, this messianic kingdom is intended to accept men of all nations. To enter it, one must first accept Jesus’ word.”
“Jesus’ invitation to enter his kingdom comes in the form of parables, a characteristic feature of his teaching. Through his parables he invites people to the feast of the kingdom, but he also asks for a radical choice: to gain the kingdom, one must give everything. Words are not enough, deeds are required.”
If the Sower discussion runs long, abbreviate the Mustard Seed and Leaven to one discovery question and one Life question, and draw the rest from Going Deeper.
Leader, or invite a participant to pray:
“Heavenly Father, you sow your Word into our hearts every time we open Scripture and every time we listen for your voice. Open our ears to hear, our minds to understand, and our hearts to receive what you have planted in us. Give us the patience to let your Word grow in its own time, and the courage to let it transform us. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Go around the group. Ask each person for their name, what brought them to this study, and one thing they hope to receive from these ten sessions. Allow about a minute each. Keep it moving, because the discussion is the main part of the night.
The Kingdom of God is central to Jesus’ parables, but he never defined the Kingdom the way a textbook would. Instead he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” and told a story. Over the next ten weeks we will let Jesus teach us the Kingdom the way he chose to teach it, as a reality to enter rather than a concept to memorize. Tonight we read four of his Kingdom parables together, drawn from Matthew 13 and Mark 4. Each one reveals something about how the Kingdom comes into the world. Listen for what they have in common.
Have someone read Matthew 13:3-9 aloud. Then read Jesus’ own interpretation in 13:18-23.
Q1. Jesus describes four different outcomes for the seed, and the seed is the same in every case. What changes from one outcome to the next? What stays the same? [TEXT]
The soil changes. The seed (the Word of God) and the Sower (Christ) stay the same. The whole parable turns on this observation, and it sets up everything else.
Q2. In verses 19-23 Jesus names three forces that keep the Word from bearing fruit. They are the evil one, persecution and tribulation, and the cares of the world with the delight in riches. Walk through each of them. How are they different from one another? [TEXT]
The first is direct spiritual opposition (the evil one). The second is suffering, which produces falling away where roots are shallow. The third is subtler. It is neither opposition nor suffering but the slow drift of life’s cares and material attachment. Each keeps the Word from bearing fruit in a different way, and the Christian life is exposed to all three.
Q3. St. Augustine reads the four soils as seasons of the same heart rather than four fixed categories of people. St. John Chrysostom stresses that the seed and the Sower are the same, so what varies is the soil, and the responsibility lies there. Read together, what do these two voices ask of you? [TRADITION]
St. Augustine offers hope, and St. John Chrysostom offers responsibility. Both readings are true and both are pastoral, and the Catholic tradition holds them together. No soul is beyond grace, and each of us is responsible for the soil we are becoming. Resist the urge to choose one and dismiss the other.
Q4. Isaiah 55:10-11 says God’s Word “shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose.” Yet in the parable the Word is choked or withered in three soils out of four. How do both passages stay true at the same time? [TRADITION]
God’s Word always accomplishes his ultimate purpose in salvation history (Isaiah’s claim). Yet the response of any individual heart is real, and the heart is free to receive or reject in the moment (Jesus’ claim). The two do not contradict each other. This holds divine sovereignty and human freedom together without collapsing one into the other.
Q5. Be honest with yourself for a moment, not for the group. Of the four soils, which one most truthfully describes where your heart is right now: path, rocky, thorny, or fruitful? You do not have to share your answer. [LIFE]
Give a full minute of silence here. The aim is personal recognition rather than group sharing. Afterward, invite anyone who wishes to share, but do not press. The recognition is what matters here.
Q6. The thorns in Jesus’ own interpretation are “the cares of the world and the delight in riches” (Mt 13:22). What specific cares and attachments are choking the Word in your life right now? [LIFE]
Ask for specifics. “Stress” or “busyness” is too vague. Ask what the stress is about, whose approval is at stake, and what the attachment is. The parable diagnoses best when the answers are specific. With high-school and young-adult groups, common honest answers include phone use, comparison and image-management online, fear of disappointing parents, romantic attachments, and anxiety about career or grades.
Have someone read Mark 4:26-29 aloud.
The phrase translated “of itself” in verse 28 is the Greek automatē, the source of our word “automatic.” Mark is making a careful point. The man who scatters the seed is real, and his work matters, but the seed grows by a power that is not his. The Kingdom comes by God’s action, which is primary. Our work is real, and it is secondary.
Q7. The farmer scatters the seed, then sleeps. The seed grows by a power he does not control and cannot produce. Where in your spiritual life have you been trying to force growth by effort, when this parable suggests your work is to scatter and to wait? [LIFE]
This question often draws out ministry workers, parents praying for children, people in difficult prayer, and those longing for the conversion of family or friends. The worker remains in the parable, but the growth does not come from him. “Scatter and sleep” describes trust, and it should not be mistaken for passivity.
Have someone read Mark 4:30-32 and then Matthew 13:33 aloud.
Q8. The Mustard Seed describes outward growth, small to large. The Leaven describes inward transformation, a hidden agent that changes the whole batch. Why might Jesus pair these two images? What does each one say that the other does not? [TEXT]
The Mustard Seed answers “where is the Kingdom?” (it spreads outward through the world). The Leaven answers “how does the Kingdom work?” (from the inside, hidden, transforming what it touches). Together they describe one Kingdom moving in two directions at once.
Jesus’ first hearers had a background for these images. The picture of a tiny seed becoming a great sheltering plant, with birds nesting in its branches, was already in their Scriptures. Let’s read three of those passages and see what Jesus is doing with them. Read each one slowly before answering.
Have someone read Daniel 2:34-35 aloud.
Q9. Set Daniel’s vision beside the Mustard Seed. What is the same about the two images, from beginning to end? And what might “cut out by no human hand” be telling us about where this Kingdom comes from? [TRADITION]
Both move from something tiny to something that fills the earth, stone to mountain and smallest seed to greatest shrub. “Cut out by no human hand” signals divine origin, meaning that human empire does not build this Kingdom. Let the group arrive at “small beginning, universal scope, God’s doing” themselves before you name it. Daniel 2 is the closest Old Testament parallel to the parable.
Have someone read Ezekiel 17:22-24 and then Daniel 4:10-14 aloud, back to back.
Q10. Both trees have birds nesting in their branches, the same picture Jesus uses. Read the two side by side. Who plants the tree in Ezekiel, and what happens to the tree in Daniel 4? By choosing this image, what is Jesus claiming about his Kingdom? [TRADITION]
In Ezekiel God himself plants the tree, and it endures. This is the promise. In Daniel 4 the tree is Nebuchadnezzar’s empire, and it is cut down. This is the fate of every earthly kingdom. On this reading, Jesus claims the Ezekiel promise for his Kingdom and contrasts it with the fate of empires. Read together with Daniel 2:44, the images point to a Kingdom that will become universal and will not be cut down. This is one of the quiet ways he identifies his movement with God’s own action in history.
Q11. The Leaven works invisibly. You cannot watch leaven changing dough. You see only the result. Where do you sense God working in you in ways you cannot yet see or measure? What would it mean to trust that work without evidence of it? [LIFE]
This is a contemplative question. Not everyone will have a ready answer, and that is fine. Asking the question is itself formative. Resist the urge to fill the silence.
This week, before you open Scripture or sit down to pray, say one sentence aloud: “Lord, make me good soil today.” Then read or pray slowly, paying attention to what you hear. Come next week ready to share one place where you noticed the Word working in you, even quietly.
Then take the specific “thorn” you named in question six. Write it down, and bring it to confession or to prayer this week.
“Lord Jesus, you are the Sower, and your Word is good seed. We confess that our hearts have been path, rocky, and thorny in different seasons, sometimes within a single day. Plow us open and deepen our roots. Burn away the thorns of anxious attachment. Make us, this week and every week, the good soil that hears your Word, understands it, and bears fruit. We ask this through you, the Word made flesh, the seed planted in our hearts. Amen.”
These questions are available if your group finishes early or if a question opens a subject worth exploring. Use them in any order. You do not need all of them.
QGD1. Jesus quotes Isaiah 6:9-10 in Matthew 13:14-15 to explain why some hear the parables and others do not. Read Isaiah 6:9-10 in its prophetic context. What does it mean that the parables fulfill this prophecy? [TEXT]
Isaiah 6 is the prophet’s commissioning, where God tells him his preaching will produce hardness in many hearers. By quoting the passage, Jesus signals that the parables are themselves a prophetic action. They reveal to the willing and harden the resistant. The parable form is at once judgment and mercy.
QGD2. 1 Peter 1:23 calls believers “born anew … through the living and abiding word of God,” and James 1:21 calls Christians to “receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” What light do these texts shed on the Sower? [TRADITION]
Both treat the Word as a living seed planted in the believer. The Sower is the foundational image of the New Testament’s account of how grace begins in a soul. The Christian life is, in one sense, the Word working its way out from the seed it was planted as.
QGD3. St. Augustine’s conviction is that no one is permanently hard ground. Yet the path in the Sower is hard, and the seed never takes root there at all. Hold these two together. Where does it leave you as you pray for a particular person who currently looks like the path? [LIFE]
This is a tender question, because many will be praying for a parent, child, sibling, or friend who looks closed to faith. St. Augustine’s hope is real, and the path can be plowed. But the parable also recognizes that some hearts are closed in this present moment. The Christian responds with patient prayer and faithful sowing, and avoids both despair and presumption. Suffering, time, and grace are the plow.
QGD4. Read Daniel 2:44 (“in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed”) alongside Mark 1:15 (“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand”). If the Mustard Seed is Daniel 2 arriving in history, what is Jesus announcing about when the Kingdom comes? [TRADITION]
Daniel foresaw a kingdom set up “in the days of those kings” that would never be destroyed. Mark 1:15 announces that those days have arrived. The Kingdom is more than a distant future hope. It has arrived in Christ, is growing now, and will come in its fullness at his return. For Catholic biblical theology this is the central point. Christ inaugurates Daniel’s everlasting Kingdom, and the Church is its seed and beginning in history (CCC 541, 567; Lumen Gentium 5), awaiting its definitive fulfillment when Christ returns in glory.
Primary parables: Matthew 13:3-9, 18-23 | Mark 4:26-29 | Mark 4:30-32 | Matthew 13:33
Old Testament background: Isaiah 55:10-11 | Isaiah 6:9-10 | Daniel 2:34-35, 44 | Daniel 4:10-14 | Ezekiel 17:22-24
New Testament support: 1 Peter 1:23 | James 1:21 | Romans 10:17 | 1 Corinthians 3:6-9
Catechism: CCC 541, 543, 546, 567
Sources cited: St. Augustine, Confessions I.1 and VIII.12 | St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 44 | St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 111, a. 2, and Catena Aurea on Matthew 13 | Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament (Mitch and Hahn), on Matthew 13 | Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 5 | Brant Pitre, on the Daniel background of the Kingdom.