Day 23: "Hear This!" – The Parable Framed by Listening (Mark 4:3, 4:9)

By Sindhu Nadarajan · Thursday, October 15, 2026

A parable inside two commands

Jesus begins the parable of the sower with a command: "Hear this!" (4:3). He ends it with another: "Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear" (4:9). The story sits between two calls to listen, and Mark is telling us how to read what lies in between. Before it is a lesson about soil, the parable is a summons to hear.

"Hear this!" and the Shema

Jesus opens with Akouete!, "Hear this!" The Greek verb akouō is the equivalent of the Hebrew shama (to hear), so every Jew in the crowd would have heard an echo of the prayer they said each day: Shema Yisrael, "Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone!" (Deut 6:4). Jesus himself quotes it as the first commandment (Mk 12:29). Strikingly, the Old Testament has no ordinary word for "obey." When English Bibles say "obey," the Hebrew is usually shama. To the ancient Israelite, hearing and doing were one act; if you did not act on the word, you had not truly heard it. "Hear this!" is not a call to listen politely, but to receive the word and live it, as those who do God's will belong to Jesus (3:35).

(A note on the words: shama in Hebrew and akouō in Greek are the verbs meaning "to hear"; Shema and Akouete are the commands, "Hear!")

St. Ambrose noticed that the law's first word to us is a word of receiving. He wrote that the law "did not say 'speak' but 'hear.'" He traces the Fall to the opposite: Eve went wrong by speaking to Adam what she had not heard from God. Sin began with speaking before listening, and salvation begins with listening first.

Now God speaks in person

At Horeb the people were afraid to hear God directly, so Moses stood between them as interpreter. In the boat by the sea, something new is happening. Mark says Jesus taught them "in the course of his instruction" (4:2). Theophylact points out that this was not the teaching of Moses or of the Prophets, because Jesus preaches his own Gospel. The God who once said Shema Yisrael through Moses now says Akouete! with his own human voice.

The sower went out

A passage that the Catena Aurea attributes to St. John Chrysostom reflects on the words "a sower went out." Christ did not go out in space, since he is present everywhere, but by drawing near to us in the flesh. Because sin blocked our path and we could not go to him, he came out to us. The Shema called Israel to listen for God. In Jesus, God comes out to find the listener.

"Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear"

In Greek, Jesus' closing words use the same verb twice: Hos echei ōta akouein akouetō, "Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear." The first "hear" is the ability; the second is the command. Everyone in the crowd had ears, but not everyone heard.

St. Bede the Venerable says that whenever this phrase appears in the Gospels or in Revelation, what is being said is mystical and worth hearing and learning. The ears that hear it belong to the heart, and the ears by which we obey belong to an interior sense. Jesus is not asking for better hearing. He is asking for a listening heart.

When Jesus repeats the phrase a few verses later (4:23), St. Bede spells out what such hearing involves: not turning the ear to fables, but giving the ear to search out what truth has spoken, the hands to carry it out, and the tongue to preach it. Ear, hands, and tongue: real hearing, shama, moves through the whole person.

Opened ears

Later Jesus heals a deaf man with the Aramaic word Ephphatha, "Be opened!" (7:34). The Church repeats this at Baptism, when the priest touches the ears and mouth of the newly baptized so that they may hear the word and proclaim the faith. The ears to hear are a gift we have already received. The task is to keep them open.

St. Teresa of Ávila

On October 15 the Church remembers St. Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Carmelite reformer and Doctor of the Church. For years she struggled to pray, distracted and divided between God and the world. What changed her was learning to listen. She described prayer as an intimate conversation between friends, spending time alone with the One we know loves us. In The Interior Castle she teaches that God dwells at the center of the soul and speaks there, but we must turn away from the noise at the outer walls to hear him. Her life shows what it means to have ears to hear: she let what she heard in prayer reform her own life and then the whole Carmelite order.

Ponder

• When Jesus says Akouete!, "Hear this!", to me today, what noise in my life makes it hard to listen?

• Do I tend to speak before I have truly listened to God, in prayer, in decisions, or with others?

Closing prayer

Lord Jesus, you went out to find me when I could not come to you. Open my ears as you opened the ears of the deaf man. Quiet the noise within me so that I may hear your voice, and help me to live your word in what I do and share it in what I say. St. Teresa of Ávila, teach me to listen to the One who loves me. Amen.

Patristic references are from the Catena Aurea, St. Thomas Aquinas' commentary on the Gospels, which weaves together the words of more than 80 Church Fathers, including St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and St. Bede, phrase by phrase.