This coming Sunday’s gospel ends: With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it. Without parables he did not speak to them, but to his own disciples he explained everything in private. (Mark 4:32-34) Mark concludes this collection of parables with a summary indicating  that he has selected illustrations of Jesus’ teaching from a much larger cycle of tradition. It was Jesus’ method to teach the people through parables such as the one which Mark has presented. Through these parables Jesus is proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom; in other words, He was proclaiming “the word.” The term is an echo of the explanation given to the parable of the sower, where it occurs eight times. It is appropriate to the vocabulary of revelation and means clearly “the word of God,” or more concretely “the word of the Kingdom.”

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