The Parable of the Sower: Dramatic Irony in Mark

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Irony is when things are different, very different, from how they are being presented. But the person hearing or seeing the ironic situation has to understand this. If someone says something ironic and no one understands he’s being ironic, then their true meaning is missed and communication fails. The viewer or the reader has to get it in order for irony to work.

Dramatic irony is a specialized version of irony. When you’re reading a book or watching a film or TV story, you will almost always learn something that almost none of the characters know. Hitchcock gave an example of this by describing how he could show a shot of a bomb strapped under a table in a crowded restaurant. Then he would continue to show scenes in that restaurant, the patrons (and our heroes) completely unaware of the bomb. The tension is astounding, now: what will happen?

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The identity of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, the Messianic secret, is another example of dramatic irony. As Drs. Ehrman and Méndez say in their latest Introduction to the New Testament textbook, the author knows Jesus is the messiah because he says so in the first sentence. The reader knows it, too, because they read it in the first sentence. But for eight chapters, almost no one else but the demons know who Jesus is. Indeed, Jesus overtly acts to keep that knowledge from coming out throughout the story, commanding people not to tell others about what they know.

So, when Jesus finally tells the parable of the sower, that dramatic irony should kick into overdrive. We readers should recognize that we have seen or will see examples of all four soils in the people Mark describes. The people who reject him outright, like his family members, are the soil of the wayside. The people who respond enthusiastically to the miracles, wanting more, quick to blow away when persecutions arise, are the soil of the rocky ground. The people who will let the seed choke due to cares of the world and the lure of wealth are the soil of the thorns. But the good soil people are those who follow Jesus to the end, letting the seed grow as it should, and thus produce more fruit …and more seed.

The parable of the sower should then make us realize that when Jesus tells people to hide who he is, he is attempting to give that knowledge, that seed, the best chance to land in good soil. He is planting that knowledge in the people who see and hear him. Indeed, Jesus enforces the Messianic secret in order to avoid the ill effects of the rocky soil (which raises a clamor of attention and hatred which hinders his ministry) and the thorny soil (which will frustrate the time and labor he’s done to let the knowledge grow properly).

Dramatic irony teaches this to the intended readers, those who wish to become sowers for Jesus themselves. Reading, after all, is something most people could not do in the time Mark was written. It’s an investment of time, even for those who could only listen to someone else read the gospel aloud. Mark, by telling or reaffirming for the reader or listener from the beginning that Jesus is the Christ, is planting that seed with them as well. He is using dramatic irony, a fantastic device to build tension and interest in a narrative, to trick the readers into maintaining silence about who Jesus is long enough to let the seed of how to teach others about Jesus grow within them as well, all while reading cautionary tales about the pitfalls of ministry gone wrong.

As such, this may be seen as Mark taking a huge problem for the early Christian communities (the early Jesus never mentioning the need to suffer and die as the Messiah, as recognized by Wrede) and turning it into an opportunity for teaching (Jesus was hiding this information in order to make the most and best opportunities for people to learn about him). Using the Messianic secret as dramatic irony was how Mark solved the problem.