Luke 8 Bible study: How you hear

Favor's Mark 4 teaches the farmer's parable, and how in Jesus's explanation those sown on every kind of ground hear the word. In Luke the hearing goes on after the parable. Jesus ends it calling out, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" (8:8) (tap hear). After the lamp he says, "Be careful therefore how you hear" (8:18). Then "His mother and brothers came to him, and they could not come near him for the crowd" (8:19), and he answers, "My mother and my brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it" (8:21). Here is what almost everyone misses: his answer uses the words of his own explanation. "The seed is the word of God" (8:11) (tap word), and he names as his mother and brothers those who "hear the word of God and do it" (8:21). Mark tells of his mother and brothers before his farmer's parable (Mark 3:31-35; Mark 4:3-9), and Favor's Mark 3 sets the three Gospels' words for Jesus's answer side by side. Luke tells it after the lamp (8:16-18). Luke doesn't comment on where he tells it, and these notes don't either.

2 Chronicles 34:27→leads toLuke 8:15

When the king heard the words of the book, the LORD's word to him through Huldah was, "because your heart was tender, and you humbled yourself before God when you heard his words… I also have heard you" (34:27). Then he made a covenant "to keep his commandments, his testimonies, and his statutes with all his heart and with all his soul, to perform the words of the covenant that were written in this book" (34:31). Jesus, explaining his parable of the sower, said, "Those in the good ground, these are those who with an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it tightly, and produce fruit with perseverance" (Luke 8:15). Jesus doesn't name Josiah or cite 2 Chronicles 34, so setting his words beside it is a reading, resting on a shared subject, the heart of one who hears the word, not on a shared word (Luke is written in Greek, so no link between the two chapters' words is claimed). Some read the two together: Josiah heard the words of the book with a tender heart (34:27) and bound himself to do them with all his heart (34:31), the kind of hearing Jesus describes. Others read Jesus' words in their own setting, where "The seed is the word of God" (Luke 8:11) and those in the good ground go on to "produce fruit with perseverance" (Luke 8:15), and note that the LORD's promise to Josiah was about what his eyes would not see (34:28), not about fruit; they read 34:27 without looking from one to the other.

ἀκούωakouosay ak-OO-o

Strong's: "to hear (in various senses)". "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" (8:8). In 8:4-21 Luke's Greek has the verb nine times, in eight verses (8:8 twice, 8:10, 8:12, 8:13, 8:14, 8:15, 8:18, 8:21), and Luke has it 65 times (counted in RP2018, the Byzantine text the WEB translates). In the WEB it is hear, hearing and heard: "Be careful therefore how you hear" (8:18), and "these who hear the word of God and do it" (8:21). It comes once more in the chapter, when word comes from Jairus's house: "But Jesus hearing it, answered him" (8:50). Favor's Mark 4 studies it in Mark's telling of the parable.