Like the “Life in Community” illumination, this illumination was painted with techniques associated with the Eastern Church and its iconography. It illustrates Mark 4:3-9. “He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them, “Listen! A sower went out to sow.” (Mark 4:3)
Aidan Hart represents this passage with an icon in which Jesus is wearing ordinary Western work clothes: blue jeans and a sweatshirt. He is scattering the seeds into the text of the Gospel. At the bottom of the image we see representations of soil substrates such as we might find in a geology textbook: the far-left looks like limestone, the middle-left gravel. Donald Jackson and Sally Mae Joseph contributed the border decoration and calligraphy.
Susan Sink remarks, “We are also called to sow the seed, just as we are called to be receptive ground for the seed to grow in us.” (Art of the Saint John’s Bible, vol. 1, p. 64)