God’s Kingdom: Mysterious Growth
If you’ve been around me for any length of time when it comes to teaching God’s word, I think we all have favorite parts of the Bible. I think we all have sections that we love. And the Gospel of Mark is one of my favorites. It really is. The gospel of Mark is shorter than the other gospels. It is action packed. It’s not a lot of talking. It is full of all kinds of miracles and stories of Jesus moving and moving quickly.
The word immediately in the Gospel of Mark gets used 42 times, that’s eight times more often than any other book in the Bible. It’s a book that is on the move, and it’s a book that’s a little odd in places. So scholars have long theorized that the gospels of Matthew and Luke borrowed much of their material from Mark. We know that those three gospels tell the story of Jesus in the same way and tell a lot of the same stories of Jesus. But the Gospel of Mark seems to have been kind of the original document, the original gospel, as it were, that was at least written. 96% of the Gospel of Mark can be found in the Gospels of Matthew or Luke – it’s almost all there. In fact, there are only three stories in the entire gospel of Mark that are unique just to mark. You can only find them in the gospel of Mark, and all three are super weird. They’re oddballs.
The first parable in our scripture reading today is one of those three stories. It’s a story of a man who goes out to sow seed, and the text says that he rises day and night, but he has no idea how this seed springs forth. He throws this dead old seed in the ground, and before you know it, there’s a harvest. And so then he comes out to put the sickle to the harvest, to gather in all of the produce he has created. It’s an interesting parable, because we think that the scriptures were supposed to be read, at least these parables were supposed to be read what we call allegorically, which means that every part of the parable relates to something in the real world. But here’s what’s fascinating about the parable we have, because the text says that a man sows seed, so who would we think that that man is? Yes, but the text says he rises. He goes to bed at night, rises in the morning, and he has no idea how the seed grows. Does that sound like God to you?
No, that’s not how God works at all. God knows. Right. Because the point of the parable is not about so much the person sowing the seed as it is about what grows from that seed. The people in the first century had no idea how seeds grow into plants. Their idea, honest to goodness, was I take this dead, tiny little thing, I put it in the ground, and I have no idea what happens next. But that thing becomes food. They knew they were completely dependent upon forces so much bigger than them. The rains, the sun, whether not too extreme, but good enough to help nurture and thrive, make that thing thrive. That farmer throws seed down, he has no idea how it grows.
This is a weird parable for Jesus to tell. He says, that crop, that growth, that seed growing into that new plant, that thing from death into new life is just like what it looks like to live in God’s kingdom. This is what it looks like to live amongst God’s people. This is what it looks like. Looks like to be a part of God’s movement in the world. It’s mysterious. It’s unknown. But guess what? Behind the scenes moving unbeknownst to you or me, God is always at work and God is always present.