“To what shall we compare the kingdom of God?”
It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth.
“To what shall we compare the kingdom of God?”
It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth.
11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
June 10, 2018
Mark 4:26-34
In natural matters, we tend to think of things as developing gradually, evolving over a long period of time. We concentrate on the process by which things come to be. We don’t work in terms of cataclysmic transformations; rather, we expect gradualism, piecemeal progress. This is probably the opposite of what our Lord was thinking. To ancient Oriental minds the striking thing about the growth of a seed into a plant was not how gradual it was. On the contrast, what would strike them would be what a contrast there was, and how total this transformation was. A seed is nothing like a full-grown plant. Seeds can fall out of your pocket on the way to the field, but mustard trees can’t. Birds can nestle in the branches of mustard trees but not by landing on a seed. We have a kind-of evolutionist way of thinking that dulls our sense of how stupendous this contrast really is. Explaining the process does not explain away the contrast between the start, the insignificant looking dot, and the finish, the busy luxuriant plant. And this, our Lord is saying, is what God’s relations with us are like: God takes what is tiny and insignificant and transforms it into something great and magnificent. Are you ready for that?
Fr. Tom Boyer