Our gospel today is remarkably annoying. As Pete just read to us, Jesus explained #everything# in private to his disciples. But that jerk who wrote our gospel decided to give us only the public parts. Given how much trouble the disciples tended to have understanding Jesus even after the super-secret private tutelage, what chance do we have to figure out what He was talking about? But let’s take a wild stab at it anyway and see what we can come up with.
On its surface, what does a story about someone mindlessly scattering seed, or a story about how big a plant a mustard seed grows into, have to do with the kingdom of God? Jesus recognized that sometimes it takes a bit of misdirection to get our minds around a difficult truth. 50 years ago, CS Lewis said that what we needed as Christians are new metaphors. We need new ways to get at the truth to pull us out of our complacency.
Surely, when Jesus began to talk about the kingdom of God, he could have given a dense theological treatise on the topic. But what good would that have done? Remember the disciples? The passage tells us Jesus explained his parables to them, yet the disciples of the gospels are at best a mixed bag. The first parable intentionally undermines the whole idea that we will be ok if we just have everything explained to us. The person sowing the seed doesn’t know how it grows. Knowledge is neither the prerequisite nor the solution to living in the kingdom of God.
Let’s use Mother Cathy as an example, for a moment. If Mother Cathy so chose, she could quiz everybody at the altar rail before administering communion. Oh you want to receive the bread, do you? Well explain first what it means when the Nicene Creed says that Jesus is light from light, true God from true God. You think that you get the wine just because you got the bread question right? Not so fast! How does the council of Chalcedon inform our liturgical practice today? She could administer the theological version of the old racist literacy tests that were designed to keep the undesirables from voting.
And that is what the insistence on purity of knowledge would do. It would separate us into an elite who knows, truly understands, the theological truths of the world. And then there would be the peons, the underclass, who know nothing. The medieval Roman church fell into this trap, in separating the clergy from the laity and fencing off the Eucharist from the common folk.
Jesus tells a parable like this to speak to people like me. I have always prided myself on being smart, on knowing lots of things. And there is nothing intrinsically wrong with knowing things, whether in the context of school or work or even church. But Jesus tells us that:
The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, #he does not know how#. The earth produces #of itself#, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come."
God brings about the kingdom, #despite# our lack of understanding. Our limited minds are not this end all impediment to the growth of the Kingdom. And sometimes, we need odd parables to be thrown at us in order to break us out of our normal mindsets, to make sure that we can walk #by faith# into areas that we don't completely understand.
To make this point a slightly different way, I want us to think about St. Barnabas the Apostle. His feast day just passed on June 11th. Barnabas, whose name literally means son of encouragement, has two things for which he is famous in the Bible. Barnabas is chosen by the church in Jerusalem to bring additional preaching help north to Antioch. When he gets asked, he casts about for a companion and finds this random fellow named Paul, who due to his unsavory past no one would talk to. Paul gets his missionary start because Barnabas trusted the work that God had done, even if he was unable to understand every jot and tittle of it in a propositional sense. So first off Barnabas is known for giving St. Paul his start because of the faith he had that God had changed Paul.
After Barnabas and Paul go wandering about on some missionary journeys, they are joined by a young man named Mark, whose name should be familiar given the source of our gospel today. Mark had trouble on the journeys, though, and he skipped out along the way. After the first big journey around the eastern Mediterranean was completed, Paul and Barnabas got ready for journey #2. Barnabas thought they should bring Mark along, but Paul would have none of it. Paul knew, and he had clear evidence, that Mark was not good enough to go on a missionary journey. So they split, Paul wandering off to Greece, and Barnabas wandering off with Mark in a different direction. Second, then, Barnabas is known for giving St. Mark a second chance because he had faith that God was continuing to work through someone who had previously failed.
Barnabas, it seems to me, felt the truth of our gospel deep down in his bones. He knew that God was able to produce fruit from week and feeble human soil. He knew that one failure was not enough to write a person off. He knew that at the right time God would enable a bountiful harvest, a harvest of justice, righteousness, and maybe in the end, knowledge as he walked by faith in spreading God's kingdom.
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