The Sprouting Seed (Proper 6 B)

The Sprouting Seed
Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6)
14th June 2009
Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
11:45 a.m. Choral Matins
CoE CW Daily Office Lectionary Year B Pentecost 2 Primary Service
Ezekiel 17:22-end; Psalm 92:1-4, 12-end; 2 Cor 5:6-10, 14-17; Mark 4:26-34
God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel includes two of Jesus’ parables—the parable of the Growing Seed and the Parable of the Mustard Plant. They both are intended as comparisons for “the kingship,” or “the reign of God.” In order to understand what they are about, what questions they are trying to answer, we need to look a little at the history of the times when Jesus lived.


Jesus lived at a time of world empire. He grew up in Galilee, a minor client state on the fringes of the Roman Empire. Rome had conquered, bought, and otherwise swallowed up all the world known to people living around the Mediterranean. But the Pax Romana, like every “world order” put in into place by force, was largely a creation of the state’s propaganda machine: the leader of a nation about to swallowed up by Rome, is famously reported to have said, “You crucify or enslave whole populations, burn their cities and leave smoldering ruins in their place, and then use the word “peace” to describe the burned-out desert you leave behind.” The state spin-doctors would say again and again that the Emperor was God’s son, and that the Empire was the order and peace intended by the Gods. Like our world today, this was a place where might seemed to make right, and where money and power seemed to count for everything.

Judas Maccabeus

One of the peoples thus subjugated by Rome was Jesus’ own, the Jews. Just a century and a half before, they had hoped dearly for deliverance from all their foes and the establishment of God’s just and right kingdom. Judas Maccabee and his army threw off the harsh oppression of the Greek Seleucid kings left behind by Alexander the Great. The Book of Daniel, written at that time, had predicted that the Maccabees and their state would grow and grow, like a rock from the mountains cut out without hands, until it would fill the whole world and smash all systems of oppression and wrong. But that effort had gone seriously wrong. The Maccabees themselves became tyrannical, their rule oppressive and harsh, and their religious establishment hopelessly corrupt. The Temple itself became as much a symbol of oppressive taxes and impossible rules as of God’s presence on earth. Members of the Temple establishment, called Sadducees during Jesus’ time, became quickly the quisling darlings of the Romans. What Daniel had hoped would be the kingdom of God had become just another petty and corrupt oligarchy with a compromised religion and horrendous rulers.

Some Jews fled the Maccabean establishment and went into the Judean wilderness, seeking to “prepare in the desert” a way for God’s true kingdom. They called themselves the “sons of Zadok” or the “sons of Light,” and their city at Khirbet Qumran at the north end of the dead Sea, “Damascus.” They advocated a separation of true believers from the rest of the world, whom they called “the sons of darkness,” and believed they would one day destroy them in a great war for God’s kingdom, together with the evil “Kittim,” or Romans. They are the ones who wrote and left what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jewish historian Josephus called them Essenes.

Others reacted to the collapse of political independence with the arrival of the Romans and to the clearly compromised credibility of the Temple authorities by calling for more and more rigorous study and application of the Law of Moses, and for greater and greater distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. We call these people the Pharisees, and it is from them that all modern Judaisms trace their teaching.

Others reacted to the political subjugation of the Jews by the Romans by calling for military rebellion. According to Josephus, a Galilean named Judas led a major revolt against Rome around A.D. 5 in reaction to a census by Roman Procurator in Syria, Quirinius, to increase taxes. The Romans crushed the revolt, and then crucified thousands of the defeated Jewish soldiers. A few surviving guerillas fought on as bandits and terrorists. They are called the Zealots, and were later to lead another revolt from Rome that would bring an end to the Temple, ancient Jerusalem, and most Jewish life in Palestine.

All of these groups in their different ways were trying to answer some basic questions that trouble us even today. What is the relation of Imperial power to the power of God? What is the kingdom’s position n the oppression of the poor? Why does evil seem to be in charge? Why do good people suffer? Where is God and why doesn’t he act? Is he asleep? Is he a monster who can’t be bothered? Is he weak or incompetent? What do we need to do to make God’s kingdom come? Is God’s kingdom just a matter of trying personally to do God’s will and feel good about ourselves? Or is it about social justice? Can it be said to exist at all while evil still rules in the world?

When Jesus first began to preach publicly, it caused quite a stir. People were excited. Here was a prophet from the backwards part of Palestine, Galilee, declaring that God was beginning to act to establish his kingdom. “God’s kingship has come near, and is in your midst.” He quoted Isaiah, saying the time had come to declare liberation to the captive, freedom to the prisoner, and sight to the blind. And when he began to heal people as part of his message that God’s kingdom had arrived, they really started to flock to see him and hear him. Would he overthrow the Romans? Would he thrown out the corrupt priests from the Temple? Or would he just cause a stir and get himself and his followers killed in the process? And then, of course, people started to ask him how the Kingdom of God could have come already when the rule of evil, and of the Evil Empire, was still all too evident. How could Jesus possibly mistake his pathetic little gatherings for sermons and healings with the overthrow of evil and the great and terrible day of judgment promised by the prophets?

Jesus told stories as a means of letting people know about what he thought about these questions. He wanted to challenge their beliefs and assumptions about God, God’s reign, and what its arrival means. That is why many of his parables begin with the words, “The kingdom of God (or, in Matthew, “of heaven”) is like…”


In the parable of the growing seed, he says the kingdom of God is like a seed—it sprouts and grows all on its own regardless of whether the person who planted it knows that it grows or understands why it grows. Jesus reminds his listeners that the seed is God’s kingdom when he ends the story by noting that the planter, seeing the grain is ripe, thrusts in his sickle to harvest the grain. “Harvest” is one of the images used in the Hebrew scriptures to describe the “great and terrible day of the Lord,” when God’s kingdom would put an end to the reign of evil.

Jesus says that God’s kingdom comes primarily through God’s acts, not ours.

God will ultimately set things right, and settle accounts, but that is not yet now, he says.

The kingdom, however, is already here, at work, he says. It is like a seed that sprouts and grows on its own, no matter whether see are aware of it, or understand how.

The kingdom won’t come through force of arms. The kingdom will not come merely through human acts. But it will come. It will come. Regardless of how bad things are, how much the evil triumph and the righteous suffer, how overwhelming the imperial power seems to be or how corrupt the religious establishment is, it will come. God actually is in charge, and God’s reign is here and now. And its full manifestation will come. Trusting in God means not worrying that it will, because it will.

The other parable we read this morning is the parable of the mustard plant. Jesus says the kingdom is like a mustard seed—it is one of the smallest of seeds, but produces a huge plant. This parable is about the disproportionality of the kingdom now and the kingdom in its full manifestation. Jesus elsewhere uses the parable of the leaven to make the same point: the small and apparently insignificant or difficult to notice kingdom we see now is tiny compared to what its results and end will be. It only takes a tiny bit of yeast to leaven dough that makes a whole kitchen full of bread. In the parable of the mustard plant, Jesus again makes sure his listener knows he is talking about God’s reign by making allusion to an image from the Hebrew Scriptures about the coming kingdom of God: the allegory of the cedar sprig and tree in Ezekiel that we also read today. In Ezekiel, a cedar representing God’s kingdom is so huge that all the birds of the air can find shelter in its branches.

So how do these stories connect to us?

People around Jesus had all sorts of ways to excuse God for not acting, or to try to force God to act, or to act in God’s stead. Jesus focuses on the core issue, the trustworthiness of God. That seed will sprout regardless of us, and will result in something so huge that the whole world can shelter in it.

We need to trust in God. We cannot let our impatience get in the way of this trust. We cannot let our laziness get in the way of this trust. We cannot let our pride and desire to control things and have them our way get in the way. We need to surrender to God, and know, in the words of the prayer, that he is doing for us more than we can ask or imagine. That doesn’t mean we are off the hook and don’t have to do anything. But it means the first thing we have to do is trust and realize it is God at work, not us. We have to let God change us and move us to do the works of his kingdom. But again, the seed sprouts and grows on its own. We simply need to let go and let God. We need to get our will and ego out of the way, and let God do his thing.

In the name of God, Amen.