My wife was laughing about Amazon listings for the item pictured here, or more specifically, for the seeds to grow black roses like the one in the photo. A handful of disappointed reviews made the thing even more ludicrous. No actual rose looks like the one in the picture, and it is next to impossible for a home gardener to produce a rose bush from a seed.
Yet as our Gospel text for this Sunday, Mark 4:26-34, suggests, there are plenty of seeds in the world which do produce remarkable results, perhaps even with little or no effort. We might be wise to doubt the seeming ease with which the seed is scattered in verse 26, the sower does nothing else in verse 27, a full crop grows in verse 28, and then a bountiful harvest is reaped in verse 29. The farmers I used to know in Nebraska would certainly tell you it’s never that simple.
Part of what Jesus is up to in the first of two small kingdom parables is countering what might have been a false impression created by another parable about seeds and farming in the first part of chapter 4. The B cycle lectionary skips over the longer “Parable of the Sower,” and leaves it to Matthew’s more elaborate treatment in year A of the lectionary. Instead, we read this little story which is unique to Mark. In fact, it’s the only parable in Mark which does not appear in any of the other Gospels.
In any case, the earlier parable of the sower might have left one with the impression that the arrival of the kingdom is founded mostly on human effort, even careful attention to the sort of “soil” in which one plants the word of the kingdom. But this “Parable of the Growing Seed” indicates that the “earth produces of itself,” “automatically,” as the actual Greek word suggests. Here is great comfort and encouragement toward patience for those of us who may be discouraged by lack of results from the efforts we put toward doing God’s work in the world.
Likewise for the much more familiar parable of the mustard seed in verses 30-32, which also appears in Matthew and Luke. Here the emphasis is not so much how the seed grows independently of human effort, but on great and perhaps unexpected results from a small beginning. Again, there is encouragement toward patience for those who do not yet see a hoped for arrival of significant changes in this world, while at the same time assuring us that such changes will appear.
The first parable says, in verse 27, that the one who planted the seed would “sleep and rise, night and day,” while the second parable, in verse 32, indicates that the mustard plant grows large enough that “birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” While we ought not take either parable to suggest that human inactivity is the sole proper way for us to relate to the kingdom of God, we can discern in both of them a comforting word about that kingdom being truly of God, that is, being the result primarily of His activity rather than ours.
More than once, I’ve wearily finished a Sunday worship time and sermon or perhaps a hospital visit or some other pastoral activity like a Confirmation class, feeling as if my efforts have fallen fall short and that nothing has really happened or changed. But every once in a while God grants a glimpse of how a seed has grown as an unexpected person tells me how a bit of the message blessed her or I years later see what was once a squirrely Confirmation student all grown up and engaged in meaningful ministry for the Lord. And I realize that it was all God’s doing and very little of my own.
Those little glimpses of the growth of the kingdom are sort of like the explanations of the parables Jesus gave His disciples, as described in verses 33 and 34. Much of the time things are unclear and baffling, but then the Lord comes along and shines a little light on it all. We’re not planting impossible rose bushes, but the grand trees of a kingdom which will one day cover the whole earth.