The kingdom of God is like this, Jesus declares: Someone scatters seed on the ground, and goes to bed and rises night and day, and meanwhile the seed sprouts and grows — how, this person does not know.
Jesus teaches us about the kingdom of God, but those of us who are looking for a timetable, a blueprint, or a constitution of the wondrous realm, won’t get our answers from him. Jesus tells us stories of shepherds and gardeners and bakers, stories with vineyards, trees and birds in them — parables that say so much and explain very little.
Who is this gardener who scatters seed on the ground, and then nothing is mentioned about watering or weeding or keeping the rabbits away? Are we to think of God as the sower? Or perhaps Jesus himself? Or may we be so bold as to identify ourselves with this “someone” who scatters seed on the ground? Maybe this isn’t so bold after all, since most of us wouldn’t think of God as sleeping and rising night and day, not knowing how it is that the seed sprouts and grows.
Perhaps we want to think of ourselves as the soil in which the seed of Jesus’ life and death takes root and flourishes into a harvest of life, and we don’t know how, but we sleep and rise night and day, confident that the harvest season will come in God’s own time. “Intimacy with Christ grows in us as certainly and as effortlessly as seeds grow,” wrote Wendy Farley. “We have so little to do with Christ’s nearness to us that we can just go to sleep. In fact, it might be better if we did sleep through the whole thing, snug and safe, resting like babies in our mothers’ arms.”[1]
Martin Luther clearly saw himself as a sower when he told his congregation in 1522, “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses on it. I did nothing; the Word did everything.”[2]
We can enter the parable identifying with the gardener, or the seed, or the soil, and each entry takes us into a different room of meaning. Once the seed is in the ground, the miracle happens, we don’t know how. The miracle happens within us and among us and beyond us. We receive and trust; we bear fruit and don’t know how. Sometimes we sow generously, by the handful, in the rhythm of our walk with Jesus; sometimes we plant just a single, precious seed, mindfully and carefully, trusting that there will be a harvest in God’s own time. We sow and go to bed without a worry.
As an undergraduate, Kent Keith wrote what he called The Paradoxical Commandments.[3]
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway. ...
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway. ...
Our faith, in a way, is a habit of joyful and hopeful anyway.
Some seeds get eaten by the birds.
Scatter them anyway.
Some seeds, you worry, may not get enough water or sunlight.
Scatter them anyway.
The world objects.
Be generous anyway. Be kind anyway. Be merciful anyway. Scatter the seed Jesus has sown: at harvest time the sowers will sing and dance.
Parables resist complete explanation; they aren’t locked treasure boxes that reveal their splendor only to those who find the proper key. No, they are living stories, at once familiar and unknown, conversation partners that surprise and confound us as often as they comfort and assure us on the way to the kingdom. They won’t sit still long enough so we can turn them into catchy memes or paradoxical commandments. And they subvert all the frameworks of thought that prohibit our hearing the message of the kingdom — hearing fully and truly what Jesus proclaims, and not just what we want to hear or have always heard. Parables don’t offer answers that settle things. They point us back, again and again, to the one who speaks the word to us with many such stories and who is himself for us the parable of God and of fullness of life with God.
“With what can we compare the kingdom of God,” Jesus asks us, “or what parable will we use for it?” He wants us to ponder with him what language, what images we might borrow to speak about the dominion of God. And he wanders the realms of nature and scripture, worlds teeming with mighty creatures like the lion, the stag and the eagle, the bull and the bear, creatures frequently adopted as symbols of human dominion, but they make no appearance in Jesus’ stories of God’s reign.
What language, what images might we borrow then? Nebuchadnezzar, king of mighty Babylon, had a dream, according to the book of Daniel:
Upon my bed this is what I saw; there was a tree at the center of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew great and strong, its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the ends of the whole earth. Its foliage was beautiful, its fruit abundant, and it provided food for all. The animals of the field found shade under it, the birds of the air nested in its branches, and from it all living beings were fed.[4]
When Jesus asks, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?” perhaps we imagine such a mighty tree, a tree whose branches extend to the ends of the earth; the tallest, the most magnificent tree of all, forever defining the center of the world; with its top in the heavens and its roots in the depths of the earth; with beautiful foliage and abundant fruit; with shelter and food and peace for all living beings.
The prophet Ezekiel dreamed in exile in Babylon of God planting a tender shoot on Israel’s mountainous highlands, a twig growing into a mighty cedar, with birds of every kind nesting in it and finding shelter in the shade of its boughs.[5] Throughout Israel’s history, any story that mentioned trees with birds in them was a story of hope that in the end God’s kingdom would prevail over Assyria, Babylonia, Rome or any other empire.
And that ancient tradition continues to this day. During the years of military rule in Uruguay, a teacher was thrown in prison for subversive activity. He hadn’t planned an assassination or conspired to overthrow the dictatorship; his crime was much more serious: he taught history and literature. He was fortunate, though, since he wasn’t just “disappeared” like so many others, and his 7-year-old daughter was allowed to come and visit him once a week.
On one of her first visits, she wanted to bring him a picture she had drawn the night before at the desk where he used to prepare his lessons: a tree with it’s top touching the clouds, and birds flying in the sky and perching on the branches. She brought it to prison, but the guards took it away from her. Birds were considered subversive, free as they are to fly across a sky without borders—they might give the people the wrong ideas.
A week later the little girl returned with another drawing. It was a beautiful tree, lush and tall, with strong branches, and the sun was smiling in the wide blue sky. The smiling sun had not yet been put on the index of banned images, and so the girl was able to give her dad the picture. “Thank you so much,” he said. “This is the most beautiful tree I have ever seen.” And pointing at a number of tiny dark dots among the leaves, he asked her, “Is it a cherry tree?”
“Shhh, Papa,” she whispered, “those are the eyes of the birds. They live in the tree, and when the guards aren’t watching, they fly!”
Trees with birds in them are symbols of hope, hope that in the end God’s reign will prevail over empires of fear and oppression. Jesus wants us to ponder with him what language, what images we might borrow to speak about the dominion of God, and I’m quite certain he loves the little girl’s picture with its fun, subversive twist of birds posing as cherries. His own parable includes a twist like that.
“The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed,” he says. There’s nothing mighty about mustard. It can grow into a shrub, maybe 8 or 9 feet high, about as tall as the typical Galilean house, but that’s it. The mustard shrub just won’t scale to palatial dimensions.
But what it lacks in imperial majesty, it makes up for with ubiquity. Mustard grows fast and just about anywhere, it tends to take over where it’s not wanted, and the birds love it.
When it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in the shade.
The kingdom of God is like this annual plant that perpetuates itself with tiny seeds. It doesn’t just sit there and simply get bigger and bigger with the years. The mustard shrub depends on renewed sowing and its perennial promise lies in the fruitfulness of the seed and the faithfulness of those who spread it. What this suggests to me is that God’s dominion is no divine empire, putting an end to earthly empires with overwhelming force, but rather an invasive reality, transforming the everyday with the seeds of divine compassion, righteousness, and truth. We carry the seeds of the kingdom in us, and we scatter them by bearing fruit, in freedom and obedience, reminding one another that we are, and are meant to live as, citizens of God’s dominion. We do and say and notice lots of small things in lots of places, things as common as mustard, and we trust that they’re all connected with each other, often in hidden ways like seed in the soil, but bound to be fully revealed.
With what can we compare the kingdom of God? It is like us, ordinary people, young and old, folk who listen intently to Jesus and go and scatter the tiniest of seeds on the ground. Trusting that God will provide the growth, we sleep and rise night and day, always looking forward to the harvest of life.
[1] Feasting, Year B, Volume 3, 142.
[2] Luther’s Works, Vol. 51: Sermons I., J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald, & H. T. Lehmann, Eds. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 77-78.
[3] Kent Keith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_M._Keith
[4] Daniel 4:10-12
[5] Ezekiel 17:22-24