Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Mark 4:26-34
Summary: Jesus frequently told stories — parables — set in rural settings. One common theme was that the kingdom of God was some type of seed. We should take this teaching to heart and view our lives as planting seeds of hope and peace — we won’t always see them grow, but we’re still called to plant.
Greetings all, good to be with you all this morning! Since our last time together was at the retreat, I was a bit shocked to realize that it’s actually been six weeks since we were here at the church for a service.
This morning we have two fun little parables to work with. The second one, the parable of the mustard seed, is one of the most well known parables in the whole new testament — it’s a moving image of the small seeds we plant as Christians growing into large and impactful plants.
The first parable, however, is one that is a bit mystifying — unlike many other parables, we’re not given any explicit explanation from Jesus to his disciples about its meaning, and for a while this week I was really stumped trying to understand it. Tim Geddert, in his commentary on Mark for the Believers Bible Commentary series, has these questions to ask about this parable:
This “parable explicitly claims to be an illustration of the nature of the kingdom of God. What is not explained is what aspect of the farmer’s activity [or inactivity], and/or aspect of the seed’s and plant’s progress, is to be compared with the kingdom. Is the focus on the patience of the farmer during the time of growth? Is it that the plants, the kingdom, grows independent of human effort? Is it that the seed grows irresistibly once it is sown? Is it that the plant must go through different stages before the harvest can come? Is it about the imminence of the final judgment of God? Is the parable a call for patience? trust? discernment? preparation?”
Regretfully, Geddert goes on to not answer any of these questions — so much for help from that bible commentary!
But I think multiple interpretations and messages in parables is part of what makes them so genius and exciting as teaching tools — here we are some 2,000 years after Jesus still trying to fully understand what his kingdom means for us today, and what this story has to do with it.
This morning, we’ll spend a good bit of time with this parable and the parable of the mustard seed, but we’ll start by taking a step back and thinking about the context of these parables and Jesus’ ministry in the first part of Mark. Then we’ll take a closer look at these parable, and then we’ll close by thinking about how we should apply these them, both as individuals and as a church.
So, to start, let’s think a bit more about Jesus’s teaching methods and the context we hear these stories in, particularly the ‘genre’ of parable.
Jesus often chose to teach in parables, and these have proved to be a genius way of getting people to interact with and internalize Jesus’s message over two millennia.
Of course, though, he didn’t invent this storytelling format. It isn’t the most common in the west today, but many Rabbis in Jesus day taught in parables, too — as Jesus often did, he didn’t reinvent the wheel and completely cast off the Jewish tradition, but rather opened the door of Yahweh worship to all, including gentiles; Jesus came not to destroy the law or tradition, but to fulfill it — fulfill and communicate God’s desire to bless all humanity, and storytelling is one of those human characteristics valued in all cultures.
Another thing we need to remember about parables is that parables are kind of the ultimate contextualization tool — Jesus’s parables are full of metaphors of farming and rural life, because that is whom he was preaching too; we can get too bogged down in the details if we are unwilling to tell stories that connect with people we’re interacting with. Now, we’ll spend plenty of time staying in the agricultural metaphors today, but we can also take some liberties of trying to re-tell parables in our context.
It might be a more hyper-capitalist an example than I’d like, but an extremely brief retelling of the parable of the farmer here in our context might be something like this: “the kingdom of God is like young man who has saved a little money, and decides to divide his money up and invest it in ten different businesses that his friends are starting; then, whether he pays attention or not, those investments grow if God has willed them to grow, and they grow without the investor doing anything — but when the man needs to retire, he’ll come and get his investment back and it will have grown to a huge extent.”
So, pretty much just as mystifying as Mark’s version, right? But maybe it makes some clearer points in our context about the slow growth that God prefers — we aren’t investing in a ponzi scheme here that promises to double our investment in a week; the kingdom is like an index fund that is slowly growing for the long-term good of all.
Anyhow, let’s get back to the actual bible and not my hasty attempt to contextualize it! Let’s return to thinking about the Parable genre.
Another thing we should remember about parables, and this is particularly true of the way Mark frames them, is that they seem to be intended to have an inside and an outside — Jesus’ states in this chapter that there will be people who understand the parable and people who don’t; Jesus’ favored insiders understand the message of the parables, he often explains them to them, while those outside the kingdom don’t understand.
Jesus’s quotes Isaiah and makes this explicit, saying that those on the outside may be “ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” It seems like Jesus is telling stories intentionally preventing some people from seeking forgiveness — How does this reconcile with our forgiving God?
Here, we have to remember the context where Jesus is preaching — Jesus is ministering in a militarily occupied territory, where he is preaching to the dispossessed, the unemployed, the people cut out from the social systems of the day. Those who “get” the messages that Jesus are preaching are the rural poor who must rely on one another and God to survive, those who can’t afford medical care and have come to Jesus to have their ailments healed. The ones who don’t understand are the people already in places of power, who live by their own understanding and wealth, not by the grace of God, who sends the rain and makes the seeds grow.
Speaking of seeds again, as I already mentioned, it is no accident seeds and growing things are such strong metaphors in scripture — I want to read a section of 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 3:4-11 for you all, for an example of seeds being important outside of the gospels.
“You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men [and women]? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men? What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe–as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building…For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
So, why read this long passage? Because really, all we can do as Christians is plant seeds — even Paul the apostle freely admits and admonishes other church leaders to remember that all they are doing is planting seeds that it is up to God to grow. As Christians today, we do not create the seeds of good news, of the fruit in people lives: God has done and is doing that. Pastors and leaders who take credit from God are missing Jesus’s and Paul’s point — we should never forget that we are in God’s hands, and we are merely his instruments. Plus, we should remember we almost never get to see the full fruit of the seeds we plant — so much happens outside our view as any one individual. We have to choose to invest in people and worthwhile causes even when we may not see how those seeds will grow.
Three final thoughts on context before we talk more about these two parables — the parables fall in a whole chapter, actually Mark’s only chapter, of Jesus’s parables; we get many more parables in both Matthew and Luke than we do in Mark. One confusing thing I’ll reference is the fact Jesus told, earlier in the chapter, the parable of the sower, with the seeds and various soils —a parable we likely know much better than this parable of the unaware farmer. I’ll reference back to that parable a few times going forward, mostly contrasting it with the two parables we are working with. We keep this in mind because these parables all fit together; each one doesn’t explain everything.
Secondly, we should remember that we get this body of teaching here in Mark four only after Jesus has gone throughout the community healing — we Christians shine best when we put our teaching after our good deeds; while we should preach and share why we serve God and do good deeds, we should follow Jesus example of doing good deeds first — always reaching out first with the hand of healing and love.
Final piece of context — we should remember that Mark’s gospel is full of messages of hiddenness — but also the promise that all will eventually be healed, and all will be made right. We see this theme in both these parables.
So, let’s turn back to our two parables for today — the parable of the mustard seed and of the parable of the growing seed.
First off, we can ask: what ties these two parables together?
Both parables make the case that growing the kingdom isn’t up to us — It’s up to God. Both parables also make the case that faith, and acts of faithfulness, tend to be small, potentially even barely visible, like the mustard seed — but that these seeds that we, and God, plant, will grow until they bear the harvest God has prepared.
The idea that God is love is small — but its implications are profound and grow into life-changing, world changing, forces for good.
Let’s start by thinking a bit more about the mustard seed first, then we’ll come back to the farmer.
We might miss some of the meaning of the mustard seed here, partially because it’s a parable we know well — as is often the case when we think we fully understand scriptures, we might miss some low-hanging fruit of interpretation due to our cultural context, and the assumption that we understand it fully.
The Jewish annotated new testament points out that empires of the ancient near east often used trees and plants as symbols of their power — perhaps the way we are familiar with eagles or lions as symbols of power. But these ancient empires, from Babylon to Syria, often talked about mighty trees, like Ceders, as their images of power in the world, symbols of their kingdom — mighty cedars are referenced often in the Bible, and we actually have references to them in both our call to worship from Psalms and our benediction from Ezekiel today. Jesus is contrasting here — Jesus is saying his kingdom, rather than being like the cedar, will be like the mustard tree; while truly, yes, growing from a very small of seed, never gets huge or majestic the way a cedar does.
To quote from the Jewish annotated new testament: “Mustard plants [in the Middle East] are invasive shrubs that grow to be a few feet high. Like other parables, this one is satirical and humorous, and highly suggestive: the kingdom [of God] is like a scrubby, invasive bush! The parable suggests that the kingdom arises from a very small beginning and nevertheless grows miraculously.”
This is an interpretation of this parable I really like and have never encountered before and fits so well with the message of Jesus — that God’s kingdom, rather than establishing some new, mighty, cedar-like empire, is going to grow tenaciously like weeds into thousands upon thousands of impossible to kill, but also useful plants: plants that give food and shelter both to birds and to humans, explicitly in contrast to the empires of the world that put glory over the health of the land and of people.
This, of course, fits perfectly with the message of the cross as well — we may not succeed by worldly standards, but the kingdom succeedes through self sacrifice and God working in us.
Let’s turn now to the parable of the growing seeds.
As I said earlier, this is one of the less explicit of Jesus’ parables.
The main takeaway, I think, is that the seeds of peace, justice, and faithfulness that God plants, and that we plant, are always growing regardless of if we pay attention — this is a good thing. This parable reminds us that God is clearly at work in the world even when we don’t see it — God has planted his seeds, his spirit, his ruach, in all of humanity — of course God’s kingdom is growing far beyond what we see.
Anabaptist biblical scholar Ched Myers, in his commentary on Mark called ‘Binding the Strong Man,’ says that the message of this parable is this: “the vocation of the disciple and reader lies not in trying to provoke the harvest, for that happens “of itself”, but rather in tending to the “sowing of good seeds.” We need to remember that Jesus’ listeners were contemplating armed rebellion — a veritable ‘harvest’ against the unjust people in society; but Jesus rejects this for them, and for us — instead, we are to focus on sowing good seeds and trusting that God’s judgment will come to pass, but that God will bring this about, not us.
Another way to approach this parable is to put ourselves in different places in the story. Whenever we read parables, we should try and put ourselves — and God — in multiple different places to understand all possible dimensions of its message.
So, as with the parable of the sower, we, and our lives, might be the seeds growing into plants — growing wherever God has placed us. If we are the seeds, though we know even less about the harvest than the somewhat inactive farmer — rather, all we must do is live faithfully and grow as much as we can, trusting that God knows what timing is best for us. We can live faithfully in the moment, growing and trusting in God.
But we can also read this parable with ourselves like the farmer — often we are the people planting seeds and waiting patiently to see if they grow.
So — as I tend to ask around this point in my sermons, so what? What does any of this mean for how we should live today? What is the application we should take away from these two parables?
I think the main message of these parables — that we are called to plant small seeds of faithfulness and love and trust God to grow them — is actually extremely applicable to how we live our lives. In the words of Mother Theresa, we are all called to do small things with great love.
I agree, but this leads to a question — if we are to focus on small seeds, do we ignore the big concerns — the empires, the wars, the governments that can do far more than we ever can as an individual or church? I believe that, while we shouldn’t completely ignore the power centers of society — and we call them to faithfulness — we can become so focused on them that we forget to plant seeds in the here and now in our communities that God will grow, even if they sometimes feel small and insignificant now.
This image of planting seeds of hope in the face of huge obstacles that make us question if our efforts are worth it, is one that was very central to me during my time with Mennonite Central Committee in Vietnam.
There were plenty of weeks, when living there, that I wondered if I was really doing anything significant — if my presence there was really doing much good for the great Christian project of reconciliation and peace between God’s people.
But there were plenty of times when small interactions I think did plant significant seeds of peace. One memory that has really stuck with me was during my first Tet, or Vietnamese new year celebration — as a sidebar, Vietnamese new year is basically the same holiday as Chinese or Lunar New Year, even if Vietnamese people will insist it’s different, and it’s like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years combined, by far the biggest holiday of the year. As is traditional during the days around Tet, most people go back to their quê, or hometown, such that Hanoi’s population drops from it’s normal 8 million down to around 3 million. My first year in Vietnam I went with my host family back to the village where my host father was raised. When people are in their home village, life slows down — for nearly 10 days, work is forgotten, family and friends are together, and days are spent eating, drinking, and visiting neighbors. Even though the village is only about an hour and a half from Hanoi, it’s a totally different context — it’s a heavily Catholic village where everyone knows everyone, where nearly everyone farms for a living, and where I was the only westerner, very different from the urban and developed Hanoi.
The particular story I want to share, though, centers on the activity of visiting neighbors houses. As the second westerner to have visited this village in living memory — the first being the previous MCC volunteer who lived with my host family — I was clearly a big topic of conversation, and as we walked through the village we were invited in for food at nearly every house we passed.
Once, while we were visiting a family that I knew nothing about, a younger guy, probably in his early twenties, asked me what country I was from, and I said ‘America.’ Foolishly, I asked, ‘do you like the United States?’ Now, he got really embarrassed, and blushed, and shook his head; communicating this honestly was clearly an act of courage, potentially making him a bad host.
Now, I could have cut and run — I could have gotten embarrassed myself, or just let the moment slip away; instead, I’m glad I chose to say something along the lines of, in my then fairly rudimentary Vietnamese, ‘There’s a lot of times I don’t like the US either. I’m so sorry about the war here.’ Then conversation moved on, and we went on to have a great time eating and celebrating.
Now, why do I share this story? Because I think it’s small interactions like these — seeds, if you will — where we build bridges across cultures, across deep woundings of war and hatred, that can grow, with God’s blessing, and change the world.
This is one reason, though it may seem small, I’ve been glad to participate in a few Mennonite Action events calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and in our support of Afghan and Ukrainian families as a church. There are times when these efforts seem small in the face of the needs of these countries and families — and I absolutely also support systemic solutions to these problems, too — but the small things we do for the sake of peace matter, both to God, to our neighbor, and to ourselves.
Another thought on Gaza — on one hand, I’m incredibly down that after many months of atrocities and of peaceful protests here in the states, it seems the asymmetric war continues with no end in sight, with the US continuing to supply weapons dropped on a packed enclave where the population is majority children. In the face of violence and hatred on the scale we see in the Middle East, what do small protests do?
One thing that’s kept me invested and hopeful is the legacy that protests against the Vietnam war had for Vietnamese people — people in Vietnam remembered and frequently named to me how important it was to them to know that many average Americans opposed the actions of our government at that time; in the same way today, protests demonstrating against violence and calling for peace in the Middle East are planting seeds of peace between the US and Palestinians, which I deeply pray will one day grow into real trees of peace and stability for Palestinians and Israelis alike.
But it’s not just big international issues in which we live to sow seeds — we also need to remember we can sow seeds of peace in the course of our daily lives, too — the way we interact with students and co-workers, with patients and friends, with our parents and children, these, too, are seeds of peace and the good news, that God loves us and is with us, that grow the kingdom which Jesus was so insistent on saying is among us. We may never understand or know how the seeds we plant grow, and the harvest isn’t up to us — it’s up to God. What we can do now is plant and grow where God would have us plant and grow, by telling the stories Jesus’s told us, of hope in the midst of fear, and love in the place of hatred.
As we go today, may we go forward not looking to change the world overnight, but instead patiently and hopefully planting seeds — growing families and communities of grace, joy, and peace — may God grow these seeds as he sees fit. Amen.
