Seed Grows of Itself

Mark 4: 26-34

 He said, “This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.”

He said, “To what shall we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it. Without parables he did not speak to them, but to his own disciples he explained everything in private.

Discussion Questions: 

1. How is your participation in the “The Kingdom of God” evolving as you grow in faith and trust?
2. In what ways have you “scattered seeds” in the Kingdom? Where have you benefitted from the seeds others may have planted in your life?
3. What barren ground is waiting to be seeded and planted with your life, gifts, passions, presence, and concerns?
4. In your faith experience, how are you doing with moving from a focus on outcomes and expectations, to simply continuing to sow seeds of faith?
   
   Meister Eckhart, a 14th century German monk, says this about the seeds we’ve been talking about: The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly, its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and a God seed into God.

Biblical Context

Mark 4: 26-34
Mary M. McGlone CSJ

Pelagius, a fifth-century monk who was accused of teaching that people didn’t need grace to be saved — must have considered this parable highly insulting to dignified “self-actualizers” like himself. (Those psychological terms weren’t part of his Latin vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t understand the attitude.) Problems with this teaching of Jesus neither started nor stopped with Pelagius and friends.

The problem with this parable is that it assaults our egoism, a bloated distorted sense of self-worth that closes our eyes to the fact that everything we have and are is a gift of God. According to the Italian Jesuit Scripture scholar Silvano Fausti, this parable reflects Jesus’ own understanding that while his message and ministry, even the very reign of God he preached, seemed to be headed to the tomb, he knew that God was at work in ways he did not understand. He had planted the seeds he had been given. The rest was up to his Father. According to Jesus, the growth of the reign of God is as imperceptible as the hidden development of a seed in the ground. Fausti says that belief in this truth is an expression of genuine monotheism, implying that when we stop thinking of ourselves as gods, we will trust that only God can bring about the kingdom. We may plant seeds but we must resist the temptation to think we know how to make them grow.

Jesus follows this parable with one about a mustard seed. Just when disciples might feel that nothing is happening, that they have fallen for the impossible dream, Jesus promises that God’s reign is not only mysterious and beyond human control, but as prodigious as a weed. The Hebrew Scriptures never talk about a mustard seed, which suggests that Jesus may have been reinterpreting something like the parable of today’s first reading. The reading from Ezekiel 17 compared the chosen people to a shoot taken from the greatest of foreign trees and replanted by God in Israel. Seeing the kingdom of God start as a mustard seed is a far humbler image. Nevertheless, the minuscule mustard seed’s growth is astounding or, as farmers would tell you, uncontrollable.

  Seeds and Weeds: What You See is Not All You Get

Reflection
By Fr. Michael K. Marsh

We live in a world that mostly believes what you see is what you get. We trust our eyes to reveal what is real and what is true. For most of us, I suspect, this is our default attitude and orientation to other people, our relationships, and the circumstances of our lives. This approach certainly has its benefits. It is easier, definitive, and more efficient. It is not, however, without problems. A what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude assumes that life is limited to physical and tangible realities. It keeps us skimming across the surface of life. It puts humanity at the center of life as the final interpreter and arbiter.

We tend to see what we want to see, what we have been taught or told to see, and what we expect to see. Just because we look at the same thing doesn’t necessarily mean we see the same thing. Three eye witnesses to an accident will most often tell three different stories of what they saw.

What we see is determined not so much by the thing seen but by how we see. I am convinced that a primary purpose of holy scripture and sacred doctrine is not just to tell us what to see but to teach us how to see. Paul reminds the Corinthians that “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). Samuel looked on Eliab and thought he was the Lord’s anointed, the next king after Saul. “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:6-7).

Too often human-seeing is outwardly focused and appearance based. God-seeing, however, is inwardly focused and heart based. This is not a rejection of outward and visible appearances but the recognition that our life and world is not limited to what we see. For every outward appearance we see there is a deeper inner reality.

We are always being invited into a deeper seeing. That’s what Jesus’ parables are about. They are the lens that aligns human-seeing with God-seeing. They give us a glimpse into God’s kingdom even as we look at the things of this world. Parables ask us to see in a different way. They rarely give answers. Instead they sharpen our focus and cultivate a deeper vision. Parables ask us to let go of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get world and trust that what we see is not all there is. There is always something more going on than what we see. That something more is the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God is already planted in creation. God is always at work in our lives like a seed scattered upon the earth. As a seed does its seed thing, so the kingdom does its kingdom thing. We may not understand it. Outward appearances may even suggest God is absent. It may look like nothing is happening. We sleep and rise. We wait. We trust. We hope. We pray. We go about the ordinary work of life. Within that ordinariness the life of God has already been planted in each one of us. One day it sprouts. It grows. The invisible becomes visible. The full harvest was always there hidden in the seeds. It may have been invisible but it was never absent. We now see what has always been.

Compared to the needs of the world and the circumstances of our lives the kingdom can often look small, insignificant, and inadequate like a mustard seed. Looks, however, can be deceiving. It is only an optical. The kingdom will take over.
In first century Palestine mustard was considered a weed. Jesus compares the kingdom with a weed. As weeds take over, so does the kingdom of God. You can refuse to plant it.

You can pull it up. You can cut it down. Regardless, it is there and it keeps coming back. No person or circumstance is ever Godforsaken.
The seeds, and weeds of life are everywhere. Don’t just look at what you see. Look at what is there. Look again if you need to. Look more deeply. Change how you see. Behind every seed, and weed is the faithfulness, promise, and power of God to change lives.

Reflection excerpt from Interrupting the Silence: Fr. Michael K Marsh used by permission