Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

“The reign of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…or like a mustard seed which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet, when it is sown, it grows up and becomes the greatest of shrubs…” Mark 4, 26-34

Frederick Buechner is a Presbyterian minister, who is now well into his 90s. He’s also a poet, novelist, essayist and theologian with more than thirty books to his name. He once remarked: “Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it’s only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvellous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the Church’s thing, the pastor’s thing, the lecturer’s thing. Heard as a joke. - high and unbidden and ringing with laughter - it can only be God’s thing” (Buechner, Frederick, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Comedy, Tragedy and Fairy Tale, Harper Collins 1977).

While Jesus was not a stand-up comedian, the parables he told are closer to jokes in their style than they are to serious sermonising. Jokes and cartoons often take a familiar characteristic of a person or thing and stretch or distort that characteristic so much that we laugh at it. Parables are a bit like jokes and cartoons in that they shake up our easily-made assumptions and sabotage comfortable views and ideas that we otherwise often fail to question. Parables are something more than moral tales dressed up as narrative prose. Moreover, their impact can easily be blunted when we try to explain them. If we fail to swallow them whole, we can end up subverting them, just as we can rob a joke or a cartoon of its humour when we set about explaining it. There is something abnormal or incongruous about a woman’s turning her house upside down as she searches for a ten-cent coin, or an elderly father’s running down the road to welcome home a wayward son who has wasted half the family fortune. I suggest that Jesus meant his parables to be taken whole and given room to stretch, challenge and disturb us. Their modern equivalent would surely be closer to comic strips like Insanity Streak and Non Sequitur than to a Sudoku puzzle.

Parables, by virtue of their very ordinary and yet unexpected images and through the linkages they make with our day-to-day experiences mess up our assumptions and jolt us into asking: “What exactly is Jesus getting at?” After all, he had become accustomed to having large crowds come to listen to him. What’s more, many of them would have been familiar with the proclamations of the prophet Ezekiel, who, at a time when the people of Israel were living in exile in Babylon, had given Israel a message of comfort and encouragement by predicting the nation’s future greatness: “I will take from the crest of the cedar…a tender shoot, and plant it on a high and lofty mountain…It shall put forth branches and bear fruit, and become a majestic cedar. Birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it, every winged thing in the shade of its boughs” (Ezekiel 17, 22-23). It’s not by coincidence that this is from today’s first reading. So, when Jesus addressed the crowd gathered around him, we can only guess at their anticipation when he started with: With what can we compare the reign of God, or what image will help to present it?” (Mark 4, 30) But surely their jaws would have dropped when he followed up immediately with: “It is like mustard seed which, when planted in the soil, is the smallest of all the earth’s seeds, yet once it is sown, springs up to become the largest of shrubs, with branches big enough for the birds of the sky to build nests in its shade” (Mark 4, 31-32). Surely, there must have been mutterings of “You’ve got to be joking!” and heads shaking in bewilderment: “Mustard, the greatest of all shrubs???” After all, mustard bushes grew across the length and breadth of Palestine, and were regarded as a noxious weed. No farmer in his right mind would have sown mustard seed in his fields.

But surely that’s the point. The growth of God’s kingdom is so unexpected and far-reaching that only God or someone close to God could dream it up. It will spread like wild-fire or, to mix the metaphors, like out-of-control mustard bushes. The joke is so outrageous that in Frederick Buechner’s words “it can only be God’s thing.”

And this is only one part of God’s joke for the world. It began with an unmarried mother from an obscure town of Nazareth giving birth to royalty in the equally obscure town of Bethlehem. And that royal child grew to be a leader, whose catch-cry was “service”, and who, for all his efforts, was executed as a criminal. And the biggest joke of all, that many of us still cannot comprehend, was the resurrection - God’s vindication of all that Jesus had said and done.

But let’s not forget the other parable which opens today’s gospel-reading: “This is how it is with the reign of God. A man scatters seed on the ground. He goes to bed and gets up day after day. Through it all, the seed sprouts and grows without his knowing how it happens. The soil produces of itself first the blade, then the ear, finally the ripe wheat in the ear” (Mark 4, 26-27).

This is a parable for all of us would-be messiahs, who set about with vigour our responsibilities of being disciples of Jesus. While our best efforts are not to be discounted, none of us can force anyone to grow in faith, none of us can claim credit for furthering the reign of God. To work for peace, harmony, reconciliation and compassion among and between the people of our world is a laudable undertaking, but achieving those things is ultimately out of our control. That’s the work of God, so let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that God is at our beck and call, that we can control God, even with the best of intentions.

What’s the message from all this, then? I suggest it’s a little like engaging with a literary text. Many of us have had the experience of dissecting the text of King Lear or Hamlet in our efforts to come to grips with the messages that Shakespeare intended to convey. But there is no better way of understanding King Lear or Hamlet than to engage with them as they are presented in a theatre. In the same way, parables will impact on us only when we let them wash over us, only when we open ourselves to experience them.

I leave it to you to decide whether the crowds or the disciples got the better deal and whether Mark himself fully understood Jesus’ use of parables. Perhaps he just thought that the disciples were just slow learners: “By means of many such parables Jesus taught them (the crowds) the message in a way they could understand. To them (the crowds) he spoke only by way of parable, while he kept explaining things privately to his disciples” (Mark 4, 33-34).