Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Scripture for the Day
Mark 4:30-34
My wife, Jenelle, and I are notorious plant killers. It’s not without many attempts, but we struggle to keep plants alive. They can be indoor or outdoor plants. Sturdy or delicate. Native or non-native. It’s a struggle. We’ve emptied an embarrassing number of cilantro plants and other herbs into the garbage can. To be fair, we can keep some plants alive. The hostas in our front yard could survive a nuclear winter. In our living room, Jenelle has successfully nurtured a cutting from a Monstera Deliciosa. Affectionately known as “Pratty” after the actor Chris Pratt, this cutting was given to us by our friend, Jake, who bought the original plant from the set of Jurassic World. We’re basically living with a movie star. Thanks to Jenelle’s attentive watering and some luck, Pratty is doing well. Other plants in our house struggle for survival, a situation made worse by my sole responsibility for caring for them while Jenelle and our kids are away visiting family in the northwest.
But you know what grows and sustains plants like nothing else? The earth. We may not all like what rises from our Georgia soil, but it’s impossible to deny its productivity: azaleas and magnolias, towering cedars and flowering fruit trees, kudzu and poison ivy, wildflowers, and even persevering moss. The earth nurtures a great diversity of vegetation, and the seasons allow us to witness this miracle of growth year after year.
The parable this morning from Mark 4:30–32, along with the parable immediately before it (Mark 4:26–29), capitalizes on the earth’s productivity. With all respect to our dear Mustard Seed Bookstore, Jesus’s parable isn’t only about the mustard seed but also about the earth and its incubation of new life.
Jesus begins his parable with the question, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?” And Jesus answers his own question. It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. It’s like a mustard seed that, when sown upon the earth, grows up and becomes the largest of all the garden plants. It’s like a mustard seed, so tiny that it would hardly suffice as a chipmunk’s snack, becoming the source of safety and procreation for the birds of the air. It’s like a negligible mustard seed that grows into a site of shade and sustenance. And the seed becomes all of these things because it is first sown upon the earth, thrown perhaps without any assurance of what it might become into the embracing womb of the earth.
What does this teach us about the Kingdom of God? That the Kingdom takes root in small, inauspicious things and grows into something great. That seemingly insignificant words or deeds or people are transformed into something entirely different, into something that provides rest and re-creation and life for others. Certainly.
But what of the earth? What of the sowing? I read this text in light of the ongoing crisis caused by the global pandemic we are all experiencing. I read it with stories of layoffs and final goodbyes prevented by personal protective equipment and hospital policies. I read it in light of the loss of certainty, of cherished forms of connection and community. And because of what Paul says in 1 Cor 15, I read it in light of death and the hope of resurrection. In that chapter, Paul also talks about seeds and the sowing of seeds upon the earth. For Paul, this is an adequate metaphor for describing the resurrection body: one body is sown and buried in the earth, and yet another body is raised.
Friends, there is no denying the reality of death in this season of life, whether the literal death of loved ones and friends or the figurative death of ways of life and expectations. But the earth teaches us what God can do with things sown upon it. Whether it takes months or years or the full scope of history, God will surely bring new things to life. Like the sowing in Jesus’s parable, there is no assurance of exactly what will become of these seeds sown to the earth, no guarantee what form they will take when they rise again. But they will rise. Seeds tossed to the earth will become something new. We have only to wait and watch for the new things to come.
