Dear Jesus, We know you like your stories. Sometimes, they’re pretty good and relatable like about lost sons  and people who help guys that get mugged on the roadside.  Books and movies get made out of those. But really, seed stories? Where could we possibly go with that? It’s not like most of us live in the kind of agrarian world you did. Can’t help but say this gets boring. Might have to pass on this one.

Move on by, if you have to. But be forewarned: Jesus knows your type. Just before these stories that you say make you yawn, he said, “To those who are open to my teaching, more understanding will be given. But to those who are not listening, even what they have will be taken away from them.” (Mark 4:25)

Jesus often did not explain what he gave people. He left it to them to figure it out. So when people went home or gathered where people do, they could explore it together or let it settle in their thoughts as they drifted off to sleep. Smart it was. He made them chew on what he had to say. That way, it stayed with them longer and became a part of them.

Granted, these stories seem a little too simplistic. You don’t have to be a farmhand to know that seeds get planted and then later harvested. And there are some that don’t get planted but just grow on their own, spreading out. Yet, if you look closely, you may realize there’s some satire going on, too. Not the kind that makes you laugh, but the kind that pulls two absurdly different things together and leaves you to sit in the irony of how they really aren’t that different after all.

Farm to Table

You’re right. Today’s households don’t grow and make everything they consume. That day is gone. But there is much more awareness and the desire to know the source of what people consume. From that perspective came the Farm to Table movement whereby restaurants serve local, fresh, even organics goods lessening the distance, time, and nutrient breakdown of food. Jesus could likely have utilized this comparison if he lived today.

But his story uses this. Several of his little parables are prefaced with, “The Kingdom of God is like…” This one is short. Farmer plants. Farmer goes about some other business. Farmer returns when the plant has grown, and the produce is ripe for harvest. So what’s (deep, loud, God-sized voice here) The Kingdom of God got to do with some hick in the field?

Some, but not a whole lot. The guy does his job, and hopefully he’ll get some of that food on his table, that’s all. But in between is where the real work happens. Think of it as what happens between the farm and the table. The farmer has little to nothing to do with how the seed grows. Yet, there is mystery that happens. Analyze it all you want about how things germinate or the photosynthesis process, but you’ve got to admit, it’s cool how it happens without even looking. When the seed has fulfilled its purpose, people are fed.

Need a connection? The Kingdom of God takes hold of how the simple, sometimes seemingly unimportant actions of God’s love for neighbor happens, and in a dynamic but inevitable manner something big, transformative, provisional is accomplished. A life of faith often has to just wait through a season or two or several before results are realized. Yet, in that seasonal waiting is where grace, the work of God in love, is worked out. Without it, there is no harvest to reap.

Invasive Weeds

Parable #2 gives a similar but slightly tweaked perspective. Again, there are seeds, but specifically Jesus names the mustard seed. It’s one of the smallest seeds, tiny; when it falls on soil it can get lost in the dirt. But it’s also mighty, like very mighty, like invasive. Interestingly, this Kingdom of God seed-analogy is not planted. Invasive weeds spread on their own and have the ability to take over along roadsides, fields, places unexpected and maybe even unwanted. All that, plus it’s not easily eradicated.

So it is with God’s presence, purpose, grace-filled power. It’s not detectible all the time when it first takes root but expect it to bring about that which makes its presence known. Like a shrub that provides shelter for birds, it’s a place to rest and restore in the waiting. Eventually, its growth has the ability to alter the landscape of life, the hope for change in the world that might not seem possible unless that which has the potential of impact and transformation comes into persons’ lives.

Seedy Satire

Simple stories Jesus tells but also at a second glance imperceptibly dangerous. Implicit in satire is critical upending of how the world works, enforces stability, the-way-its-always-been-done. The seedy Kingdom of God does not operate under the prescribed processes of the culture. Mysterious is its mode of operation. Growth of the heart and soul takes place in a reversal of the mind and perspective. Established boundaries and systems are pushed and rearranged if not outright eliminated. God creates an alternative to how things get done, relationships are formed, what the future will bring. Miraculously, it begins with a seed.

Jesus reminds those who open to his teaching that the Kingdom of God will not be buried forever. No one better than he would know that what’s planted, buried, put in the ground won’t stay there forever. That greater understanding would be given to those who listen, wait in hope, and watch what the seed of his life will do.

Mark 4: 26-34



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Weedy Wheat

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