NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 11 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time. We've made a bit of a jump since last time. You remember last time we had Jesus in a house, a home, treating those around him as his sisters and mothers and brothers, and thereby giving a response to what the work of the Spirit looked like in bringing in a new and pure, cleansed people. Then he goes out to teach beside a lake. A huge crowd gathers, so he gets on a boat and he teaches parables from, as it were, a floating pulpit. And it's indicated that many of those present don't understand his parables, so he takes the disciples aside and explains the parables to them. And so in chapter 4 we have several explained parables, and he's explaining parables to the disciples. Today's two parables are both part of those — or at least, as it appears, not spoken to the general public but spoken to the disciples. In other words, these are instructions to preachers about what they're preaching. And I think that that's a point worth remembering: they're not general; they are for people whose job is the Word. Having said that, as so often we're reminded of the Lord's words — which don't appear in today's Gospel but in the passage just before it — that he told those outside everything comes in parables, "in order that they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed listen but not understand, so they may not turn again and be forgiven." This is a quote from Isaiah, indicating God making something known which is also capable of producing confusion in the hearts of those listening. It's also capable of being understood the wrong way. And that's, if you like, the first lesson for a preacher like me: to what extent am I simply one of those who thinks I know but don't, thinks I'm passing on something good but I'm not? And there is, if you like, I think, a very necessary sense of awe before the Word, lest we be mishandling it. So let's have a look at these two parables in that light. So he says, first of all: "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow — he does not know how. The earth produces of itself: first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle" — actually, "at once he sends the sickle, because the harvest has come." Who is the sower? He says, "as if someone would scatter seed on the ground." At first reading, I think, well, the sower is clearly God, the seed is the word, he sends it out and it produces fruit, and then the harvest comes. And so he sends in the angels with a sickle to conduct the harvest, and there are other places in Mark's Gospel where sending the sickle and sending the angels for the harvest are referred to. But here it's rather odd that God should be the one who's doing that, because the kingdom of God is as this one who would scatter seeds, so there's rather a careless quality, which is indeed how seed is scattered when sowing. But the passages in the Hebrew Scripture to which this refers — for instance Isaiah 55 — suggest something quite different. There is something very deliberate about everything that God does. There's nothing casual about it. "For the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth, it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." And in fact we actually get the same idea in our first reading for today from Ezekiel, where at the very end, the very last line, "I the Lord have spoken and I will do it." There's this sense that the Lord's word, the creative word, is deliberate and forming. In other words, God doesn't only make things happen, but whenever God says anything, that saying is part of the making it happen. If you like, there's not dumb creation and added words. God is a creator and speaker, so that both the thing and its communicability — its intelligibility — is part of the same process. This is how we know that God is at work. So it seems rather odd that you have someone who scatters seeds and then sleeps and rises night and day, so goes about his or her daily business. And the seed which sprouts and grows, he does not know how, it says. Well, if you're God, of course you know how — you're the one behind the whole path. The earth produces of itself, and the Greek word is automatē, from which we get "automatically." First the stalk, then the head, and the full grain in the head. In other words, something becomes visible. But when the grain is ripe, at once — and here is the sower again, the scatterer, the one who scattered — at once he goes in with the sickle, he sends the sickle, because the harvest has come. In other words, he may sow fairly randomly, but as the fruit becomes clearer, so he knows, realizes what's going on, and what is worth collecting and what is not. So I wonder whether this isn't more directed to preachers than an allegory about God. It presupposes the allegory about God, which is that God knows exactly what he's doing. He is the one who produces the seed. We may think we're scattering it, and indeed a random preacher like I is well aware that I'm scattering seed, and we don't know how it grows — I certainly don't — and yet we can sense harvest, we can sense things growing. I, as a preacher, have tried to preach the gospel of grace amongst gay people, and that's involved encouraging first-person conscience and integrity amongst gay people, which is something which has been officially disapproved of by a church authority and people who we would regard as religious leaders. So I've been trying to do something that may not be good. But if any of the words that I have been scattering are part of what God accomplishes, then there will be growth and there will be a harvest. Now you'll say: yes, I'm part of this, I'm gathering something here with you instead of merely scattering. Something like that. Anyhow, I leave that open to you. Let's now turn to the mustard seed, which is rather fun, because Jesus here says: "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?" So actually, rather gloriously, he has a slightly over-the-top approach to this one. It's as though he's giving a rhetoric of "this is so grandiose that I can't think of ways to talk about it." There's an element, I think, of deliberate bathos in what we're about to get. It's like a mustard seed — so having started off with "oh, it's so, so, so impressive," it's like a mustard seed, straight down to something very, very small. And please notice that there's no reference to a mustard seed in the Hebrew Scripture; it only appears in the New Testament, in the parallel versions of this passage and in one verse in Luke where it's regarded as the very, very smallest form of faith: "If you have faith like a mustard seed." So it's a tiny little thing. He says it's like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it's sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs. And here Mark is a better horticulturalist apparently than Luke or Matthew, because they have it grow into the tallest of all the trees, which it's not. It becomes a tall shrub but not the tallest of all the trees, and I think there's a point there, as we'll see. "And put forth large branches, so the birds of the air can make nests in its shade." Why is this bathos? Because the parallel passage — which we have today as our first reading in Ezekiel, and there's another one in Daniel — is about a great and glorious tree. "The top of the cedar, from the highest branch, I will take a shoot" — so he takes a little bit of a very, very grand tree, something that's very, very high indeed, and uses that as a sign, and says: "I will plant it on the "High mountain of Israel, it will sprout branches and bear fruit and become a noble cedar." So there's something tremendously impressive about the cedar — not so much the mustard bush. "Every kind of bird will live beneath it, every winged creature rests in the shade of its branches, and every tree of the field will learn that I, the Lord, am the one who stunts tall trees and makes the low ones grow." Well, here's a parable about the low one — who's making the low one grow — "who withers green trees and makes the withered green. I the Lord have spoken and I will do it." So I think Jesus is saying to us, to preachers of the word: don't expect to produce huge, enormously impressive things, because it may be that the thing you are to produce is the enormously impressive thing that's actually a small bush — not the kind of thing that gives you an idea of glory and a huge heroic quality, but something that's more appropriate to a market garden, a small garden, a herb garden, than a great forest. And the sign is still the same. Because think of it: if you're in a herb garden and you plant mustard seeds, one of the things that you have to do in herb gardens is prevent birds from eating the seeds. Herb birds are splendid things, but they are awfully inclined to eat the seeds. In fact, it's no great mystery, but in Chairman Mao's China he once conducted a campaign called the "Tiring the Birds" campaign, in which the population were ordered to tire birds — to prevent them from landing and eating seed — because it was reckoned that that would destroy the crops by the birds eating seeds. The result was a catastrophe. It was, in fact, that the birds not only eat the seeds but they also eat the insects. Without the birds eating the insects, the insects came and destroyed the crops anyhow. But that's a separate story. What we have here is a small garden where the birds might be very inclined to eat the seed, but if you plant it and it grows, it does become a shrub, and the birds — even the birds who would have been its enemy — find an ability to rest in it. And this, I think, is one of the wonderful things about the Gospel, preaching the Gospel: that the things we plant in apparent hostility — that are treated with apparent hostility — we turn out to be making something friendly for even our apparent enemies. We give them a rest and a place to sit that they might not have appreciated in the first place. And that's part of the preaching of the word, and that's part of allowing ourselves to grow and to see what is being brought into being, without being concerned that it's something glorious or powerful or of good reputation. It may be a mustard bush. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.