Text: Mark 4:26-34
Date: June 20, 2021
Event: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
Mark 4:26–34 (EHV)
26He said, “The kingdom of God is like this: A man scatters seed on the ground, 27and while he sleeps and rises, night and day the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28The ground produces fruit on its own: first the blade, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29When the crop is ready, he swings the sickle without delay, because the harvest has come.”
30Then he said, “To what should we compare the kingdom of God? Or with what parable may we picture it? 31It is like a mustard seed, which when sown on the ground is one of the smallest of all the seeds planted in the ground. 32Yet when it is planted, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the sky can nest under its shade.”
33With many similar parables he continued to speak the word to them, as much as they were able to hear. 34He did not speak to them without a parable. But when he was alone with his disciples, he explained everything to them.
Is Our God Small?
This week I saw a brief video clip of a person whose job it was to work with cheetahs. Cheetahs are often pretty skittish animals, despite their size and speed. (You might look up pictures or videos of cheetahs being assigned a companion dog to help them in their nervousness if you want to be overloaded with some cute images.) But the person in the video I saw was staying with a group of two or three cheetahs and comforting them when they got scared during the night. It showed someone in a sleeping bag, encouraging these big cats to come and snuggle with him when they appeared anxious. The person ends up with a pile of cheetahs right beside him, huddled in close.
A part of me found this adorable, but another part of me was really concerned about this. What happened if the cheetahs got too scared or got agitated? Could they kill a person? I know the person could not outrun these big cats and I assume if something clicked and they decided their comforter was actually their enemy, it seems very possible that that would be his end. But then I got to thinking: our two cats at home will snuggle with us on the couch or plop themselves on our laps and sometimes even pile up at the end of a bed. Why was I not really alarmed about that, but was alarmed about the cheetahs?
It probably comes down to size, right? Our cats, despite being big guys, are still just house cats. But these cheetahs were wild animals that can weigh upwards of 150lbs. Our cats are fast when they’re not being lazy, but they’re not cheetah fast. The apparent size and strength of something probably heavily influence what we think about its power to hurt or help.
But sometimes, our assumptions about power based on size are very, very wrong. We’ve seen how a microscopic virus can turn the world upside down. At Christmas, a birthday, or a graduation, a simple card may have a more life-changing gift tucked inside than a giant box with shiny wrapping paper. Smallness should not be equated with insignificance.
Which brings us to Jesus’ parables in our Gospel for this morning. Jesus is teaching a crowd so large he had to get into a boat and push off a bit from the shore to talk to them. This is not an intimate gathering of his disciples. This is a crowd being taught en masse in the early days of Jesus’ earthly ministry. As such, Jesus uses parables to try to ground the spiritual things he’s teaching in terminology and experiences that would have been familiar to the large audience before him.
The two parables we have before us are both related to agriculture, as many of Jesus’ parables were. He’s using these parables to explain the “kingdom of God.” We should note that when Jesus talks about “kingdom of God,” he’s often not speaking about eternal life. Jesus is not talking about heaven. He’s talking about God’s rule of grace in our hearts. When you hear the “kingdom of God” either in parables like these or the Lord’s Prayer, you should think primarily of the faith that God gives.
So Jesus is talking about the faith by which he rules in the hearts of his people. How does he describe that faith? “A man scatters seed on the ground, and while he sleeps and rises, night and day the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. The ground produces fruit on its own: first the blade, then the head, then the full grain in the head. When the crop is ready, he swings the sickle without delay, because the harvest has come.” What is Jesus’ point? The seed of faith is planted; we have little idea of how it grows, but it does grow, producing a harvest.
A seed planted in the ground seems kind of ridiculous, right? If you didn’t know anything about plants and you saw someone planting seeds, you might be tempted to ask, “You’re going to put that tiny thing in the dirt, and somehow, after some time, it’s going to produce food to sustain you?” A seed is insignificant. It looks small and powerless. And that’s Jesus’ focus in the second parable: “It is like a mustard seed, which when sown on the ground is one of the smallest of all the seeds planted in the ground. Yet when it is planted, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches so that the birds of the sky can nest under its shade.” The mustard seed is this tiny, tiny speck of a seed. And yet, the plant that comes from it can dwarf most garden plants. Birds can nest in and around it. This minuscule dot produces a powerful blessing for many.
We can be tempted to think our God is small. He doesn’t show himself in clearly visible and powerful ways. He doesn’t make his providence known with splashy demonstrations of might. Instead, he works in ways that seem weak and dull. Saving people through the spoken or written Word? Strengthening faith through a bit of bread and a sip of wine? Really? This is the omnipotent Creator of the universe? This is the one we are to trust with our eternal well-being?
And perhaps this leads to some of the shame we mentioned last week. Perhaps we are ashamed of our God. Maybe we are tempted not to share what we believe because it seems so… unbelievable? Powerless? Small?
Is our God small because he uses small-looking means? Hardly! If we return to Christmas for just a bit, Jesus in the manger, this whole scene looks small and insignificant. But when you know what is going on at the manger, your mind is blown. Because this is the incarnation of God, this is the eternal God taking his place in time and flesh to rescue his creatures from their sin! What seemed small, what looked insignificant, is not at all. These appearances are deceiving.
Truly, we don’t fully understand how faith grows, like the farmer or gardener planting a seed may not fully understand why the seed grows. And that’s because faith is not a rational, explainable thing; faith is a supernatural thing. We don’t turn a crank to make our faith grow. We don’t work out our “faith muscles” to make our faith stronger. The Holy Spirit uses the means of grace—his Word and the sacraments—to create and strengthen faith in a way that we can feel but not fully understand. I sense that my faith is stronger after having contact with God’s Word, but I can’t draw a diagram of how that worked.
Likewise, faith seems like nothing, no matter how strong it is, no matter how much it has grown. Faith doesn’t leave me with something concrete to hold on to. It doesn’t materialize itself as a weapon or shield or anything else I can lay my hands on. It’s esoteric. It is simply trusting God that what he’s said he has done and will do is actually true. And it’s not something that I can produce in my heart; it is something that God places there, cultivates there, and makes it flourish.
But is that God or is that faith actually small and insignificant? No! Think of what God does with that planted seed. The seed of faith, planted and grown, leads someone to cling to their Savior. This tiny, insignificant-looking thing is what God uses to rescue us from our sins and, at our death, bring us to eternal life. That faith he gives grips to Jesus’ cross tightly, depending on his life and death as the certainty of our forgiveness. It leads from death to life. It leads from hell to heaven. This tiny little thing produces something that has massive, eternal ramifications for us. But not only for us.
As God makes that seed of faith grow, it shows itself in your life. The way you serve others, the way you treat other people reflects that faith in your heart. It may bring comfort to someone in need or peace to someone in distress. The branches of your faith may provide peaceful shade to those around you. If that person is a fellow Christian, that leads to mutual encouragement. If that person is not a Christian, it may lead to the opportunity to share this insignificant-looking but eternally-indispensable seed of faith with them.
Don’t let appearances deceive you. Is your faith powerless? No! Is your God small? Absolutely not! Your Savior has defeated all of your eternal enemies and has given you this faith—his very rule in your heart—to trust him. That faith, given by God, will be used to bring you to eternal life. Your God is your eternal Champion. He provides what we need, always, even if it doesn’t always look spectacular with our human eyes and reason. Praise be to God for that seed of faith that he causes to grow, leading up to eternal life! Amen.
