In a recent interview, a celebrity-turned-farmer said: ‘I thought farming was a part-time thing; you just put seeds in the ground, weather happens, food grows then you sell it.’ Which is in line with today’s gospel reading and its first parable. Except it isn’t. Because, as the newly minted farmer continued, ‘it’s a full-on, twenty-hours a day, seven days a week [job].’ His experience, like most other farmers’, seems to contradict Jesus’s words: ‘A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how? he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces…’ Whose statement should we trust then, Jesus’s or farmers’? It depends. If we want to know anything about farming, those with knowledge and experience are our port of call, not the Bible…
Before you start protesting, let me explain such a sacrilegious verdict. The clues are in fact in today’s gospel. Let’s start with the first one: ‘This is what the kingdom of God is like….’ Jesus talked about the subject that his Jewish contemporaries understood or interpreted in many different, sometimes incompatible ways. No small proportion of Jesus’s audience, as well as His opponents, assumed that ‘the kingdom of God’ was a political project. We surely remember that Jesus was falsely accused of fomenting political opposition to, or even uprising against the establishment. That leads us to the second clue in today’s gospel: ‘Using many parables like these, [Jesus] spoke the word to them, so far as they were capable of understanding it.’ In other words, He utilised images, ideas and views familiar to His audience even if they were factually incorrect. Jesus wasn’t teaching farming, fishing or any other specific trade. When He used parables, He taught them ‘what the kingdom of God is like.’ The third clue is this: ‘[Jesus] explained everything to his disciples when they were alone.’ This closing sentence helps us to understand that Jesus’s parables weren’t top-end, fine-detailed theological lectures; this kind of in-depth teaching was reserved for a small group of His disciples, the future leaders of the Church.
Let’s go back to the parables and try to find the message Jesus wanted to convey. Both are answers to this question: ‘What can we say the kingdom of God is like?’ I’ve been explaining this ad nauseam but it’s crucial to understand the highly volatile political context of Jesus’s public ministry. From day one virtually everyone – followers and opponents – perceived Him as a political leader of the upcoming uprising. Jesus’s followers made plans to bring it about while His adversaries plotted to stop Him from doing so. In such a context, the kingdom of God was seen as a political project based on religious law, or in short: theocracy. A glimpse of such thinking can be found in the gospel of St Luke, when ‘once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming.’ His answer was very telling: ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.’ (Luke 17:20-21) Then Jesus gave a much longer explanation but – echoing today’s gospel – addressed it to his disciples, not the Pharisees (see Luke 17:22-35).
Incidentally, this short sentence – ‘the kingdom of God is among you’ – is the key for the interpretation of the two parables in today’s gospel; or for that matter, for every parable on the kingdom of God that we can find in the gospels. The core message of those two parables is the humble beginnings and great impressive outcome. The mustard seed can be an individual with no worldly power or influence, insignificant in the great scheme of things; namely, you and me. At the same time, the mustard seed can be a tiny act of charity, so small that it might be almost imperceptible to others. But once planted, it brings out more similarly tiny acts of charity, so we can compare it to the field mentioned in the first parable. Each one of us is the ground where the mustard seed of charity was planted when we were baptised. At the same time, we plant the seed of the kingdom of God every time we live out our faith and testify to it. That includes our readiness to apologise for our misdeeds as well as our willingness to forgive those of others. The transformation of the world starts in our hearts. If we want to live in a Christian society, we must build it up, from the grassroots, where people willingly and freely adopt and live in line with the Christian law. History teaches us that the alternative – a forcefully imposed top-down theocratic legislation – can only lead to misery, oppression and a caricature of the kingdom of God. That’s not what we are called to build. The only kingdom of God that is our mission is ‘a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love, and peace.’ (Preface for Christ the King)