“26 He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. 27 Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. 28 All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.””
What makes it go? That’s a question to ask about anything, but let’s think about it in terms of a work of God in the world—say the church. Is it a dedicated core that keeps it going? There is good in that and also pitfalls like burnout and unintentional cliques. Is it the pastor? There is less good in that. He’s more transient and only one man. Is it demographics—many families moving into the area? That’s fun on the upswing and sorrowful on the downswing. Is production quality—something on par with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir every week? What makes a church go? To widen the scope, what makes the kingdom of God go in this world? What keeps God’s work going. There is only one sufficient answer to that and it’s the last one we tend to accept, and it is the burden of this second parable. The word and Spirit make the kingdom go; that’s the claim of this sermon: the word and Spirit make the kingdom go.
We will study this in three points. First: the growing seed. Second: lessons from the mysterious work. Third: judgment. First, in verses 26-28, the growing seed. Second, reflecting on verses 26-28 throughout history, lessons from the mysterious work. Third, in verse 29, judgment.
We are first startled by this obvious realization in our first point: the growing seed. This parable is rather unique because it’s connected with another. It’s connected with the parable of the sower. It’s the next parable here in Mark and Jesus wants us disciples to hear it with the parable of the sower in mind. The seed is still the word of God. Such crossover is exceedingly rare in parables, which just shows how important this idea of the word as seed is. The call here is still for us to be receptive to that seed. Unlike the last parable where the focus was on the hospitableness of the soil, however, now the focus is on the power of the seed.
Our translation titles this the Parable of the Growing Seed, but these italicized titles aren’t original. Other Bibles call this the Parable of the Seed Growing Secretly or even the parable of the Carefree Sower.
We want to get at the thrust of it for ourselves and we start pointing out that this parable, like most, is blatantly about the kingdom of God; as Jesus puts it in verse 26, ‘He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like.”’ The message here is that the whole process is the description of the kingdom of God. The kingdom isn’t the seed, the sower, or even the grain. It’s the entire process. God is into processes. We need to accept that if we are to accept life in God’s world as it is.
We can see the process nature of this parable by the fact that the focus shifts from the man to the seed to the soil to the grain and back to the man. You can’t say that any of these elements, including the growing seed, is the kingdom of God. All of it together is what the kingdom is like. That’s needful to understand because parables tend to pack one big punch. The goal, as we saw last week, isn’t to decipher what in the story stands for what in life. The goal is to get the punch of the parable. The first parable’s point is that the kingdom must be received. This parable talks about the counter-intuitive way it goes.
This counter-intuitive nature of God’s work—His kingdom—is very difficult for us. We want the kingdom to come in the way we think it should. We all, by nature, want God to do what we think He should and to do it how we think He should do it. The parables make clear that reality is much better than that and that this being better than we assume will always surprise us.
The counter-intuitive kingdom was a surprise to Jesus’ original hearers too because they had much expectations of the kingdom than we. They thought of it in terms of their glory days—the Davidic kingdom, the days of Solomon when the all the Promised Land was theirs and was whole. It’s hard for us Americans to understand the allure of the good old days because while our nation’s prestige is, perhaps, in decline, it’s certainly nowhere near over. We aren’t a fiefdom of China or India the way Jesus’ listeners were of Rome. All this is to say that Jesus’ original hearers would hear something quite different from us when Jesus said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like,” and we need to keep that in mind. The people who first heard this parable “were still in their own eyes God’s chosen people. Their history might be one long series of disasters, but they were quite certain that their great day would still dawn,” as Barclay explained. We need to remember this and that, we are in some ways, always overhearing the Bible being spoken to someone else. The message here, as with all Jesus’ early teaching, is that God’s kingdom has now come and that this is great news. This parable explains it and that it’s not what we expect.
The illustration Jesus uses is not what they would expect; it is much humbler; “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground.” The kingdom’s coming is no conquering king riding a white stallion. It’s no band of brothers storming the castle. The kingdom’s coming is something his listeners saw quite often—a man tossing seed on to soil. That humility needs to be accepted. It needs to be received. We push back against that and hard. We are, by nature, like Namaan who was insulted that he could cleansed of his leprosy by washing in the unimpressive Jordan river. We don’t want humble and we don’t want to be humbled. We want power. We want strength. We want Hercules and his twelve labors. We want glorious heroes. Jesus gives us a man tossing seed on the ground and to make matters humbler, “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”
The focus here isn’t on the farmer’s idleness. This parable doesn’t deny what farmers then actually did and do—they tilled and weeded and watered. Jesus isn’t denying that with, “Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.” We need to be careful of critiquing Jesus, or anyone, for what they don’t say. This is most true with parables and other creative presentation. No analogy or simile or metaphor or parable gives the complete picture. You can’t get all your theology form this parable or any other any more than you can get all your theology from the story of the thief on the cross. You measure by the point stories are trying to make and the point here is clearly growth—the kingdom grows quite part from us securing it. You see that growth described in terms of happening without the farmer’s control in verse 27 and then described in its appearance in verse 28. It’s described twice to make clear that this humanly unmanaged growth is the point.
You see that in what is the likely the key word in the whole parable. If you could pull up the slide. Let’s have some fun with Greek. Look at the highlighted one. You’ll likely already know it; “αὐτομάτη ἡ γῆ καρποφορεῖ.” What English word does “αὐτομάτη” sound like? Automatic. “Automatically the ground gives growth…” “Self-moved the soil bears fruit…” or as the NIV puts it, “all by itself the soil produces.”
That’s the point. The kingdom doesn’t come by force, by our holiness, by our self-sacrifice, by anything in our flesh; it comes by the word doing its thing. That’s how you entered the kingdom. The word did its thing in you. The entirety of one of our confessions, The Canons of Dort, is devoted to delineating this process but it could be summarized as, “A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain.”
Jesus was telling these Jews who longed for the kingdom that the only way to enter it would be to receive his word which would then do its work in them—no showing God sufficient holiness for him to deliver as the Pharisees hoped, no risky hostile takeover like the courageous zealots hoped, no brokering a truce between God’s ways and the world’s ways as the Herodians tried. We simply receive what Jesus says as if it’s as true as one plus one is two and that word in us takes care of the rest.
That would have been seen as laughable to Jesus’ original listeners. Don’t ever think that God’s word was ever palatable. We will see in our second point that this parable’s point is held in suspicion today, but it is unquestionable the point that Jesus is trying to make. He’s saying that you can’t make kingdom come no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears you might offer up. It can only be received and the way to receive it is to accept Jesus and his word. They unfold in you just as they will unfold all reality. As Jesus explains elsewhere, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”
This organic process of the word doings its thing all on its own is why Jesus chose a seed. “The seed is a power to organize reality,” as Dallas Willard explains. “When you put that little seed down in the earth, it’s already packed with potent substances. The power contained within it cracks the shell or the seed and puts out that little root… the seed has organized reality in a specific and defined way to make a watermelon out of dirt, water, and sunlight. That’s why the [word] is aptly portrayed as a seed—it is a spiritual power to organize reality.”
Jesus knew what he was doing by speaking parables. The Lord knew what He was doing when He spoke at Sinai. He knew what He was doing by coming as the “word made flesh” in Jesus. He knew what He was doing by founding a word-based religion. Do we know what we are doing when we hear this word as we are at this moment? That’s the call and we give the outworking of it our attention in our second point: lessons from the mysterious work.
We’ve seen that the word does the work, but our flesh does not like that. We want the kingdom to come and everything made right by what we find manageable. Then we can understand and explain it. That’s what the flesh wants and so we, to go back to the introduction, tend to think that something other than the word makes church go. As is so often said in every church, “What this church needs is…” The only proper and complete phrase that comes next is, “this church needs the word of God.” Everything else then that God sees fit will unfold. We can accept that or rebel against it.
We tend to rebel. You see throughout church history and today. The message of this parable seems insufficient to us and so we substitute something else for the word to our sorrow. We think this influx of families will resolve this fear we have about the future. We think that man’s skills will fix this or that. We mortals are afraid to deal with this God who we can’t control and so we put something else in His place. We put something we think we can manage in the word’s place and we wind up crushing whatever we put in that place and being crushed in the process. That’s how it always ends up because nothing and no one can bear what the word can bear or do what the word can do. Nothing else can make verse 28 happen, ‘All by itself the soil produces grain…”
One of the most influential Christians since the foundation of the church couldn’t be clearer about that. Thinking about the Reformation, Martin Luther asked, “What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Nor was I crucified for anyone.” Thinking about how some Christians had come to be called Lutherans, after him, he asked, “How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, come to the point where people call the children of Christ by my evil name? … I simply taught, preached, wrote [out] God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing… the Word did everything.”
And so it is. Think back to what Pastor Joey said last week thinking about his thirty years. Did he say that he did it? No; he studied and taught and prayed and loved but who did Pastor Joey say did the work? God did it. The word did it.
This is a call for churches and elders and pastors and all individual Christians to trust God’s process. “[This parable] is a warning to all who are in too big a hurry,” as Barclay explains and that is certainly us in this nation. What’s needed is hearts that long to be good soil and understand that, as France puts it, “At first there may be little to show for the sowing of seed, and a skeptical observer might think nothing was happening. But there is an inner dynamic in that message which will in due time produce its effect, even if human insight cannot fathom how the process works.”
If we want to do church Christ’s way—and any other way is about as pointless as doing baseball by the rules of football or doing romance by the laws of metallurgy—then we need to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t going to understand how it goes or ever control how it goes. You and I need to learn to be fine with, “all by itself the soil produces grain.” Pray that you would. Pray that I would. Pray that we would.
We are all merely servants in this process. “Humans do not bring the kingdom; they are servants of the kingdom, not its cause,” as Snodgrass explains. Our role is to bring the word, live the word, repent when we fail to live out the word and so recognize that this repenting is now living the word. We must trust that there is much we do not see. None of us, and no one other than God, knows more than about 0.25% of what is really going on with the kingdom of God in our lives. Such humility is wisdom; “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” It’s not complicated. My fears, pride, and flesh complicate it for me and yours for you. “The wise disciple will wait in confidence for God’s work to be accomplished in God’s way,” as France put it. Let’s be wise. Let’s be wise because the future is coming fast. That’s our last point: judgment.
The word “judgment” has a bad reputation. We tend to think about it in only negative terms, but a high school senior opening a college acceptance letter is also receiving a judgment, the Christian hearing, “well done good and faithful servant,” is receiving a judgment. This judgment is the unfolding of the current process. Judgment is now and in the future.
The language of this unfolding Jesus has in mind comes from the prophets. In verse 29, “As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come,” Jesus borrows language from the prophet Joel—“Swing the sickle, for the harvest is ripe.” Jesus wanted his original hearers to understand that the process his parables begin is the same process the prophets spoke of and the same purposes God has always had.
This counter-intuitive kingdom was, and is, the very plan of God. In other words, the kingdom is the real deal. “[Jesus] made the decisive beginning, the seed has been sown. He leaves nothing undone,” as Jeremias explains. “His beginning ripens to its fulfillment. Till then, we must wait in patience and not try to anticipate God, but in full confidence leave everything to him.” Easier said than done but it must be said and must be said again and again and again until it’s done. We need to remember God’s kingdom is coming in God’s way and to want anything other is to crave what Adam and Eve craved. It will end just as badly for us.
The good news of this parable is the good news has surely come—yes, in seed form, but also in growth form, and it will come. “The parable is optimistic,” as Snodgrass explains; “in spite of appearances people may be confident that what has begun with Jesus will lead to the full realization of the kingdom.” God will have His way. The word is doing its deed. The relevant question for me is whether its having its way in me—whether God is having His way with me, and the same question for you. That’s what matters. That’s what makes it all go. Amen.