Storyteller - Day 12

We're at the end of Week 2 of our series, blogging through "Storyteller", the latest free, online Bible study from Sarah Koontz at livingbydesign.org.

Today's passage of Scripture is Mark 4: 26 - 34. In this passage, Jesus shares two "seed parables" - the parable of the growing seed, and the parable of the mustard seed ...

Jesus said to the crowd, "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, because the harvest has come."

He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

With many such parables He spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; He did not speak to them except in parables, but He explained everything in private to His disciples.

The parable of the growing seed is good news - it's the news that the Kingdom of God is here, among us! The Good News of the Gospel is that our God isn't remote and removed from us in some distant sphere, but rather that He is in our midst, active in our daily lives, offering us the free gifts of freedom and fullness of life. His Kingdom is not something we need to seek, or work for or cultivate, because it grows and exists without human efforts, or human understanding - just like the growth of a tiny seed into a fully grown plant cannot be fully understood or reproduced by human invention or intervention.

The second parable builds on that theme, by giving a practical example (in first century terms, anyway - I'm not sure how many of us have mustard trees growing in our backyards?!) of how something really small gets buried in the ground, and then miraculously grows into a tree big enough to support birds nests in its branches.

This parable also provides an analogy for Christ's ministry and the church. Jesus began His ministry on earth with a small band of only 12 disciples (and most of them unlikely candidates on top of that!). Jesus is then executed and buried, and for three days it appears as if His work - and the very Kingdom of God - has died along with Him. But come Sunday, and there's a glorious explosion from the tomb, like that first green shoot that unfurl itself from the soil and lets you know that your seed isn't dead in the ground after all! Then, throughout the Book of Acts, the number of Believers grows steadily, and eventually there will come a day when people from "every tribe and language and people and nation" will worship the risen Saviour!! (Revelation 5: 9) How's that for a picture of a large tree that "grows long branches, and birds (of every feather) can make nests in its shade"??!! (Mark 4: 32)

It can be easy to get impatient at the slow progress of the kingdom of God, to want the Father to move faster, and wish that the Gospel would take root in people's hearts quicker. But Teilhard de Chardin reminds us: ‘Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet the law of all progress is that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time’.

My husband was given this bottle of mustard seeds for his birthday - we were all amazed at how small they actually are!!