The Spice and Not the Cedar

Propers: The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 11), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The thing about parables is that they aren’t meant to make sense. They’re meant to disrupt, to break their hearers out of old ways of thinking. Parables don’t clarify; they shock. And as surprise remains the basis both for humor and for horror, they do so with a smile and a scandal intertwined. Parables are equally delightful and disturbing.

Thus does Jesus garner not only our attention but also our reaction. He provokes us even today, 2000 years after the fact. We are still discussing His teachings, still debating their interpretations, with a vigor no other figure in human history could elicit; though the Buddha perhaps could come close. Even those who reject the supernatural claims of faith still find themselves captivated by the Galilean. Love Him or hate Him, we cannot seem to ignore Him. He is still alive.

“The Kingdom of God,” said Jesus Christ, “is as if someone would scatter seed upon the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, and then the grain. But once the grain is ripe, he goes in with his sickle, for the harvest has come.” This, my friends, is farming for fisherman: Jesus speaking of scattering grain to folks more familiar with scattering nets. And there is some humor in it.

Farmers don’t have to go out on boats, brave the stormy sea, haul the heavy catch. We all know how easy farmers have it, right? They just go to sleep and wake up and presto: there’s a whole field just sitting there ready to harvest. Really, the earth does all the work. Again: humor, sarcasm. And on top of it, an overturning of expectations. This is not how people were used to talking about the Kingdom of God.

Take a step back. About 600 years before Jesus, the Kingdom of Judah was conquered. The Chaldeans of the Neo-Babylonian Empire drove into Exile any Judean with two shekels to rub together, anyone with land or power or prestige. Only the poor were left behind. The meek inherited the earth. Ancient empires did this to prevent rebellion. They took people out of their homeland, scattered them across foreign territories, and resettled other conquered peoples from other nations in their place. They mixed them up so as to assimilate them.

Judean Exiles thus found themselves bereft of everything they’d known of God: the kingship, the priesthood, the Holy Temple and the Promised Land, all of it lost, all of it up in smoke. By rights they should have vanished, as had so many others beneath the Babylonian boot. But something remarkable happened. A new generation of Prophets arose proclaiming that God had not abandoned them, that God in fact had gone into Exile with them, and that soon the time would come when God Himself would lead them back.

Judaism as we know it, as Jesus knew it, thus arose in Exile, keeping a people together via their shared language and stories and Law. They edited and compiled the Torah, the Books of Moses, in the form that we have them today, during the Exile. They focused no longer on priests but on learned rabbis, no longer on the Temple but on the common synagogue. They became the People of the Book. And this explains the Hebrew Bible’s ubiquitous theme of exile and return, a repeated pattern stretching back to the Exodus, and beyond that to Adam and Eve east of Eden.

Just as the Prophets had prophesied, the Exile ended abruptly. The Judeans could go home! And they trusted now the promise of their God, the promises given through said Prophets. They looked forward to the coming of the Christ, to the Resurrection of the dead, and to the establishment of the Kingdom of our God upon this earth.

The Babylonians had conquered them, but the Persians set them free. Then the Greeks had conquered them, but the Maccabees set them free. Now in the time of the Second Temple, in the time of Jesus Christ, the Romans had come. But the Christ was now due any day, according to the countdown in the prophecy of Daniel. Everyone was looking for the Christ to set them free, to throw off the shackles of Rome and return Israel at last to her former glory—indeed, to heavenly glory.

They reckoned this kingdom would come in the way that kingdoms always had: through violence, through warfare, through resistance. Only now it would be bigger. Now God would send them a heavenly King, who would fight a final battle, to establish an endless reign. That was the kingdom that many expected, including a fellow named Judas the Galilean, who, about the time when Christ was 10 years old, led a rebellion in the Galilee against a Roman census, which had been imposed for the purposes of taxation. Sound familiar?

Judas managed to take Sepphoris, the administrative capital of the region, before the Legions wiped him out, along with his entire family and God knows how many Galileans. This is what Jesus grew up with! Other would-be messiahs led similar uprisings before, during, and after Jesus’ day. Rome crushed them all. But surely they would get it right on one of these occasions. Surely the Kingdom would rise. That’s what the Zealots wanted, what the Sicarii wanted, and why another Judas close to Jesus sought to force His hand. Judas Iscariot wanted the Christ to fight.

Yet when Jesus speaks of His Kingdom, when He preaches deliverance to the crowds, He says not one word about uprisings or violence or fire or sword. Instead He speaks of seeds! Of lazy, baffled farmers who just wake up one morning to find a fertile field. And all they have to do is reap it! The Kingdom in these parables has no army, fights no battles. The Kingdom grows as naturally as seed upon the ground. We don’t understand how it works. It arises without our consent. Yet it produces, in abundance, all we could need and more.

How confused the crowds must have been. How odd it all must’ve sounded. Some of them had to have laughed, and others gotten upset. Likely many did both. But now that He has their attention, Jesus doubles down. “The Kingdom of God,” He continues, “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, so that birds of the air can nest in its shade.”

This again is Jesus’ sense of humor. All throughout the Hebrew Bible, great empires and kingdoms are compared to mighty trees, like the cedars of Lebanon. Look no farther than this morning’s reading from the Prophet Ezekiel, in which the Kingdom of Israel, and thus its anticipated reëstablishment as the Kingdom of God, is compared to a cedar tree, tended by the Almighty to shelter birds within its branches. This is an image that people would know: a mighty tree to represent a mighty kingdom.

But Jesus says it’s mustard—a tiny, spicy, unruly little weed that refuses to stay in its garden, which purity codes consider unclean because it can spread like the plague. What an image for the Kingdom of God! A weedy, wild Kingdom for an unexpected Christ. And it grows to the greatest of shrubs, He says, which is humorous in and of itself. Imagine the glory of a Kingdom compared to the mightiest of vegetables.

The Kingdom of God is like a man who didn’t realize he had planted too many cucumbers, and they came up so quickly and got so large that he resorted to sticking unclaimed cukes behind any unlocked car door that he could find. Let he who has ears to hear, listen!

I won’t offer an easy explanation. There’s more to this morning’s parables than the simple notion that “great things have small beginnings.” Parables shock, remember, they don’t clarify. They shake us up. They offend us, even as we laugh. They break us out of the boxes of our limited conjecture, shattering the idols where we want our God to stay. Jesus was a radical, but not in the way we assume. He disarms our presuppositions. He shows us a new way to fight: with truth and love and mercy, and not with the edge of a sword.

The Kingdom of God is not what we think. Its throne is a Cross, its crown is of thorns, and its King is not a killer but the victim we have slain. We sleep, we rise, we know not how, and behold—He is alive!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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