Mark 4:26-29
26 He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would
scatter seed on the ground, 27 and
would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does
not know how. 28 The earth
produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the
head. 29 But when the grain
is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has
come."
Time. We measure it in millennia,
centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds,
and nanoseconds (that’s one-billionth of a second). We can capture events in
time with print, pictures, and film. We can keep track of time with
wristwatches, clocks, and calendars. We can even observe the effects of time as
we gaze up into the night sky or down into the deepest places of our planet. Yet
for all the ways we can track, observe, and experience time we cannot stop it.
Time marches on whether we like it or not, and it marches at its own pace
whether we like it or not.
When I reflect on my own life I can
see the reality of time’s inability to be slowed, quickened, or captured. When
I was in elementary school, I wanted time to speed up. I couldn’t wait to go to
high school, where we got to change classes and put our books in lockers. When
I was in high school, I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen so I could get my
driver’s license, get a job, and buy a car;
after I got my car, graduation and the real world couldn’t come fast
enough. In college, I couldn’t wait to graduate, so I could get married and
start seminary. Now, here I am, married for six years, three years out of
seminary, quickly approaching my thirtieth birthday, and at times I find myself
wishing I could wind back the clock, slow down time or reverse, to go back to
those days of regulated nap times, when paying the bills was someone else’s responsibility,
and all I had to worry about was whether or not there were marshmallows in my
breakfast cereal!
On the other hand, I think we all
experience those days when we wish five o’clock would arrive a little sooner,
those weeks when we wish Friday would hurry up and get here, or those vacations
when we pray for time to slow to a crawl so we can see every site or soak up
more sun while we lounge in allowed laziness. But alas, we are not masters of
time, for time continues to grind on without our assistance or approval. In a
word, time is unstoppable.
Now, perhaps that’s somewhat of a
discouraging thought for you, but may I suggest that simply because something
is unstoppable that does not mean that it isn’t beneficial; just because we are
unable to completely control something doesn’t mean that it’s all bad.
Take, for instance, the way children
grow. How many of you parents have ever said something like this about your
children: “I wish they would just stay this age and not turn into teenagers”?
Or how many of you have ever sent your child out of the house for his or her
first date, afraid of what trouble the changing effects of time and biology may
lead to? Inside the door frame of my grandmother’s pantry there are painted
over scratches and faded pencil marks that all continue halfway up the length
of the jamb. Each mark tells how tall my cousins and I were at certain points
in our childhood, but none of those marks gets shorter. Just as time’s passing
is relentlessly unstoppable, so is the growth of our children. Try as we might
to slow it down, stop it, or even reverse it, they grow up whether we like it
or not. It is unstoppable.
Like the passing of time or the
growth of children, today Jesus tells us a story about the way in which a seed
grows. Once it is sown in the good soil (reminding us perhaps of the story we
heard from Jesus a couple of weeks ago), nature takes over and the seed in the ground
germinates. Once the first, frail leaf of the plant breaks through the darkness
beneath the dirt into the warm light of the daytime sun, the great miracle we call
photosynthesis takes over as the plant absorbs sunlight and nutrients from the
soil to grow taller. Jesus describes the action of the growing seed in verse 28: “first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” What
really puts the point on the parable, however, is what Jesus says at the
beginning of that same verse: “The earth produces of itself…” The
earth is producing the growth, not any action of the scarcely mentioned one who
scattered the seed. In this story, the understanding here is that the seed
grows from the earth on its own, in its own time, in its own way—whether the farmer
likes it or not.
It’s actually quite fascinating to think about how much faith it took for
one to grow something in Jesus’ day. Today, we genetically manipulate seeds to
produce bigger fruits or greater yields. We scientifically craft their DNA so
that they can resist pesticides and herbicides and grow in harsh weather
conditions. In the first century, however, the understanding of why and how
plants grew was left to little more than experience and faith, as Jesus says in
verse 27 “the seed would sprout and grow, [the sower] does not know how.”
So a farmer planted seed in his field, prayed, and waited for the earth
[to] produce of itself. Once a plant started to grow, there was no
stopping it, no reversing its growth because the season wasn’t right or the
farmer wasn’t ready. When a crop began to grow, the farmer had no choice but to
see it through to harvest. He couldn’t slow it down or halt its growth—in a
word, it was unstoppable. Jesus tells
this story about the unstoppable growth of this seed for the same reason he
tells many of his stories, in order to describe the kingdom of God. He says in verse 26, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…”
The kingdom of God is like the growth of this seed—once it starts, its growth
is unstoppable.
But this isn’t the easiest of concepts for us to understand. For
something to be unstoppable means it’s out of our control, and we want control—we
need control. We like being able to
control when something begins and when it ends. We like being able to make our own
schedules and live by our own rules. Do you realize we now live in a world
where a person can pause live television, grow a “fresh” tomato in the dead of
winter, remotely start the engine in his or her car, and manipulate the
temperature and humidity in his or her house from a different country with
nothing more than a smartphone carried in a pocket?! Our powers of control are
only increasing, so a story from Jesus about an uncontrollable movement, and
uncontrollable kingdom might not sit that well with us. If we can’t control it,
we often don’t want it.
There are exceptions of course. For example, I remember watching the
first infomercial for the Ronco Showtime
Rotisserie & BBQ in my grandmother’s living room nearly a decade ago. Today,
according to the Ronco website, the company sells thousands of those machines
every week.[1] What
is the claim about this machine that makes it such an enormous seller? Ron
claims you can “set it and forget it!” Nothing to control; just set the dial
and forget all about it until it’s ready. The machine controls itself. To tell
you the truth, that’s one of the things I like about the automatic transmission
in my truck; I don’t have to manually select gears in order to accelerate or
take a steep incline on the road. I just drop the transmission into drive and
I’m on my way. And I’m sure many of us can testify to how convenient it is when
our banks or credit card companies have some sort of automatic bill pay that
handles paying all our bills on time each and every month. It’s one less thing
to worry about, one less thing to control. I guess sometimes it’s nice when
things are out of our control; we just like to call them “automatic.”
“Automatic,” however, still carries with it a sense of control (we can
always cancel online payments and put the car in park). The kingdom of God,
however, doesn’t work like that; it doesn’t begin and end simply because we
want it to. No, the kingdom of God, like a seed growing up from the ground, is
unstoppable once it starts—and the reality is it has already begun. Jesus’
first words in Mark’s gospel are found in chapter
one, verse fifteen, and with Mark’s first recorded words of Christ we hear
him proclaim "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news." The kingdom of God is at
hand, and all throughout Mark’s gospel we hear of how unstoppable its growth is
as Jesus gathers followers on his way to the cross and the ultimate expression
of the kingdom’s unstoppable power as even the power of death could not hold it
back—the grave could not stop it!
In the words of Jesus, “the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is
at hand.” It has started and it cannot be slowed or stopped, for it grows by
the power of God and the moving of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom of God is here,
growing among us even now, so each of us is faced with a decision: will we join
the growing kingdom, or will we let it pass us by? We cannot slow it. We cannot
stop it. We can only choose to join it or ignore it. For the kingdom of God is
unstoppable; Christ’s reign as king and lord is unstoppable, God’s will to
reconcile us unto himself is unstoppable. Through faith in Christ we join in
this unstoppable kingdom, for just as the seed grows and the earth produces of
itself, the kingdom grows and produces of itself.
Yet there is coming a day when the fullness of God’s kingdom will be
realized, “when the grain [will be] ripe” and “the harvest [will] come."
There is coming a day when God will be fully known, and as the apostle Paul
says in his letter to the Romans: "As I live, says the Lord, every knee
shall bow to me, and every tongue shall give praise to God." So it
seems that even our eternal recognition of the kingdom is unstoppable. However,
the decision still remains: will you recognize the unstoppable power of the
God’s kingdom present among us even now, or will you continue to ignore its
presence, hoping to ignore whatever work the Holy Spirit may be working in your
own life?
The unstoppable Kingdom of God is at hand. It is here among us today. It
is as a seed scattered on the ground, which grows in a mysterious and
unstoppable way, and the time for its harvest, its fulfillment, is coming. Will
you join this kingdom now, giving your life and trust to its king, Jesus the
Christ?
Let us pray…
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