He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. 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—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
Mark 4:26-29, NIV
The title of this piece is a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Barbara Grant, telling David Balfour that things will go better for him if he is prevented from interfering (Catriona, ch. 19). It is surprising good advice in many situations, and appears to be implicit in the Parable quoted above.
Jesus says that He is telling His followers what the Kingdom of God is like; and proceeds to tell a story in which a man benefits from a process he trusts utterly – but of which he understands only the start and the end. He scatters seed on the ground – and then keeps well out of it, until the time when the “fruit is secured alongside” (ὅταν δὲ παραδοῖ ὁ καρπός, which the NIV translates as ‘As soon as the grain is ripe’). Then immediately he is all action again: “he sends the scythe, because the reaping is standing right there”, ie the time of harvest has arrived.
How do we know the man trusts the process utterly? Because he scatters seed on the ground – and doesn’t waste time, wailing over the loss of his precious seed. Quite the opposite: because he knows the process, he is able to leave well alone and go about his business; seed sown now equates to future abundance. He is celebrating!
Nor does he get tricked into intervening too soon. In both the English and the Greek, the head is mentioned twice – first it appears, but only later does it contain the full grain (εἶτα πλήρης σῖτον ἐν τῷ στάχυϊ). An impatient person – say it was myself – might be tempted to harvest the heads when they appear; and they will be rewarded with feathery tassels that cannot be eaten, much less ground to make bread. Only someone who trusts the process waits until that moment when the harvest he was expecting is standing alongside him; and then he acts.
So – keep the big feet out of the platter, and more especially out of the growing crop. But, what exactly is the process? Because supposing the man represents us, and the soil, our heart (following Luke’s key to the previous parable); then the bit “he doesn’t know how” is probably the Kingdom in operation. What is going on, while night and day, the man sleeps and gets up?
αὐτομάτη ἡ γῆ καρποφορεῖ; acting of itself, the earth bears fruit (ie a harvest or crop). And it doesn’t just happen in one night; first the green crop, then the head, then the full grain in the head. It takes time. You only know the process is complete when you can see (and feel) in the head, lots of grains, each and every one of them exactly like the grain that was scattered on the ground at the start of the process. Act before that and you have nothing of value; leave it too long and it rots in the field. So the man knows his part, but the process is the process.
What is that saying, outside of a field of sown grain?
“Acting of itself, the earth bears fruit.” That sounds wrong from a scientific point of view; a grain of wheat or any other seed is actually a fully formed embryo of the future plant to come. Chemical based agriculture from the late 19th Century would object and say, “no, no, Jesus – the seed turns into a plant, as long as there is the right ratio of N, P and K in the soil.”
And funnily enough, we now know that the people pushing nitrogen-based fertilisers on an unsuspecting world, were wrong. It is very much the earth that makes the seed grow into a fully formed plant. By itself, the embryo in the seed can unfurl – and then die. It is actually the living soil – alive with fungal mycelia and microbes – which is able to extract nutrients from dead organic matter and never-alive minerals alike, and trade them for photosynthesised sugars with the growing seed, to enable it to reach full stature and fruitfulness.
And – finally reaching the point of all this – that is how God has made us too. You and I are mimetic beings, and designed that way; our purpose is to receive what God speaks and reproduce and multiply that. We don’t know how it works, but it does. If you have been reading God’s word and trying to do it; well done, but perhaps relax. Your job is to scatter God’s word into your heart; and then to harvest it when it is ready and multiplied many times over. As long as you keep God’s word in your heart, you will reproduce and multiply it.
Of course, there is bad news too: whatever you keep in your heart, will reproduce and multiply. Yes.
So to fully understand what Jesus has managed to teach us in four short verses, come back to the Garden, and see why a small act of disobedience had such consequences. If you have been seeing Genesis 3 as something of an over-reaction on God’s part – a “bad dog, no biscuit” kind of moment – you should think again.
After He has made them and set them in the Walled Garden (which is literally what gan (גַּן) as in ‘gan eden’, the Garden of Eden, means; and if we call it Paradise, that is from the Persian, ‘pardes’, also a walled garden), He visits them there every afternoon.
We have no idea what God spoke about with them, but we can be sure that whatever He spoke, was being reproduced and multiplied in them. And just as God speaking into His world could have immediate impact, too (“let there be light – BANG!”), so we can assume the same was true of what Adam and Eve were doing. I always assumed that Adam naming the animals was just a job of description; but perhaps he actually prescribed what they were to become. That is of course just speculation; but we need to understand that when God made Man in His own image and likeness, that was not at all just a matter of number of limbs and facial hair; God had made people just like Himself.
Which means that breaking the one rule they had been given, and eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was not a simple act of disobedience. Nor did God over-react, one iota. His children, with all the power they had received to reproduce and multiply whatever God said, had now snatched autonomy – and the knowledge of evil. If you can reproduce and multiply every evil thought that comes into your head and heart, you get… all this.
And as I have mentioned before, God did not curse the earth: Adam and Eve did. It is called consequences.
But circle back to the parable: here’s how the Kingdom of God is. We are redeemed and restored and back in the mimetic business God always had in mind for us: reproducing and multiplying what He said. That is the Kingdom of God; and that is us, its citizens. And in just 4 verses. Pretty useful things, parables…
Seeing the Kingdom 