13th June, 2021
Parish Church of St James, Louth
Ezekiel 17.22-34; 2 Corinthians 5.6-10, 14-17; Mark 4.26-34
- May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I tend to keep the attitude in my gardening that a weed’s a flower by any other name…but when a marching army of six-foot tall, imposingly leaved plants appeared across the lawn of Legbourne Rectory alarm bells rang. Many google image searches later, I was still unconvinced it might not be giant Japanese knotweed. It turns out there is no way to discreetly discover the answer: a van emblazoned with terrifying images of invasive plants swung into the drive in the clear sight of every neighbour who might be watching. It was a shocker of a day, storm-battered and bitter-winded, so I was as much embarassed as relieved to discover these were in fact sucker saplings from a tree across the fence! But meanwhile the expert did triumphantly discover an interloper: we had himalayan balsam lurking amidst the seedlings popping up in our self-sown meadow, ready to explode its seedhead and dominate the garden.
Jesus so often tells parables with a green and growing context. This shouldn’t be put down to any bare contingency of the agricultural context of his time and place. It should recall us to read deeply from the book of nature, away from any illusion of outgrown dependency on the created world that nourishes our bodies, minds and souls.
Here Jesus tells two parables which begin with seeds. A seed has such mystery, in its littleness, its apparent dry dull deadness and then the contrast and discontinuity of what comes to be—the ripe crops of the harvest, and all they might feed; the mature plant which forms a whole little world of shelter and sustenance.
These seed parables speak to the wonder and magic of growth, growth that exceeds our expectations or understanding, even as we have the joy and the burden of playing some part in it. This is clearly God’s purpose and grace, seamed into existence, hidden and revealed. Jesus’ reference point in the second parable of the mustard seed is our first reading from Ezekiel. In that beautiful image of the promise God makes to his people God takes a green cutting, and brings it all the way from tender sprig to towering cedar, a tree which is an image of his kingdom life. But God is not just the gardener, dependent on wind and weather and soil PH, he is the source and sap of life: ‘I bring low the high tree, I make high the low tree. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish’.
And, in Christ, God the gardener and creator is also God the tree itself. The mountain-top cedar prophecies the sacred wood of the cross on the hill of Calvary and the fruit it bears. Its sheltering branches under which ‘will nest birds of every kind’ prepare us for the love and refuge without boundary which the life and love of Christ is, a shade we can find now, in the midst of the heat of our lives.
However Jesus’ parable does take us somewhere new. Instead of the lofty cedar of Ezekiel, he presents us, with laughter in his eyes, with the mustard plant. Less noble tree than shrub—but one incredibly hardy, strong, even intrusive and invasive. The kind of plant that would indeed take over a garden.
Like the sown crop of the first parable, this is insidious growth. It comes and continues to be and has a life and force of its own. The kind of growth we are seeing all around us in these days of swift acceleration into summer after our long chill spring, everything springing long and lovely and lush. Jesus’ kingdom is everywhere, humble, but consistent, and like the mustard seed it will produce has a heat and a power to season and flavour whatever it touches.
Perhaps what matters is that in each of these stories God’s final purpose, our life together in God, the kingdom the Church lives to be, is growing towards its most perfect shape. This is not happening despite us, but it does involve God’s free gift of grace to which we return our own freely given faith. This is not necessarily a noble outline to our eyes at present. But present always is the promise of the shelter and sustenance of God’s love. And we are not just the gardeners or the observers of this growth. The Letter to the Corinthians reminds us that we, too ‘are a new creation’. We are the seed itself, sown and nourished by God’s grace and power, branches of the vine, foliage on the mustard plant, tender cuttings full of the sap of his love.
And so what must we do? I think we are called to promise not to be cynical, not to despair. I think we are called always, in everything, to look for the insidious growth of the mustard plant of his kingdom, and to give ourselves over to God’s purpose, not our own vision. I think we are called to look for the invasive power of love, without which nothing we do is indeed worth anything, that most excellent gift, which can slip in, small as a mustard seed, where every other boundary seems closed. I think we are called to be ourselves part of the shade, sustenance and shelter of the kingdom, for one another, for all whom we encounter.
And now, as we come in prayer to the fount of God’s love, our intimacy with him at the altar in the bread and the wine that are his body and blood, we come ourselves under the shelter of those spreading branches of the cross. Let us find there the right place to make our own nests, our true home in his presence, from which all our best and most real flights of love can be made.
AMEN.