While we sleep the world turns – life’s mechanisms keep pulsing, and growth continues to gain ground. It seems that nothing can stop the overall advance towards fulfillment, ripeness.
Jesus compares this to the kingdom of God. In one of the parables that Mark writes about, Jesus says:
“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know. Of its own accord the land produces first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the crop is ready, he loses no time: he starts to reap because the harvest has come.”
I remember an experiment our grade school teacher made us conduct – leaving a saucer with a wet mungo seed on the window sill, where it could get sustenance from the first sunshine. The next day we could see the seed coat splitting and shortly thereafter the tiny leaf or cotyledon slipping out, tender as the beetle’s diaphanous inner wing. We knew that in no time the seed would sprout some more and put out a slender white leg, the little leaf curled at its tip, and that in due course it would become a full plant.
Jesus continued with another parable, this time mentioning a particular seed, the mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth,” which once sown “grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade.”
Aside from as illustration that great, momentous things start with something small, the seed has each a purpose, to grow into a shrub or tree that delights with its flowers or sustains with its nourishing fruit, or, as set out in a poem by Robert William Service, that somehow participates in human destiny.
In Service’s poem “The Seed,” a tree narrates how as a seed “[n]o one could tell my fate / as I grew tall.” Time had a carte blanche over it. No one hated it, or rumored about its shame — it had a happy early treehood – “Oh I was proud indeed, / And sang with glee, / When from a tiny seed / I grew a tree.”
But one day for some reason people came to it full of anger, and split it “to the core / With savage blows.”
This it could not understand, since it had done nothing except to grow from a proud seed into a great tree, Why then did the people see a need “to lay him low?”
The last stanza gives the answer:
Why did I end so ill,
The midst of three
Black crosses on a hill
Called Calvary?
The tree, which once came from one small seed, had become the cross of Jesus.
Indeed, likewise in this sense may we compare the kingdom of God – won for us by Christ’s death and resurrection – to a seed.