Mark 4

²⁶ And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. ²⁷ He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. ²⁸ The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. ²⁹ But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” ³⁰ And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? ³¹ It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, ³² yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” ³³ With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. ³⁴ He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

One of my favorite Christian musicians is Andrew Peterson. I think he is oftentimes quite profound both musically and lyrically. One song that he wrote never fails to affect me. It is entitled, “Mountains on the Ocean Floor.” It is an interesting song and it catches you off guard, especially the beginning of it.

My uncle’s in the county jail

His time is on his hands

He knows he chose a barren cell

Over a fair and fertile land

He took another hit

He hit another high

He flew until he fell

Just like he has a thousand times

Nothing ever seems to change

But miles away beneath the waves

There are mountains

Mountains on the ocean floor

They’re rising from the deep

But no one ever sees

No one ever sees

I can’t believe I landed there

I swear I swore it off

I know that I can’t stand it here

Still I came and took a fall

I wish that I could shake it

I wish that I was free

I wish that I was half the man

I wish that I could be

There are mountains

Mountains on the ocean floor

They’re moving up so slow

No one ever knows

No one ever knows

Nothing ever seems to change

But miles away beneath the waves

Down below the dirt

Hotter than a flame

In the belly of the earth

He has given you a Name

There are mountains

Mountains on the ocean floor

They’re rising from the deep

Where no one ever sees

There are mountains

They’re hidden there beneath the waves

They’re moving up so slow

No one ever knows

There’s a molten heart of stone

That is waiting to explode

Only God can see it grow

What a fantastic image, mountains on the ocean floor. His point is clear enough: reality is much more than it seems. Beneath the surface even of those who have great problems there is oftentimes something amazing happening: a slow, steady, revolutionary change of properties that will, in time, change that person forever. Within those who often seem to be the hardest hearted that is “a molten heart of stone that is waiting to explode.” The final line is profound: “Only God can see it grow.”

What Peterson is pointing to is a reality that Jesus explains in our text: that the Kingdom of God is dynamic and growing and transformative, but often in ways that we cannot see or do not expect. It is a subversive Kingdom, a mountain under the ocean that surfaces here and there in ways that we could not have imagined and that confounds us when we try to define reality in merely surface terms.

Christ preached the Kingdom come and coming.

We must first notice yet again the primacy of “the kingdom” in the preaching of Jesus. He was always talking about “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven.” In our text, he mentions it twice in order to establish the two parables.

²⁶ … “The kingdom of God is as if…”

³⁰ … “With what can we compare the kingdom of God…”

The fact of the matter is that Jesus was always talking about the kingdom of God! Consider the thirteen references to the kingdom of God in the gospel of Mark alone:

• “the kingdom of God is at hand” (1:15)
• “to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God” (4:11)
• “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed” (4:26)
• “With what can we compare the kingdom of God” (4:30)
• “there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God” (9:1)
• “it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell” (9:47)
• “do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (10:14)
• “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (10:15)
• “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God” (10:23)
• “Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God!” (10:24)
• “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (10:25)
• “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (12:34)
• “I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” (14:25)

Obviously, Jesus saw His mission and ministry as bound up with the kingdom come and coming. In Christ, the kingdom had come, had broken into the kingdom of the world. But the mission of Christ was to call men to the kingdom come and coming, the kingdom that is here but not yet fully here.

For numerous reasons, I have come to believe that the greatest weakness in the modern evangelical church is this loss of a high view of and strong emphasis on the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the rule of God, the presence of God, and the way of God. Our word government is much more narrow than the ancient word kingdom, but our word government may provide a bit of a conceptual bridge to help us at least approach the idea of kingdom. For instance, see how this hits your ear: “Repent, for the government of God is at hand!” “To you has been given the secret of the government of God.” “You are not far from the government of God.”

Again, the word government is too deficient to be a synonym, but in this season of presidential election, perhaps it might help us to consider the fact that, according to Jesus, to be in Christ is to recognize a government greater than our own earthly government.

Of course, it is no mere government, it is a kingdom, the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is greater than government and the kingdom of God is even greater than the Church. One French theologian has said, “Christ announced the coming of the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.”[1] This is not a good thing. The Church is not the kingdom. The kingdom is greater than the Church. But it is clear that in the New Testament the Church is the reality through which the truths and ways the kingdom enter into the fallen kingdom of the world. It is in the life of the church that the watching world should see the kingdom at work.

This was clearly the case in the book of Acts and it has always been the case whenever the Church musters the courage actually to be the Church! You have the privilege, then, of going to school or work or church or home and modeling a different way, a kingdom way, a way that stands in stark contrast to the cursed way of the world.

Christ preached the kingdom! And what did He say about it in our text.

The kingdom of God carries within itself incommunicable divine properties of growth and vitality.

First, Jesus returned again to the image of a sower and seed. He has, of course, just used this image, but here He is using it to make an even deeper point than the one made before.

²⁶ And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. ²⁷ He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. ²⁸ The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. ²⁹ But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Here we see Andrew Peterson’s “mountains on the ocean floor.” The seed is the word of the kingdom, the truth of the kingdom. The sower is Christ and, now, Christ working through us, his Church. In this telling of the parable, Jesus is highlighting the incommunicable divine properties of growth and vitality that operate beneath the soil and move the seed from a buried thing to a living, fruit-bearing thing.

This parable is about the kingdom itself, but the kingdom includes the lives of those within it. Thus, it is about more than our lives, but it is not about less than our lives. The kingdom of God is an underground movement that emerges in victory above ground in the changed lives of those in whom the seed has found good soil. In the second parable we will consider the kingdom itself, but here let us consider how this parable applies to the individual Christian life.

The kingdom of God carries within itself incommunicable divine properties of growth and vitality. I call these divine properties of growth incommunicable because they defy our timing and understanding. Just how does a human heart change from lost and rebellious and dead to living and loving and merciful? It is a mystery of God! It is the power of the kingdom at work within us.

Do you realize that each time in your life when you set aside the old way you would like to act or react or think or talk and embrace instead the kingdom way of acting, talking, reacting, or thinking, the seed of the gospel blossoms and grows until mysteriously and in ways neither you nor anybody else saw coming, it emerges above the soil! Do you realize that all of the times you worship and read the scriptures and pray and learn and grow, the soil is becoming more and more conducive to kingdom growth and fruitfulness?

Sometimes we seem to grow quickly. Sometimes we seem to grow slowly. But kingdom practices never fail to contribute to our growth. The kingdom is a buried and emerging reality. In other words, the kingdom is a resurrection reality. As a result, all those within it will experience resurrection power. “The saying is trustworthy,” writes Paul in 1 Timothy 2:11, “for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him…”

To be in Christ is to be caught up in the kingdom dynamics embodied definitively in Christ: death, burial, and resurrection.

What did it look like in that tomb between good Friday and Easter? We cannot say. That door was sealed to us. “He sleeps and rises night and day,” Jesus said in verse 27, “and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.”

Do you understand now why it is that Christianity cannot be reduced to a fill-in-the-blank workbook. It cannot be manipulated. Our job is to die to self with Christ and live in Him! He will grow us as we yield to Him. We need not try to dissect what that looks like. We need only trust and die and rise again! We do not affect this transformation, but this does not mean that we refuse to strive for transformation. We give our all to Christ. We give our very lives. Only He, however, can give the increases.

Let us not skip quickly over the final verse of the first parable.

²⁹ But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

There will be a harvest, an end, when the sickle falls on the fields of the world. Jesus fleshes out this image of the final harvest more fully and descriptively in John 15.

⁵ I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. ⁶ If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.

This, too, is the kingdom: the final harvest, the falling of the curtain, the end. For the child of God, the end is the beginning. For those who have rejected Christ and His kingdom is not merely a rejection of the kingdom, it is also an embrace of the hell itself. There is eternal death outside the kingdom, a place of torment: “the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.”

See here the mysteries of the kingdom!

The kingdom of God is counterintuitive: it seems so insignificant yet so large that it is a haven of salvation and rest to all who come into it.

At the heart of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom is the idea of the kingdom of God as counterintuitive, paradoxical, upside-down, and unlikely. The kingdom operates in ways that surprise us, that catch us off guard.

³⁰ And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? ³¹ It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, ³² yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” ³³ With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. ³⁴ He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

In the first parable, Jesus was pointing to the mysterious generative powers of the kingdom. Here he is pointing to the unlikely and unforeseen growth and vitality of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is like a tiny mustard seed that becomes a large plant. James Brooks informs us that “although an herb, the mustard plant could grow to heights of ten to twelve feet and attain a thickness of three or four inches.”[2] This, Jesus tells us, is what the kingdom of God is like.

There are various ways that we can apply this. Consider, for instance, how the early church father’s approached this. The second/third century church father Tertullian saw the mustard seed as an apt symbol for the whole story of salvation history.

In just this way has righteousness grown in history. The proximate righteousness found in the created order is grounded in the holy God whose righteousness first emerged in a rudimentary stage as an undeveloped natural apprehension in the presence of the holy One. Then it advanced through the law and prophets to childhood. At long last through the gospel, God’s righteousness has been personally manifested with the vital energies of youth. Now through the paraclete, righteousness is being manifested in its mature stage.

That is a great way of looking at it. The stages of the seed’s journey from seed to large plant can be likened to the unfolding of God’s redemptive plan throughout the scope of history. In the second/third century Clement of Alexandria saw the mustard seed as descriptive of the nature of the word of God itself. “The word which proclaims the kingdom of heaven is sharp and pungent as mustard,” he wrote. “It represses bile (anger), and checks inflammation (pride). From this word flows the soul’s true vitality and fitness for eternity.”

One of the most beautiful of the early interpretations of this image comes from the fifth century. Peter Chrysologus wrote this about the Kingdom and the mustard seed:

It is up to us to sow this mustard seed in our minds and let it grow within us into a great tree of understanding reaching up to heaven and elevating all our faculties; then it will spread out branches of knowledge, the pungent savor of its fruit will make our mouths burn, its fiery kernel will kindle a blaze within us inflaming our hearts, and the taste of it will dispel our unenlightened repugnance. Yes, it is true: a mustard seed is indeed an image of the kingdom of God. Christ is the kingdom of heaven. Sown like a mustard seed in the garden of the virgin’s womb, he grew up into the tree of the cross whose branches stretch across the world. Crushed in the mortar of the passion, its fruit has produced seasoning enough for the flavoring and preservation of every living creature with which it comes in contact. As long as a mustard seed remains intact, its properties lie dormant; but when it is crushed they are exceedingly evident. So it was with Christ; he chose to have his body crushed, because he would not have his power concealed…Christ became all things in order to restore all of us in himself. The man Christ received the mustard seed which represents the kingdom of God; as man he received it, though as God he had always possessed it. He sowed it in his garden, that is in his bride, the Church. The Church is a garden extending over the whole world, tilled by the plough of th gospel, fenced in by stakes of doctrine and discipline, cleared of every harmful weed by the labor of the apostles, fragrant and lovely with perennial flowers: virgins’ lilies and martyrs’ roses set amid the pleasant verdure of all who bear witness to Christ and the tender plants of all who have faith in him. Such then is the mustard seed which Christ sowed in his garden. When he promised a kingdom to the patriarchs the seed took root in them; with the prophets it sprang up; with the apostles it grew tall; in the Church it became a great tree putting forth innumerable branches laden with gifts. And now you too must take the wings of the psalmist’s dove, gleaming gold in the rays of divine sunlight, and fly to rest for ever among those sturdy, fruitful branches. No snares are set to trap you there; fly off, then, with confidence and dwell securely in its shelter.[3]

The mustard seed is therefore Christ Himself and also His Church, the body of Christ. Christ came in the smallest of ways. He came in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Yet His kingdom has now swept over and throughout the earth. There are still too many who have never heard, to be sure. Even so, the name of Christ is now worshipped in countless tongues of men the world over.

We must see our great calling as the continuation of this great kingdom expansion, but we must see it in the right way. The mustard seed does not grow because we will it to grow. It grows by yielding itself to the life-giving God of heaven and earth. It grows as it dies and is buried. It grows as it yields to the Lord of the harvest.

This is how the kingdom grows. This is how the Church grows. This is how the individual Christian grows: by yielding itself and submitting itself to the Lord of the harvest.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.

 

[1] Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom. (New York, NY: Seagull Books, 2012), p.27.

[2] James A. Brooks, Mark. The New American Commentary. Gen. Ed., David S. Dockery. Vol.23 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1991), p.85.

[3] Patristic quotations are from Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds., Mark. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed., Thomas C. Oden. New Testament, Vol. II (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p.59-62.