Reading Scripture

3rd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:33-34

17 June 2012

John D. Lane

Trinity Church, Staunton VA

An audio version of this sermon is available here.

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

“In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.” So says author Fran Lebowitz.

Sometimes we have to be reminded that Jesus does not draw up algebraic equations on 1st century blackboards. His scientific facts are sometimes not quite right. He speaks in parables, not allegories. Many parables begin: “The Kingdom of God is like ....”

I took a pastoral counseling course, taught by a Jungian analyst. He emphasized that it was often very difficult to be certain about reality. For instance, a patient might think that she was being followed. Was this really so? Often there was no way of knowing. He suggested using the phrase “as though.” “It is as though someone is following me, and I feel frightened.” Not much different from Jesus’ parables: “The Kingdom of God is like ....”

The Bible is much more than literature, but to read and hope to understand it, we often have to  approach it as literature. The Bible has characters–the most important of whom is God: Father, Son & Holy Spirit–plot, metaphors, similes–“the Kingdom of God is like”–irony, twists, suspense, surprises, blood and gore, mystery, physical settings, intrigue, relationships, etc.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus uses a slight variation in introducing the parable: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” “As if,” “as though,” “like,” so on, but not is, not equals, not algebra, not arithmetic, not 1 = 1, 2 = 2, not literalism.

Occasionally, I think, we can indeed take Jesus literally, such as when he tells the rich young man to sell all that he has and give the money to the poor. That’s the kind of statement we are, however, quite willing to take figuratively. But Saint Francis took it literally. As someone noted, Saint Francis is the most admired and least imitated of all the saints. I had a friend who for many years headed up stewardship at a large parish. Part of his shtick was to speak at each of the services on Loyalty Sunday. He himself was committed to the tithe, and he made an impassioned plea to the congregation. Afterwards, one of his friends came up to him, and said, “Purnell, you were really great this year. You almost convinced me.” Despite the fact that Jesus spoke about money more than anything else, we don’t take those passages seriously.

One commentator, Eugene Boring–what a name, think of this as a Boring quote–says: “In the preaching of Jesus, parables were not vivid decorations of a moralistic point but were disturbing stories that threatened the hearer's secure mythological world–the world of assumptions by which we habitually live, the unnoticed framework of our thinking within which we interpret other data.” [Eugene Boring, The New Interpreter's Bible (Matthew), p 299, quoted by Brian Stoffregen in Exegetical Notes]

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”


The first of today’s short botanical parables threatens one of our mythological assumptions, that we are in control of our own destiny. “Be good and prosper.” “Be bad and be punished.” But we know in our hearts that this is indeed myth, actually nonsense. Bad things do happen to good people. And the wicked can prosper. When I was newly ordained, I had a bishop tell me something and then say, “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.” I soon forgot whatever tale he told me, but 40 years later, I remember how ready he was to lie about it. He was not a great moral teacher.

The Kingdom of God, Jesus tells us, is not something we control. Seeds sprout and grow. We can try to influence this through weeding, applying fertilizer, and praying for rain, but there are no guarantees. God is the 900-pound gorilla: he does what he wants.

We can prepare for the Kingdom of God, but we can’t make it happen. Many fools have tried to predict the coming of the Kingdom, quoting the Bible but ignoring the words of Jesus: “You know not the day nor the hour.” There is no precision to understanding parables, but these are some of the thoughts that this story has teased out of me this morning.

“With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

There are four things about this parable which spring out at me:

(1) Jesus was a carpenter, not a farmer. He needs to be excused for saying the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds; it isn’t. This is not a discrepancy that proves the Bible is all nonsense. Jesus is making a literary point. Poetic license, please. Get over it.

(2) Mustard may not be the greatest of all shrubs either; it only gets about 10 feet tall.

(3) What his audience knows, but Jesus doesn’t say, is that the mustard plant is an invasive weed. It grows easily and widely, like dandelions in our yards. The Kingdom of God is near you and everywhere, just like mustard or dandelions or morning glory or kudzu–whether you want it near you or not.

(4) Besides producing Grey Poupon, the mustard plant has other functions. It is good for God’s creatures, the birds. The Kingdom of God, though we don’t control it, is a good thing.

I am suggesting one way of looking at the Bible in the hope of understanding and learning from it. Look for repetition, consistency, a vision of God that is the sometimes the same in both Old and New Testaments–Hebrew Bible and Greek Bible, to be politically correct–a vision of God which develops as the stories unfold. But it is literature, not science. It has nuances. Prepare to be confused occasionally–or often. Expect to have your preconceptions challenged.

I had a very frightening professor in advanced preaching. He said that God would forgive an ineffective sermon, but would never forgive a sermon that was bad because the preacher had given little thought or time to preparing it. He had been dead several years before my Saturday nightmares ended. I would be getting up to preach my worst effort of the year, and Edmund Steimle would be in the third row. I would wake up in a cold sweat.

The parables are relevant to us, and I close with another Steimle point: A sermon should be 20% then, the time of Jesus, and 80% now, the time in which we live. I believe he meant that the reason we read, study, and preach the Bible is because it matters to us, now. It’s worth the effort.

So I end where I began:  “In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.”