Sunday Meditation: The Seed Parables

In today’s Gospel readings, Jesus is seen preaching in Galilee, and on what does He preach?  He preaches on the kingdom of God.  How does He illustrate what the kingdom of God is like?  He uses two parables that together are referred to as “the seed parables.”    

 

Jesus said to the crowds:

“This is how it is with the kingdom of God;

it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land

and would sleep and rise night and day

and through it all the seed would sprout and grow,

he knows not how.

Of its own accord the land yields fruit,

first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.

And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once,

for the harvest has come.”

 

He said,

“To what shall we compare the kingdom of God,

or what parable can we use for it?

It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground,

is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth.

But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants

and puts forth large branches,

so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.”

With many such parables

he spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it.

Without parables he did not speak to them,

but to his own disciples he explained everything in private.

~Mk 4:26-34

In Galilee Jesus must be speaking to agricultural workers.  As a gardener, this resonates with me, and I assume it resonated with Jesus’s audience.

Dr. Brant Pitre explains them well.  First on the Parable of the Growing Seed. 

 

Second on the Parable of the Mustard Seed.

 

Isn’t that fascinating?  Dr. Pitre always seems to enlighten in an unexpected way. 

 

Sunday Meditation: “This is how it is with the kingdom of God.”

 

Our Sunday John Michael Talbot hymn, “Behold the Kingdom.”