Friday in the Third Week After the Epiphany | By Chris Farrar

2 Samuel 11:1-17

Psalm 51:1-10

Mark 4:26-34

Ah, the mustard seed. What a familiar, warm text. Maybe, like me, you learned the story as a child during Sunday school. As a kid there’s a real sense of potential. It’s all about the mustard seed – how the smallest of all the seeds can become the greatest of all shrubs!

I imagine we’ve all heard a sermon about the other Parable of the Sower, of the seeds scattered in various places, and asked ourselves – which seed am I?

So much of the exegesis done on the Gospels and the catechesis done in the Church is about asking the question our local demi-god lives by, “How then shall we live?” But we often interpret this question and our answers through that uniquely post-Industrialization heresy of individualism.  We ask, how do I grow from a tiny seed into the greatest of all shrubs? How do I ripen before the harvest?

How do I get to heaven?

Growing up in American Christianity you’d be forgiven for developing this theological peculiarity. It’s certainly not unique to our country, but there is something distinctly Western, distinctly capitalistic about asking, “How do I save my own hide?”

Inherent in this internal disposition are our past struggles with fire and brimstone, predestination, and whether we’ve been “saved.” This may be especially true for those of us who have come to the Church from other denominations.

Regardless, for many of us, at the center of our understanding of Christianity – the very crux of our faith – is an anxiety about personal salvation. And in centering the question of whether we’ll go to Heaven, we forgot the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The parable of the mustard seed is not about our personal faith, or salvation. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God,” Jesus asked? The kingdom of God is not some future, post-eschaton reality. It is not shiny gates and St. Peter in white robes. The kingdom of God is organic, wild, growing – it is this very place and time and those of us gathered here in community. The kingdom of God is the Christian society that Christ instituted among His followers. And when that society grows, and flourishes, even “the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” Even those outside of our bounds will benefit from it.

Our Psalm is a familiar one and stirs up in the more liturgically minded of us visions of Ash Wednesday, with its penitence and focus on the personal things we’ve chosen to “give up.” And while I am very partial to the season of Lent and do understand the deep need for self-reflection, the way it is often approached does smack of this sense of individuality.  

“Against you only have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight. And so you are justified when you speak, and upright in your judgement.”

Through the lens of our American Christianity this rings so true – yes, I am a sinner! Yes, my greatest sins, so large as to dwarf the harmful way I treat my neighbor, are my sins against God. Yes, God will – and only God can – judge me.

Our individualism blinds us to a truth the Hebrews would have understood – God’s judgement inside of time is so often reserved for societies and nations, not for us as individuals. Scripture recounts stories of God’s judgement, and the vast majority are in response to societal inequities – the ways that Israel, or Sodom, or some other people treated the poor and needy among them – and not the way individuals treated each other.

Despite what we may have been led to believe, the Kingdom of God is not Heaven. It is our Christian society in the here and now. And applying this understanding to the Psalm brings forth a different meaning. It is not that my sins against God are so great as to outweigh my sins against my neighbor, but that all of my sins – my selfishness, my rudeness, my uncharitable thoughts about a neighbor or classmate or a fellow member of my community – are sins against God. We are all created in the image of the Divine, and to commit sin against one another is to reject God’s presence in Creation.

We must understand this.

We must have a societal understanding of the Gospel.

And we must understand that while yes, the Good News of Jesus Christ is that we will have eternal life, it is also that we are called to labor in the here and now for the Kingdom of God, and that we must continue to do so, from this time forth, and forevermore.