INTRODUCTION TO THEME

Today is the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, and in the lectionary we’re continuing on a series of readings from the Gospel of Mark – last week was Mark 3:20-35, a passage which ends with Jesus saying enigmatically to those gathered around him: “Here are my mother and my sisters and brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” …… The Gospel reading today is the passage from Mark 4 which begins: “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…”, two parables of the Kingdom, the second of which is the famous Parable of the Mustard Seed. So obviously, today, we’ll be focussing on …. the Kingdom! We’ll see if we can make sense of this centrally important idea—it’s really Jesus’ number one message in all the Gospels— which, however, even though he talks about it constantly, Jesus never directly explains.

GOSPEL READING: Mark 4:26-32

REFLECTION

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground…” ….. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God ….? 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 …”

“The word ‘Kingdom’ is found fifty-five times in Matthew; twenty times in Mark, forty-six times in Luke and five times in John.” – a total of 126 times. It is clearly Jesus’ number one message—the Gospel is the Good News of… the Kingdom, Jesus announces and inaugurates it—if we don’t get the Kingdom, we don’t get the Gospel. But Jesus only ever speaks about the Kingdom indirectly, in parables, metaphors, what seem sometimes like riddles.

On the internet I found a list of 90 Gospel verses referring to the Kingdom, but not in one of them does Jesus explain directly what the Kingdom is—he just seems to assume that the people he’s speaking to have some sort of idea of what it is. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of prophecy, the great King God sends to save his people—that’s what the people he was talking to were hoping he was, and that’s what he actually was.

So, a King has a Kingdom: it’s a literal kingdom, an objective state of human relationships in the world, a Kingdom of human beings (all the citizens are humans), but no human being is the King, rather God is the King …… the Reign of God, or Reign of Christ, as we often now say.

Now, if the Kingdom is just a literal kingdom, and the people Jesus is speaking to know that, why then does Jesus speak about it only in riddles? This can only be because the people, and this includes Jesus’ disciples, had the wrong idea of what his Kingdom would be like, and that they were so far away from being able to understand what it would be like, that he has to speak about it in a deliberately obtuse, indirect, paradoxical way, pulling out every trick in the book to disrupt their old way of thinking about it!

And that’s because The Kingdom, Jesus’ Kingdom, is an absolutely, totally, radically new idea breaking into the world, it’s directly from God, it’s not an idea any human could have, naturally, created—it was, and still is, an unnatural, unhuman, radically new conception ……. It requires an entirely new way of thinking, a new mindset, to even begin to get your head around it—still today!

The beautiful Greek word is metanoia …. It’s the word that is translated in the New Testament as “repentance”, or “conversion”, but both these English words, I think, understate the original concept in Greek – from meta-, change or transformation, and gnosis, knowledge, thinking.

The concept of metanoia is used in modern psychology: metanoia is “the process of experiencing a psychotic ‘breakdown’ and subsequent, positive psychological re-building or ‘healing’”—now that, I think, really captures the experience that is being referred to in the New Testament: breakdown, repentance, then healing, re-building, a completely new mindset.

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”—the final verse of our New Testament reading for today from 2 Corinthians 5. Metanoia is a radical inner transformation, not a merely intellectual thing. In his conversation with Nicodemus that we read on Trinity Sunday, John Chapter 3, Jesus describes it as being born again—“no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again”—implying a sort of death—psychotic breakdown—first before being born again a new creation.

It’s a gradual process, of course, a little death and rebirth every day—as the saying goes, we “die to self” everyday—Jesus “died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (that’s verse 15 of 2 Corinthians 5).

Ah … that’s the nature of the transformation in question, the metanoia: from natural selfishness—we live purely for self—to very unnatural selflessness—we live for others, we live for Christ. A completely new mindset.

But … what we have to absolutely understand is that no effort of our own can bring about this metanoia, this inner transformation, rebirth. It starts with a breakdown—a breakdown is something that happens to you, you can’t break yourself down. The most you can do—what you need to do—is let go, give up, let it happen—it’s an act of faith—you let God break you down, trusting that God will heal you and bring you back to life, a new life, a life free of selfish grasping, a life of selflessness, of selfless love—and God does!

The Kingdom: a radical new way of living, completely unnatural: an objective state of human relationships in the world based on selflessness, selfless cooperation. A Kingdom of humans without a human king, as I said before, rather the invisible God of love is the king, Christ is the king. No human king: well, rather than a kingdom, then, we would now call it a Commonwealth, a Republic—the Republic of God I called it a previous time I was here. It is, or would be, the perfection, the ideal of ….. Democracy!

“The Kingdom is the sort of thing you’d want to come about—just about everyone would want to come about—even if you didn’t believe in Jesus!”—I actually said this to a friend of mine the other day, a person who is an avowed atheist—and they agreed! It’s everyone’s ideal, of a perfect society, a perfect world; of course it is.

“But fat chance,” I said, “of it happening without Jesus, without a God of love who really exists, out there, acting in human life….” Why? Because if it’s just up to us humans, if we truly are on our own, then we really are in trouble. All we can see is the terrible things happening around us in the world right now, humans doing terrible things to each other, natural human selfishness and evil seeming to rule everywhere we look, and we can’t even imagine how it could get better.

You know, I think this is why there’s such an obsession with dystopian literature, film and art at the moment. Most people in the west have abandoned God, they’re either agnostic or atheist, they have no faith in anything outside of themselves, and they sense the potential, for disaster, for Mad Max, A Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, The Planet of the Apes—it comes about because of nuclear conflict or disaster, environmental collapse, our whole species is threatened with extinction. Dystopia seems to have captured the human imagination. People can’t imagine the opposite—utopia—the Kingdom—there’s no genre of utopian literature or art, just dystopia! With no God of love to put our trust in anymore, just us here ourselves on our own, the future definitely looks pretty gloomy.

But there is a God of love to put our trust in—we believe! As I said, it’s our mindset, or whole way of thinking, our imagination, that needs to be transformed, before we can understand, before we can believe, in the Kingdom.

Back to the people Jesus was talking to in today’s Gospel reading. In what way did they have the wrong mindset, the wrong idea of the Kingdom? They were starting to think, to hope, that Jesus was the Messiah. But they had the wrong expectation of what the Messiah would do, the sort of Kingdom he would bring into the world—they thought the Messiah would be a mighty king, a mighty leader who would expel the Roman imperial oppressors of the day and restore the great kingdom of Judah. They had no idea that the real oppressors of the day, of any day, were … themselves, their own selfish, sinful selves …. and until they went through the amazing metanoia experience, beginning the transformation from natural selfishness to unnatural selflessness, there was no way they could understand the sort of Kingdom Jesus had come to inaugurate.

It’s a Kingdom, a Commonwealth, a Republic coming—there’s an inevitability about it—[even when, as they often do, things look pretty terrible] ….. This is today’s two little parables of the Kingdom from Mark 4. It starts from a small seed and grows, in the first case, into a rich harvest of grain—more seeds—or, in the second case, into a mighty shrub. The seed contains everything within it, all the genetic information, the complete blueprint, for the mature plant it becomes—there’s an organic inevitability about it—provided the conditions are right, good soil, sunlight, water, it will happen!

The seed dies before it germinates and grows into a new plant—well, sort of—the seed is certainly no longer a seed, that phase of its existence has gone, it gives up its old life to give birth to radically new life. Likewise, Christ is the seed of the Kingdom who dies before the Kingdom germinates and starts growing—well, again, sort of—as we know, he did die, and like the seed he gave up his old life to give birth to radically new life, the Kingdom.

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

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

Amen!

 

June 2024