Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s Gospel we have a most extraordinary image of what Jesus expects his work to produce and achieve, and it’s a rather surprising metaphor.  This is presented in contrast to the first reading from Ezekiel, in which God says, “I will choose a branch from the top of the tree, and I will plant it on top of a mountain, and it will grow into a great tree.”  Jesus says just the opposite: “I’m going to pick a little tiny mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds.  We will scatter the seed on the earth, and we’ll hardly notice that it’s growing.  It grows all of itself.”

What an image of how change happens, how growth happens, and how love happens.  You see, it’s not in doing great, big, heroic things, but in doing little things with love and joy, little things like being a good mother on an ordinary day when no one notices.  Notice that Jesus’ parables of the kingdom are intentionally non-glorious.  Jesus doesn’t talk about creating a beautiful building.  He doesn’t talk about running an institution from Rome.  He just talks about people doing little things that are hardly noticed.  And they change the world.  Little by little, they yield the harvest.

There are many rich images of God in the Bible: God is a king.  God is a warrior battling for the people.  God is a shepherd cradling lost sheep in his big arms.  And we should know by now that in the Bible God is not always a “he.”  God is also a mother caring for her children.  Today we catch a unique glimpse of God snoozing away.  God is sleeping not because God doesn’t care but because God trusts us and our own certain growth.  God takes the time to close his eyes and wait.  Like every good mother, God knows how to let go of her kids.

Most of us in this church are little people.  We’re not heroic or big.  Our names are not in the papers.  It’s about little things done with love in our ordinary lives.  At the end of time we will look back and see that these are the mustard seeds which changed the world.  It doesn’t look like “church work” at all, but Jesus is saying here that this is the real and deepest meaning of church.  It’s just a little mustard seed – that quietly grows and spreads this love, this healing, this joy, this caring – that is the Risen Christ.                                              

Paul A. Magnano, Pastor