[Jesus said:]“Hear, then, the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” (Matthew 13:18-23)
Seriously? This is how God's kingdom comes? This is how God's reign unfolds in the world?
Jesus' story about a farmer scattering seed might be familiar to our ears (after all, many of us heard it in worship this past Sunday), but it really is pretty bizarre if you give it a bit of thought. Jesus really does seem to be comparing the Reign of God--or the Yahweh Administration, if you like; the way God runs the universe--to a farm worker with a handful of seed that gets scattered recklessly, extravagantly, and (seemingly) wastefully over all sorts of terrain, risking that a great deal of that seed will not produce a harvest, but doing it anyway.
And I have to think that for the folks who first heard Jesus tell this tale, it sounded preposterous. What sort of a kingdom is this? What self-respecting king would let his regime be compared to something that seems so scattershot and risky? And of course, those question are not wrong: whatever Jesus is describing here, it surely does operate quite differently from the "kingdoms" of history.
Jesus' listeners have seen what those sorts of kingdoms and empires look like. They lived in the grip of the Roman Empire, which ruled with a ruthless efficiency and the brutal expediency of coercion. The empire accomplished its goals by conquering, by destroying, and by dominating. They marched their armies to your city's gates and invaded. They occupied your territory, put down revolts before they got out of hand, and extracted the wealth of your community in taxes, tribute, and plunder, all to finance more legions of their troops in your streets and more obnoxious triumphal arches and statues of their leaders to remind you who was in charge. And the Romans hadn't invented all of those tactics, even if they improved or even perfected them; the Romans' playbook was the same strategy behind the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, the Medes and the Persians before that, the Babylonians and Assyrians before them, and even further back to Pharaoh's Egypt. In other words, everybody who lived in Jesus' time and place knew what to expect from the world's kingdoms--intimidation, domination, and violence. You got what you wanted from the world by taking it through force. Everybody knew that.
And yet, that is precisely not how things look in the kind of story Jesus tells, about the surprising way that "the word of the kingdom" goes to work in God's way. Of all the images and all the metaphors in all the world that Jesus could have picked to describe the advance and spread of God's kingdom, Jesus picks perhaps the least empire-like one there is: a farmer seemingly wasting time and effort scattering seeds in every direction, who has to know that a good bit of his labor is going to be literally fruitless. A sower cannot coerce the ground to accept the seed. You cannot threaten the grains of wheat to make them sprout, and you cannot intimidate the soil into producing a harvest. All you can do, if you are the one scattering the seeds, is to let the soil be what it is going to be, and to let the seed be what the seed is going to be. You cannot force, shoot, stab, or dominate your way into a harvest. You can only scatter seed and allow life to take hold where it will. That is a decidedly un-empire-like approach.
And that is precisely the point, I am convinced. Jesus isn't announcing the "empire" of God as though God is just one more two-bit tyrant like Caesar and his fawning successors. God doesn't rule the world like Rome does, by fiat and force and coercing compliance, but more like a farmer who plants... and waits... and risks that some of the effort will appear to have been wasted. And that is exactly why the "word of the kingdom" is Good News and not just some repackaged imperial propaganda.
When our message as Christians sounds more like the Empire's edicts--and when we try to legislate that all have to fall in line with our wishes--we have lost the very thing that makes the Gospel good and news. When we make the Reign of God sound like another decree of Caesar, we have left the actual message of Jesus behind and fallen for a counterfeit. So these days, when I hear folks clamoring for displays of Christian power and influence through legislation--whether putting up monuments of the Ten Commandments at courthouse complexes or mandating that public schools read the Bible or whatever other culture-war foolishness we get carried away with--I am concerned that we have missed the point Jesus has been trying to make. That's not how God accomplishes divine purposes, as Jesus tells it. God doesn't use force or coercion, but coaxes and cultivates. The right picture is not of invading legions of a divine empire, but seed scattered by a sower who knows full well that some of what is offered to the earth will be rejected, will wither, or will be eaten up by the birds. It may startle us to realize that this is how God runs the universe, but this is the way Jesus talks about God's Reign.
So to come back to the questions I posed at the start of today's devotion, yes. Yes, this is how God's kingdom comes. Yes, seriously, this is how God's reign unfolds "on earth as it is in heaven."
Lord God, let your reign spring up among us and in us like seeds breaking open into stalks of wheat.
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