A hidden life

An audio recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 13: 18-21) is another short extract and its parables are themselves more like extended similes: the kingdom of heaven is like a tiny mustard seed that grows into a tree and houses the birds; the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman used to prove (or proof in the US) her bread. So many of Jesus’ parables or teaching points leverage the common features of the culture and society in which He lived, and today’s similes are no different. Sometimes parables do not need to be long, no more than blog posts, so let us emulate the economy of the Lord.

Why is the kingdom of God like a mustard seed? Because it thus escapes from human calculations and forecasts which would condemn it to be always small and inconsequential. Yet, lo and behold, the mustard seed and the kingdom defy the predictions of the experts and the money counters and not only mature into their fullest selves but also become a home for others. How did something so mean, so low in our all too human esteem, become transformed? Opening our minds to that reality lies along the path of wisdom. We must let go and let God show the way, God who designed the mustard seed, as He designed His kingdom. Love, like fire, begins with a spark of ignition but then is capable of consuming all before it. This is the power of the mustard seed, and the Lord has chosen the little ones of this world, the anawim, to confound the powerful.

The second simile of the leaven is similar but underscores more clearly the secrecy of the work of the kingdom. Watch a dough proving and you will see no spectacular signs of the extraordinary and transformative force within. Yet, turn away and return your gaze, and then you see what has been achieved. Life goes on, hope is not extinguished, but meanders along its course towards its appointed end, despite the indifference of all around. We might alter just a little the words of Auden’s poem Le Musée des Beaux Arts to express this thought:

 

About “the kingdom” they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood.

 

Hope for the kingdom is like that: patient, hidden, bearing all things, believing all things, enduring all things, while the leavening takes place.

And, how much such similes can bring comfort to our own souls when we feel becalmed on the seas of life, so little changed, so little repentant, so little resembling the face of Him whom we promised to follow.

But it is not the promise we make that will deliver the kingdom; it is the grace He has put in us – the smallest of traces, the hidden power – which, if we are faithful, may one day transform us so that our hearts become what they are meant to be: a tree of life for others, a bread for their nourishment, and the fulfilment of His word in us.