A Lamp and a Seed

Between the sower and the storm, Mark 4:21-34 collects a handful of short sayings and two more parables. They are easy to pass over on the way to the more dramatic material. They repay a slow read.

First the lamp. Does anyone bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? No; it goes on its stand. Whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed. Jesus has just said that he speaks in parables so that outsiders do not perceive. Now he says that the concealment is temporary. The secret of the kingdom is not meant to stay secret. It is a lamp waiting for its stand, and the stand is coming.

Then the seed that grows by itself. A man scatters seed, sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows though he does not know how. The soil produces on its own, stalk, head, full grain, and then the harvest. Only Mark records this parable, and it is one of the gentlest in the Gospels. The farmer does not make the growth happen. He cannot see it happening. He sows, he waits, he reaps.

Then the mustard seed, smallest of the seeds sown in the ground, growing into the largest of garden plants, with branches large enough for birds to nest in. The kingdom looks negligible at the start. It will not stay that way.

Put together, these sayings describe a kingdom that grows in ways the disciples cannot control, on a schedule they do not set, from beginnings that look like nothing, toward a disclosure that is certain. That is the frame Mark puts around the whole ministry of Jesus, and it is the frame to put around your own small acts of faithfulness.

You cannot see what the word you spoke to a friend last month is doing in the dark of their life. You cannot make your children's faith sprout by watching harder. You sow, and you sleep, and you rise. The one who spoke these parables was himself a seed that went into the ground. What came up was the church. Trust the growth you cannot see.