Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/073012.cfm

"the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
it is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
it becomes a large bush,
and the 'birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.'"


To the unimaginative and uninitiated, seeds are unpromising things. Acorns don't look like oak trees nor does a bushel of wheat look like a family's food supply for a year. A mustard seed looks like a mote of dust. And yet seeds carry potential and it takes a human being, with the capacity to recall the past and expect the future, to see their potential.

The Christian often suffers that lack of imagination in handling the Word of God. The preacher expects his congregation to change their ways today. The counselor expects her advice to be welcomed and followed. The parent urges her children not to emulate her past mistakes.  All of which is wasted energy. Or so it would seem.

But these words of advise have their effect, as Jesus assures us. They are seeds whose ripening must follow in the fullness of time. When that time might be no one can say. Saint Paul contemplated that frustrating beauty in his First Letter to the Corinthians (3:5-9)

what is apollos, after all, and what is paul? ministers through whom you became believers, just as the lord assigned each one. i planted, apollos watered, but god caused the growth. therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only god, who causes the growth. the one who plants and the one who waters are equal, and each will receive wages in proportion to his labor. for we are god’s co-workers; you are god’s field, god’s building.

Jesus urges the minister of the word to be patient with the ripening process. It might be easy to predict when the blade will appear and the fruit will ripen; it's not difficult to predict when the baby will be born or the child enter puberty; but it's not so easy to predict when the Word of God will mature.Mark Twain had a sense for that when he said:

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

A century later, when some 40-year-old children still live with their parents, we must expect to wait even longer for God's word to ripen and bear fruit in us, and in our contemporaries.