Rev. Fr. (Dr.) Osmond Anike

Readings:

First Reading: Ezekiel 17:22-24 – I will plant a shoot on the high mountain of Israel.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 91(92):2-3, 13-16 – It is good to give you thanks, O Lord.

Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:6-10 – We want to be exiled from the body and make our home with the Lord.

Gospel: Mark 4:26-34 – The kingdom of God is a mustard seed growing into the biggest shrub of all.

As we return back to the “ordinary time” of the year after the Eastertide and the various solemnities that followed immediately, it is interesting that the church chose, as the gospel of today, Jesus’ description of what the kingdom of God is like. We live in a society obsessed with the unquestioned theory that “bigger is better”. This belief has given rise to struggle for the biggest versions of whatever we possess. The greatness of a country is measured by how big its economy is. A country’s military is assessed by how big and sophisticated its military hardware is. Individuals determine their importance in the society by how big their houses, cars and businesses are. Cities compete with one another to outsize each other in terms of vastness. Churches and other religious houses struggle to outshine each other in terms of how big and monumental their buildings are. And even inside each church, we tend to measure effectiveness with the number of congregants. We think that the more people we attract the better we are thought to be. Our so-called spirituality has indeed become crowd-measured type of spirituality. We think that the bigger, the better. But is this always true?

Jesus has taken a different approach – indeed, the opposite approach. He tends to pay more attention not to the big things but to the little and small things: He has used little children as the perfect image of the kingdom of God; he noticed the two copper coins offered by a widow and declared that she gave more than everyone else (even those who gave thousands that day); he singled out a man of small stature – Zacchaeus – from among the crowd of very tall and conspicuous people, etc. He continued this trend in the Gospel of today where he again compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed – that tiny little seed that eventually grows into the biggest shrub of all.

By means of parables like this, Jesus wants to challenge the popular notion that bigger is better. We should not confuse seize with importance. Even in nature, bigger is not always better. When one has a bigger debt, one’s life is not better. If one has cancer and the cancer grows bigger, the person’s health does not get better but worse. Events that attract larger crowds are not necessarily better events. Public opinion polls are not necessarily gauges of what is right and what is wrong as the media often tend to suggest. If we follow the trend of embracing “the bigger, the better” attitude, we might risk confusing large number with what is right or what is good for our souls. We need to consider our choices carefully, and we should not allow ourselves to be stampeded by the crowd. The fact that “everybody” is doing a particular thing does not thereby make that thing right.

The other aspect of the parable is the mysterious nature of growth of the kingdom of God. Just as a seed planted in the farm grows mysteriously while the planter sleeps in the night, so also does the kingdom of God grow mysteriously without our effort. Ezekiel uses similar metaphor in the first reading. What this tells us is that God is in charge of his kingdom and of his church. No one will be able to root out the kingdom once it has been planted. And Jesus has planted it. It is not your action or inaction that makes the church to grow but rather the mysterious watering from God himself. Sometimes I get the feeling that people are obsessed with the number of crowd present in their assembly because they think that by gathering such crowd they are helping to construct God’s kingdom. If the kingdom of God needs human effort to construct, then I don’t want to be in such a kingdom. The fact, however, is that God does not need our help to construct his kingdom. His kingdom is already there and grows like the mustard seed. Our duty is to fashion our lives in such a way that we can qualify to belong to that kingdom. And in our institutional church, size does not matter; what is important is the quality of our faith and witnessing. Of what use is the number of church attendees when faith is lacking in majority of them. It was Jesus who, following in his emphases on little things, said that if our faith is as little as a mustard seed, we can move mountains.

Brothers and sisters let us stop fixating on size and rather focus on quality. There are billions of Christians the world over, but how many really have faith? We lack faith because, instead of allowing God to act mysteriously in our lives, we rather think that God is as obsessed as we are with numbers, and as such, we focus our attention on gathering as many people as possible through various crooked, deceptive and dubious means to come to our assemblies and “help” God construct his kingdom. God said through the mouth of Ezekiel, “I will take a shoot and plant it myself on a very high mountain… It will sprout branches and bear fruit…” The more we recede to the background and allow God to take control, the better for us as Christians, and the easier for the world to know and encounter God.