Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Today’s scriptures are about having the courage to keep on going even in the face of terrible adversity. I like readings stories about someone’s faith in the face of adversity: like, say, the story of Oscar Romero trying to defend the poor in El Salvador and being assassinated for it; or the story of Saint Maximilian Kolbe who, in the concentration camps, kept his own faith alive and helped others. I often wonder, could I be such a person myself? I worry that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be a person who lives for Christ this way. I worry that I would be concerned only about myself. The great thing about today’s scriptures is that they point to how I, too, can become a faith-filled person who witnesses to Jesus Christ no matter the situation. The gospel (Mark 4:26-34) contains two of Jesus’ seed parables, which he uses to describe the Kingdom of God. He talks about a person who scatters seed, but then goes to bed and wakes up noticing that the seed has sprouted a bit. He has scattered the seed, but how the seed grows, how fast, and where – all of those are mysteries to the man. In our day, the way seeds work are not mysteries in the sense that we do know something of how plants spring from seeds. But what is the greater point here is that there isn’t a whole lot we do in our own involvement in plant growth. We can aid in growth, for sure – and there are things we can do that are detrimental to the growth of a plant. But when it comes right down to it, we cannot attach a root to a seed, nor make a leaf spring from a stem.

The second parable is one of my favorites – the Mustard Seed Parable. God makes something small grow into something great. The mustard seed that Jesus speaks of, by the way, is not the kind that we have in our kitchens here. The yellow seeds are European and larger, and flower into relatively short bushes. But the mustard seed in Israel – it is a tiny black seed, no larger than the period on the end of this sentence. And it does, indeed, grow into a gigantic tree, large enough for birds to build nests there. Jesus is making the point that even the tiniest of tiny things can grow into large things. There again, we do not have much of a hand in actually making the tree grow. And we do not know which of the very tiny seeds could become a large tree someday.

Both of these seed parables emphasize the point that I’m sure many have heard: our task as Christians, as people living into this Kingdom of God, is to concentrate on this minute, this hour, this day, and to try to live as witnesses of Christ for each of those minutes. We cannot worry about next year – just this minute. For those in adverse situations, or even (and perhaps especially) in less-than-adverse situations, this is providing a good account of how to live.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews takes up this theme (10:32-39) as well. He knows that many in his audience have already experienced adversity of some sort: “at times you were publicly exposed to abuse and affliction”. But the author exhorts people not to give up – but hang on to the hope and belief that soon, Jesus will be with us again. Moreover, those who “endure” are the ones who have life. They are the ones who are living life!

So for us Christians today, whether we are truly living in adverse situations now (loss of a job, perhaps, or loss of a loved one) or whether we are, on the whole, rather comfortable, the charge remains the same: live each minute in Christ, as a Christian witness. Do not worry about tomorrow or next year. I do think that is how people like Maximilian Kolbe were able, even in prison, to consider the needs of his neighbor.

Jana M. Bennett