Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
For every backyard gardener invasive weeds can be maddening. In our area this is especially true of chick-weed and honeysuckle. Neither are native plants. On Arbor Days, back in the 1940s & 1950s, honeysuckle was sent home with school children to plant. A poor choice as when you think this plant has been eradicated it pops up again with renewed vigor.
Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed, a common weed. Now if he had said, “The Kingdom of God is like a cedar of Lebanon,” we could have said “ooh” and “ah!” But an invasive weed? Like the dreaded and invasive honeysuckle we know so well in Ohio, mustard plants unrelentingly reproduce and vigorously spread out in both rich soil and poor soil, maliciously threatening valuable plants. What’s going on with this parable?
For starters, all parables must be seen through the lens of first century Palestine. And all Gospel parables threaten world power. The Kingdom of God is revolutionary and threatening to worldly powers and domination systems.
Some people think that Jesus was “apolitical.” But in those times everyone was religious and everyone was political. Culturally, religion and politics were wedded; separation of “religion and state” would not come about until the Age of Enlightenment (1700 years later).
Remember the titulus charge above the cross, “King of the Jews.” Those under the thumb of the domination system of the day (Rome) are first in God’s Kingdom. Like the mustard weed, once established, this subversive Kingdom changes everything and is impossible to be rid of. Like honeysuckle, once it takes off, look out! Rome and all the future Romes think themselves secure, but in truth their time is short. God’s Kingdom has gotten into the nooks and crannies of the world. Dominant powers will succumb to those whom it views as disposable and worthless.
How are we planting mustard seeds, you and I?
-Timothy J. Cronin