Week 11 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm ; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

During the week my sister, who lives in Australia, sent some wonderful photographs of the winter landscape near the Murray River estuary. Meanwhile, in Rome there is the annual surprise of seeing once again just how much vegetation there is in the city, something the bare winter months can lead us to forget.

The readings today are full of vegetation: seeds and shrubs, shoots and branches, blades and ears, grain and harvest. Jesus's parable clearly echoes the text of Ezekiel in the first reading. Israel is small, just a shoot, but grows by God's grace to become a large cedar, offering hospitality to birds of every kind. The other nations - 'all the trees of the field' - will see the Lord's hand at work there.

Jesus repeats it, almost word for word, except that he applies it now to the 'kingdom of God'. This is not simply identified with Israel. Between Ezekiel and Jesus came other experiences and losses that obliged a continuing reflection on the service this tree was intended to offer to 'the birds of the air', what lesson about God it was intended 'all the trees of the field' should learn from this smallest of all seeds become the largest of plants. 

Neither can we make a simple identification between the Kingdom of God that is coming and any historical or institutional anticipation of it. It is a 'home' to which we still look forward, as Paul says in the second reading. We are already 'at home in the body', which means being away from the Lord. But the desire to be 'at home' with the Lord would mean being away from the body. Either way courage is required, he says, to remain in this our first home, walking by faith and not by sight, or to be ready to leave this home for our eternal one with the Lord.

It is important to try to understand where we are, in what season of God's great project we are living our lives. Between the sowing of seed and the reaping of its fruit there are many seasons to be lived through. Is it summer or winter, spring or autumn, for Israel or for the Church? For me or for you on our personal journeys?

The message today is to be courageous no matter where we find ourselves. The project is taking shape, albeit silently, often invisibly, sometimes paradoxically, moving towards its fulfilment in the Lord's harvest. Our job is to keep our hearts and minds fixed on Christ, aspiring simply to please him and leaving it to him to determine the best way for us to bear fruit.