If you’re like me, there are specific moments in your life where you wish God would have showed up and… [fill in the blank]. When my little 13 year old brother started to go blind, we wanted to know why God didn’t step in and restore his eyesight. When Ben died later that summer due to a brain tumor, we wondered – with deep bewilderment – why God didn’t show up and save our dear brother’s life.
Watch the news. Hear the statistics. Listen to painful stories of loss, abuse, neglect, violence, mayhem, terror, insanity. With all that is wrong in the world, how is God working? Is God doing anything? I’m still not immune to the bewilderment. Like a lot of people, we wonder at how God can be God and let so much evil wreck so many lives.
But: a thoughtful and prayerful reading of the Gospels in the New Testament reveal a Jesus of Nazareth who speaks to the pain that perplexed the people of Israel, Rome, and now us. In the gospel according to Mark, there is a short parable where Jesus explains how God works in the world:
“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain – first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
Obviously this parable doesn’t explain everything, nor is it meant to. But it does shed some important light on the questions the people of Israel asked while under the brutal rule of Rome. How God works in the world is attuned to the ways of the earth.
Just as a sower accumulates wisdom of seeds and soil while using diligence to prepare for the needed harvest, the sower must also trust in the mysteries of the seed and soil. So with us, as we work with God in Christ among the real world. The wisdom and diligence we attain from doing God’s will adds to the flourishing of each other, while we trust the Lord with what we don’t understand.
We want peace on earth? God wants it more. We want everyone to flourish in life? Jesus wants it more. I don’t know all the reasons for why Rome oppressed Israel or Ben died of a tumor. But I do believe that in both cases God was present with his people, in the midst of the suffering, always working through our sowing of faith, hope and love to produce a harvest that heals.
If we learn anything from this parable, Christians are ones sent out together into our community as little Christs to sow good works everyday, for the nourishment and flourishing of all, in the face of evil, amidst our own suffering, done with unstoppable love.
