THE KINGDOM IS GROWING
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
June 12, 2021
It is very appropriate that today’s gospel parables from
Jesus come to us in the very midst of Cicada season- you know, those
bugs/insects that spring up from underground, right on schedule every 17
years. They live for a few weeks in the
tops of the trees, where they make a whole lot of noise, and they mate, and
then they die. Their offspring will
arise in the year 2038 in order to do exactly the same thing. Many of us won’t be around by then. But they will be. Their progeny will outlast all of us.
We don’t get Cicadas here in Minnesota, but by coincidence I
was attending a conference in Reston, VA 17 years ago when the parents of these
bugs were all over the place. The only
other thing I remember about that visit was that it coincided with the funeral
of Ronald Reagan, which I watched on TV in my hotel room and which was
happening about 10 miles away in D.C. It
seems that the only purpose of a Cicada is to ensure that there be a future for
Cicadas. 17 years is a very long time to
wait. The last season of Cicadas was
during the presidency of George W. Bush. It was the year that Google became a public company.
Think of all of the people that you have known & loved
that were alive in the year 2004 that now are not. I think of my parents. And I think of all of the people that you now
know & love who were not alive then. I think of my nephews & nieces.
And why is it exactly 17 years for the Cicadas? How does that happen? There is a great deal of mystery involved in
these bugs. And that’s good. And it’s a great way to help us wrap our
imaginations around Jesus’s words regarding the Kingdom of God in today’s
gospel.
It is something alive and growing every single day, right
beneath our feet, even when we never give it a thought- which is just about all
the time.
For a few weeks at a time, maybe 3 or 4 or 5 times during
our life, it erupts-loudly-in order to remind us that it hasn’t gone away, and
won’t. And there’s nothing that human
beings can do to interfere with it. These little creatures are more durable than we are, despite our proud
beliefs otherwise, and despite our sometimes desperate and frantic and violent
efforts to be in charge of our own fate. There’s something much, much bigger that is in progress here, and it
won’t be stopped, because it is of God & not of us, even when it seems
silent.
This Reign of God is not a condition that we manipulate into
existence by our own cleverness or hard work or pious religious practices. To imagine otherwise is to imagine ourselves
to be in the place where only God belongs. We can certainly obscure it, or perhaps delay its full realization on
account of our sins- individually and collectively. Our God has requested our cooperation in
making the kingdom manifest before the world, and has given us gifts with which
to do exactly that.
But let us never be so audacious as to imagine that God has
given us the authority to derail His intentions for the salvation of the
world. That is nothing that is within
our power to determine. That’s why we
Christians speak of it as the “Reign of God” & not “The reign of us”. The Cicadas live & grow & mature right
here among us all the time, even when we rarely see them, or rarely think of
them. So does the Kingdom.
Jesus tells us today that the farmer who scatters seed in
his field goes about daily life not really knowing how the crops he has planted
actually come to maturity from one day to the next, but that it is up to God to
make it happen…and knowing that it is, in fact, happening…. Not without our own
effort, but not solely as the result of it. His job- (the farmer’s)- is not to micromanage the growth or to figure
out all the “why” or “how” questions. It
is instead to remain on the alert for the time when the harvest is ready for
reaping, and to act “at once” when that moment comes. God is quite capable of surprising us with
when & how we are presented with new opportunities to make God’s reign
alive and active in our own time and place. Unlike the Cicadas, it is not on a pre-programmed 17-year cycle.
And also, unlike the Cicadas, the purpose for our own
ministry is not simply self-preservation or endless same-ness. The creation of God’s reign is something new,
and to some extent not entirely predictable or even imaginable. That’s what makes it so alluring &
wonderful. We are already co-creating
with God a new world, the contours of which we have yet fully to incorporate in
to our merely human plans & schemes.
Thank God for that!
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