The Kingdom Of God Teaches Us To Surrender
(By Fr. Dexter Brereton)
[simpleazon-image align=”left” asin=”1612788351″ locale=”us” height=”375″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51yLQoRsqsL.jpg” width=”315″]According to CH Dodd, a parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, holding the attention of its hearers by its vividness or strangeness in such a way that it teases the mind to look at life differently – it teases the mind into active thought. In this parable of the farmer and the seed which grows while the farmer sleeps, Jesus uses the familiar to speak about what is less familiar.
The parable begins: “This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know….” This is directed at those who think that the coming of the Kingdom of God in our lives or in the rest of the world is really a kind of ‘self-help’ project which they can control. Using the natural processes of growth, Jesus portrays the coming of God as a ‘process of hopeful waiting’ which is really beyond the control of the one who waits.
This is good news for a number of people. I have been walking with people in family situations where a family member gives a lot of trouble: the eldest son in a family, one on whom they put a lot of hope, drops out of university and ‘shaks up’ with a girlfriend, a husband, normally placid and devoted to his family begins an extra-marital affair, a young woman begins a much-needed job but her new boss proves to be a very difficult person.
Taking the example of the parent with the difficult child, it is often very hard for parents to watch their young people waste their lives or fall into the same kind of mistakes that they themselves may have made. Yet the parable invites us to let go and trust. There is an old Trini saying: “You can make children but you can’t make their mind.” Every good parent knows that in spite of the careful upbringing they may have given to their offspring, any one of them could, at some time or the other, reject some, if not all the precious values they were taught. We are invited to be humble before the processes of growth. The spiritual development and maturity of our children is not something under our control. There are tears that we cannot cry for our children: “While they sleep, when they are awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, we do not know.”
Our parable invites to relax and enter into the waiting of God, who has to wait and to trust as we do and to know and accept that when it comes to the growth of our children, we “do not know.” Lastly, I think of the people who founded our own nation of Trinidad & Tobago. With the recent developments such as the charges being laid against Mr Jack Warner which some hold, damage the country’s international reputation or the glaring failures of major institutions within our democratic system, some, according to one columnist have wondered aloud if seeking independence from the British Crown was a good thing. Like the man in this parable, the founders of the nation “threw seed on the land”. Like the farmer in the parable they are asleep – sleeping the sleep of death, yet before they died they trusted that “the seed would sprout and would grow, how, they did not know.” I believe that the founders of our country made an act of trust that even for this tiny nation our virtues in the final analysis, outweigh our vices. This is the faith and trust into which we are all invited to enter. Let us surrender control of our families and our nation, troubled as they may be to almighty God.
