That title feels wrong to even type.
It has been drilled into my head from a young age that the kingdom of God is exciting, interesting, lively, and fascinating. I’ve heard—and probably even said myself—that if you want a thrill of a life then you’ll get on board with what God is doing in the world through His gospel. And I still believe that…sort of.
But what do the heavily-caffeinated among us do with this simple parable of Jesus:
And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows;he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” Mark 4:26-29
You can’t get much more boring than a sower who goes out to sow. It’d be one thing if this farmer planted a seed and then did something terrific to make the thing grow. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t even check on it. He just throws it in the ground and the thing grows by itself. The whole parable is incredibly boring and that is the point Jesus is making.
Everyone in the first-century who cared about these things, assumed that the kingdom of God would come through some sort of grand movement. For the Pharisees, God’s kingdom would come when enough people got their lives put together and Israel experienced a moral revolution. For the Zealots, God’s kingdom would come when the Romans were kicked out of God’s land and Israel experience a political revolution.
But, the kingdom ultimately doesn’t come through some sort of cataclysmic event. It doesn’t need human ingenuity or human excellence to cause it to grow. The kingdom of God contains within itself everything that is needed for it to grow. And more often than not the growth of the kingdom is going to be about as boring as watching the grass grow. Sure, we might have a true Spirit-wrought revival every couple hundred years, but for the most part kingdom growth is boring.
And yet how often do we try to sell ministry involvement using a much different story? We realize, for we’ve drank from the same pitcher of Kool-Aid, that every good American wants to be epic. It is our God-given destiny to be epic. And so we’ve learned that we can get people involved in ministry by appealing to this desire to “be somebody”. We tell them that they’ll do stuff of legend when they engage in ministry.
In their mind they are slaying dragons and rescuing a princess. And so they keep their eyes open for the big stuff. You know, those heroic moments when they God does something so big that history writers pick up their pen. So we pray for revival. We make big plans. We sign up for big events.
This is why you have such a hard time in your church getting people to sign up for the nursery. Holding a baby and changing a diaper is about as earth shattering as a farmer throwing a bit of seed into the ground. It isn’t flashy and it’s not immediately rewarding. So, we’ve got a long line of people waiting to be kingdom movers and shakers, but you have to beg someone to be with a screaming baby.
And I’m convinced that we’ve got a good number of Christian people practically wasting their lives waiting for something phenomenal to happen all the while ignoring the truly great things the Lord as placed at their feet. Things like getting up and going to work in the morning. Changing a diaper. Raking a lawn. Plodding along trying to disciple your children as best you can. Having lunch with your neighbor. You know, mundane everyday things that nobody writes home about…like a farmer going out to sow some seed.
Yes, the kingdom of God is boring. Don’t miss the beauty of that while you are wearing yourself out trying to be epic.
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Photo source: here
Not many people farm anymore. There’s always something to do on a farm. It may seem boring to city folk, but it actually requires a lot of hard work. None of that hard work, by the way, actually makes the plants grow. We have a lot of science today that they didn’t have then. We know a lot more about how plants grow than they did back then. While every scientist would be glad to tell you everything they know about how plants grown, I don’t know a single scientist who can explain why. Plants simply grow and we take it for granted if we don’t have to worry about whether we’ll have enough rain.
Not being much of a city boy, I don’t know a similar allegory that fits with city life. One thing I have considered lately is that we have significant segments of Christians vying for the miraculous. They look for healings, prophecies, and all manner of signs and wonders. But we have been given a far greater miracle: the forgiveness of sin. Look back in chapter 2 when Jesus heals the paralytic. It may be easier to say to the paralytic, “your sins are forgiven,” because there’s no immediate evidence, but it’s the greater of the miracles because it produces eternal life. It may not be as exciting as making a paralytic walk, but it’s far greater than giving him legs to walk into eternal torment. Likewise, it may not be exciting to watch a crop grow slowly, but it’s a far greater thing to have food to sustain the life of the community than any temporarily exciting activity.