Seed That Grows While You Sleep

Four verses, and then he moves on. A man scatters seed on a field, and then he goes to bed and gets up and goes to bed again, night after night, and the whole time he is doing that the seed sprouts and grows.

Night and day he sleeps and wakes, and the seed sprouts and grows, though he knows not how.

He does not know how, and that is no reflection on this particular farmer. It is true of every farmer who has ever lived. He knows when to sow and he knows when to cut, and everything in between happens underground, in the dark, without him. No amount of standing at the edge of the field will speed it up or explain it.

Mark says the earth produces the crop all by itself, and he gives the order it comes in: the stalk first, then the head, then the grain filling out inside the head. There is a sequence to it, and the sequence does not need a manager.

It makes a strange picture of the kingdom of God, and it is meant to. A field does not take instruction and it does not answer questions. It works on its own schedule, whether the man who sowed it is awake or asleep or somewhere else entirely.

Set that beside the rest of the chapter, which has been about response the whole way through, asking which soil you are and whether you are listening and whether you have any root. Now Jesus turns around and describes a kingdom that grows without human understanding and without human supervision. The same man says both things in the same conversation, and he does not reconcile them for us.

Then the last line, and it is borrowed.

And as soon as the grain is ripe, he swings the sickle, because the harvest has come.

Joel says almost exactly that, and in Joel the sickle is a picture of God's judgment arriving at its appointed time, not a moment early and not a moment late. So the parable ends where it was always heading. Something grows quietly for a whole season while nobody watching it understands it, and then on a day nobody at the table chose, it gets cut.