Mc 4,26-34 – Friday of the Third Week of Ordinary Time
Jesus uses two images in today’s Gospel to explain the kingdom of God to us. The first image is a simple seed thrown to the ground that a farmer throws and which then, in a way also mysterious and unknown to him, he sees sprout and become first a stem, then an ear, then a full grain in the ear, says Jesus. In underlining this aspect, Jesus wants to tell us that, very often, spiritual life does not coincide exactly with all our reasoning. Indeed, there are moments in which God’s grace acts within us in a way unknown and unexpected to us.
In fact, very often we manage to overcome some situations in our lives, some blocks and certain things that until a moment before seemed like a dead end, only through a mysterious work of God’s grace, which from one moment to the next obtains for us what we have been unable to give ourselves for years. It is a word full of hope to know that God’s grace does not only act thanks to us, but sometimes also and above all despite us and our resistance.
So, don’t be discouraged if you almost always find yourself at the same point. We must have fidelity, knowing that that fidelity will at some point make us find ourselves on the other side of the wall, without us ourselves knowing how we did it. The second image that Jesus uses is to compare the kingdom of God to a mustard seed: “when it is sown on the ground, it is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; but as soon as it is sown it grows and becomes larger than all the vegetables and makes branches so large that the birds of the sky can take shelter in its shade”.
This too is a word full of hope because Jesus is telling us that the true driving force of spiritual life is not doing great and heroic things, but being capable of small gestures on a daily basis, knowing that those small things lived with fidelity and trust can make our life reliable and different. We should ask ourselves then if we have the patience of the farmer and if in our lives we have the loyalty to small daily things that have the power to overturn our existence little by little.
