Fr Marco Lazzaron
esus might present aspects that are not always easily understandable when we hear them. Jesus, in fact, presents us with parables that if we read them with contemporary categories, would be quite difficult to understand despite their simplicity.
What is difficult to understand in today’s parable is that a Kingdom can be represented as a small seed. History has always taught us that Kings imposed themselves and immediately tried to expand their kingdoms in all the surrounding areas. Today we see the same thing. In Israel or Ukraine, wars are taking place with the use of very powerful weapons to try to occupy areas and suppress peoples and to subjugate them.
The Gospel instead speaks to us of a seed which is the tiniest and yet when grown becomes a tree that can host thousands of little birds. We live in a world and in a culture where “to have everything” and “immediately” are the most common words. We can spend our whole life in front of a screen, buying a train ticket, a plane ticket, a book, a refrigerator, the weekly shopping, and everything you ask is delivered to your home sometimes even on the same day.
Jesus instead asks us for the time to wait! This is like a Copernican revolution. The Kingdom of God progresses in its own time and with the sole intervention of God. Parents and grandparents, possibly, have placed a little seed in their children and grandchildren. Maybe, they even have “watered” this seed and carefully protected it from the “stormy” world. Now, we need to let God make this seed of faith grow in them and produce fruit “in due season”.
Faith is a reality that must be proposed and witnessed and not imposed. We only have the responsibility of being those hands of God who scatter seeds in abundance without worrying about where they are thrown. There will be time for the fruits to be seen because we have the certainty that He continues to work tirelessly so that every creature can give praise.
We all have St Monica, St Augustine’s mother, as a model. This saint woman, in front of her son who wandered among the philosophies of the time, prayed insistently for her son to embrace the faith and become a model herself, so much so that Augustine in his Confessions expresses himself with gratitude towards her. Once she saw that he was baptized in Milan by St Ambrose she died in Ostia giving thanks for the gift that God had given.