THE SMALLEST OF ALL SEEDS
od’s love made his people as close to God as a loincloth is close to the human body. Jeremiah’s symbolic action tells the people that by embracing the idolatry of Babylonia, they have given up God’s tenderness and become like rotten.
A tiny seed becomes a tree. At the beginning when one hears it and accepts it, the word of God is only a tiny seed, and when it is contested and contradicted, as it was in the early Church and is often again today, it looks insignificant, negligible. What is it, in comparison with the powerful media? But it is meant to grow and to become little by little a kingdom of love and justice that overcomes all contradiction and hatred.
First Reading: Jeremiah 13:1-11
God told me, “Go and buy yourself some linen shorts. Put them on and keep them on. Don’t even take them off to wash them.” So I bought the shorts as God directed and put them on.
Then God told me, “Take the shorts that you bought and go straight to Perath and hide them there in a crack in the rock.” So I did what God told me and hid them at Perath.
Next, after quite a long time, God told me, “Go back to Perath and get the linen shorts I told you to hide there.” So I went back to Perath and dug them out of the place where I had hidden them. The shorts by then had rotted and were worthless.
God explained, “This is the way I am going to ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem—a wicked bunch of people who won’t obey me, who do only what they want to do, who chase after all kinds of no-gods and worship them. They’re going to turn out as rotten as these old shorts. Just as shorts clothe and protect, so I kept the whole family of Israel under my care”—God’s Decree—“so that everyone could see they were my people, a people I could show off to the world and be proud of. But they refused to do a thing I said
Gospel: Matthew 13:31-35
Another story. “God’s kingdom is like a pine nut that a farmer plants. It is quite small as seeds go, but in the course of years it grows into a huge pine tree, and eagles build nests in it.”
Another story. “God’s kingdom is like yeast that a woman works into the dough for dozens of loaves of barley bread—and waits while the dough rises.”
All Jesus did that day was tell stories—a long storytelling afternoon. His storytelling fulfilled the prophecy:
I will open my mouth and tell stories;
I will bring out into the open
things hidden since the world’s first day.
Prayer
Curb our impatience, Lord,
when we try to impose
your truth and justice and peace
on a Church and a world
not yet disposed to welcome them.
In our powerlessness and discouragement
may we learn to accept
that all true growth comes from you.
We can only plant the tiny seed
and it is you who make it bloom into a mighty tree
that can give shelter to all who accept your word.
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Video available at: bibleclaret.org
