16 - Chapter 16

CHAPTER XVI THE SEED GROWING OF ITSELF

Mark 4:26-29. THIS parable, recorded by Mark alone, goes naturally with the Mustard Seed. It has been misinterpreted in two ways; first by the misleading title ’ The Seed Growing Secretly; ’ secondly, by finding the lesson in the slowness of the plant’s growth: if there is any time reference at all, surely it is to the speed of the growth. But the emphasis is neither on the rapidity nor on the gradual nature nor on the certainty of the growth, though these may be all implicit. In the Sower, the farmer who planted the seed was a prominent figure. This parable reminds us that he may be too prominent. Many things the farmer can do; nay, must do: one thing he cannot do; he cannot make a single blade of corn grow. When he has done his part, the growth goes on, silently, imperceptibly, inevitably, but “ automatically,” whether the farmer wakes or sleepes. Revivals do not come by organisation. “ Why could not we cast him out? ’ Because we thought we could. The Red Indian may.count his scalps and the football player his goals; the Christian must not reckon up the number he has brought to Christ. For one thing no one can analyse the contribution of each human instrument at work in any spiritual achievement. The last agent employed by God is not necessarily the only or the main agent. In any case we are but servants, farm-labourers who plant or irrigate; it is God who gives the increase. If the parable is a rebuke to boasting, no less is it a warning against despondency. If the farmer honestly does, day by day, the work that lies before him, he is entitled to his quiet rest by night. Whether or not in the morning the corn is perceptibly higher than the day before, he can leave the future in God’s hands. The responsibility is his; in due time the harvest will come. This parable has the historic importance of having been used, a generation ago, to discredit the motto of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union: “ The Evangelisation of the World in This Generation.” If the organizers had had any real conception, it was urged, of the nature of the task they were undertaking, the gigantic areas involved, the teeming millions of the population, the difficulties of reaching them, the varieties of creed professed, the age-long prestige behind them, the vested interests that sheltered under them, they would have seen the absurdity of their hopes. Perhaps they were wrong in fixing a time limit; our times are in God’s hands; God does not count time as we do and hastes not even as he rests not. Perhaps also they thought too much in geographical areas. It is the people, not the areas, that are to be evangelized; and even if the programme had been carried out, the inhabitants of the areas would have largely changed during the generation of accomplishment.

Yet the aim itself was entirely in the spirit of the parable; and the faith that inspired it, quixotic as it seemed to common sense, is the kind of faith our Lord enjoined on his disciples. But the harvest does not come unless the husbandmen, all the husbandmen, do their part. We have seen the wonderful advance that is possible when small minorities of enthusiasts, some in the home land, some in lands afar, prepare the soil, sow the seed, and weed and irrigate. What would happen with a whole Church in earnest, with a deep sense of indebtedness to God and to Jesus Christ, prayerfully working in the confident belief that they had a message that could save mankind as to that we have no knowledge, for we have no experience.