Jesus said to the crowds: “This is how it is with the kingdom of God. It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first, the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.” (Mark 4.26-29)
You don’t have to be a child to appreciate Dr. Seuss’s book, Horton Hears a Who. First published in 1954, the book tells the story of an elephant named Horton who hears voices one day coming from a speck of dust. Upon closer examination, Horton realizes that the speck of dust is really a tiny planet occupied by microscopic inhabitants called the Whos.
These tiny creatures beg Horton to save them from an impending danger. But when Horton tells the other animals in the jungle about the Whos, they decide that he is mentally ill, finding it implausible that this big elephant can hear voices that no one else in the jungle can hear. Not only that, but who would believe in a miniscule civilization so small that they could live on a speck of dust?
Confident of Horton’s insanity, the other animals place him in a psychiatric prison since, after all, he clearly is a crazy elephant. Locked up, Horton comes up with an idea to convince the other animals in the jungle to take him seriously instead of seeing him as a lunatic. He asks all the residents of Who-ville to shout at the top of their collective voices so that the other animals also can hear them. Hearing them, he decides, will get the others to help save the planet.
And so, all of the Whos, with the exception of a really small Who named JoJo, join in the united yell. Putting their tiny voices together, the inhabitants try to make an audible noise. But, even so, the sound is too small to be heard by any animal but Horton. Exasperated, the Whos don’t know what else to do.
Finally, with much arm-twisting, they convince JoJo to join them in the collective voices, their last chance to save their planet. Skeptical of the plan, JoJo joins them in making a sound, even though he believes that his one, tiny voice won’t make any difference. So the Whos yell at the top of their voices, this time with JoJo’s tiny voice added to the chorus.
And this time the sound was just loud enough to be heard by the other animals of the jungle, who, surprised to hear the voices, quickly release Horton, and the planet of the Whos is saved. It only happened because JoJo used his tiny little voice, never believing for a moment that it would make any difference, but learning, much to his surprise, that it made all the difference in the world.
Sure, it’s just a children’s story, or, then again, maybe it isn’t. Today, Rabbi Jesus tells a similar story about a very small thing turning into something big and impressive. “This is how it is with the kingdom of God,” he tells his followers. “It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and through it all the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.”
“Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.” Pausing, he conjoins the story with another about the tiny mustard seed that grows into a gigantic bush, both stories making the same point. Big things can come from just a tiny start.
That lesson is just as important for us to hear, if not more so, as it was for those first followers, given the complexity and the confusion of our ever bigger world where problems seem unsolvable and where answers seem unreachable. Overwhelmed and overshadowed by the immensity of the challenges that living in our present world pose to us, we often feel as insignificant and as unimportant as JoJo, certain that we can contribute nothing to the solutions needed to make this a better place in which to live, or as Rabbi Jesus calls the reformed world, the Kingdom of God.
That seems to be the most common response of ordinary people like you and me, people who want things to get better, but who just don’t believe we have anything to offer that would make things better. We feel like the boy David before the giant Goliath, a pebble in our bag, useless against such a formidable opponent. What do we have to offer, we say to ourselves and to others, sadness in our stance, weariness in our weakness, resignation in our irrelevance.
While the desire to do something to better the world is there, the know-how in fixing the problems is missing, resulting in our being immobilized, our feet frozen because we don’t have a clue as to where to begin. We tell ourselves that Rabbi Jesus only had to heal a few lepers and to feed a crowd on a couple of occasions, whereas we live in a world of pandemics, a world of mass starvation. What can we possibly bring to the table?
For this very reason, we need to hear what Rabbi Jesus says today, his words reminding us that small starts can bring big returns, that one voice joined with other voices can become a loud chorus, and that miracles happen when a tiny seed is planted in the dirt of faith. The seed sprouts, as he says, although “we know not how.”
Mother Teresa, better versed than most of us in conquering fears and in relying on faith, once made the comment, “We can’t do the big things, you and I. We’re not capable of them. But we can do the little things faithfully.” It was this principle that guided her own actions, allowing her to move forward, even in the face of huge obstacles, knowing that little things done faithfully can bring about incredible results.
A skeptical reporter, meeting Mother Teresa when she had brought a few of her nuns to Washington, D.C. to help with the impoverished and homeless people there, asked her how in the world she expected to feed so many hungry people. Her answer, based on that same guiding principle, was, “We’ll feed them one by one.”
After a lifetime of doing just that–putting mustard seeds in the ground–and finding large shrubs growing where the seeds had been planted, Mother Teresa finally was allowed rest, but only after an American archbishop, attending her funeral in Calcutta and standing before her child-sized coffin, would say, “It’s a remarkable example of the power of God that someone so tiny could accomplish so much.”
The same possibility is ours, whatever our smallness in the world, real or imagined, because the same God is always at work in and through agents such as ourselves, people who are so ordinary nobody would stop to look twice at us, with names so common that nobody would bother to look for them in a newspaper, people as inconsequential as the fishermen at the Sea of Galilee.
And yet, each moment presents us with the possibility of planting a small seed in the ground, unsure of its consequence, believing only that a good turn can bring about more good. So we offer a smile to the stranger; we open our arms to the world-weary soul; we fix a meal for the family down on their luck. None of these things is worthy of mention in the Guinness Book of World Records, but still done with a good heart, ourselves hopeful that one day birds of the sky can rest on the branches of a seedling that we planted.
Many years ago, the nighttime television show host Johnny Carson was interviewing the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, owner of the Hilton Hotel chain. Carson asked Hilton the secret of his success, how he turned his idea of a clean, comfortable room for travellers into a giant in the hospitality business. As the audience waited for an answer that boasted of a business trick or special acumen, Hilton turned to the camera and said, “Put the shower curtain inside the bathtub.”
Here, a well-known businessman put the secret of his success at doing the little things well. He understood that these seemingly small things communicate something bigger to people, showing care and special attentiveness to their comfort. It is a principle as old as the gospels, a truth packed away in the story of a seed that looks like nothing, but which becomes something impressive in time.
We’ll never become Conrad Hiltons, nor should that necessarily be our goal, but we can become people who understand that we also have something to contribute, as small as our contribution may look on the surface, every small act of kindness we do adding to the power of good so that, in time, the world becomes more decent, more humane, and much better than it is, in other words, it becomes the Kingdom of God.
As conduits of God’s manifold grace, an electrifying force that bring light into the darkness of this world, we simply need to use the opportunity put before us to do the good we can, however small, however insignificant, however infinitesimal, believing that God can use our punniness, our poverty, our paltriness, to bring about something greater, something bigger, something grander. If he can work wonders with a mustard seed, he can do miraculous things with our small deeds as well.
Several centuries ago, the King of Denmark commissioned a man named Bok to lead a small band of soldiers against a group of pirates that were causing big problems with his country’s shipping in a certain coastal area. Mr. Bok set up his headquarters on a rocky and desolate island just off the coast and, after a few years, was able to clear out the pirates.
Returning to the mainland, the king offered Bok the choice of his reward for doing the job well. Bok answered that he wanted nothing except a small plot of land on the island where he had lived and fought for those months. The king, fully aware that the island was desolate and barren, asked why Bok wanted to live in that godforsaken place. Bok simply answered that he wanted to plant trees there, that he wanted to make the island beautiful.
Surprised and skeptical, the king granted Bok’s request and, soon after, Bok went to live on the island. Along with his wife, they worked hard, planting trees, shrubs, and grass. Gradually, the vegetation took root and the island began to turn into a green paradise. One morning the couple awoke to hear birds singing for the first time on the island, heralding the morning sunrise from the branches of the fully grown trees.
Today, the island is visited by thousands of tourists each year. When Bok died, he asked that his tombstone only carry a simple inscription. It read, “Make you the world a bit more beautiful and better because you have been in it.” We can find something very Biblical in those words, something closely akin to what Rabbi Jesus meant when he talked of planting a seed that grows into a tree that becomes a home for the birds of the air.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 