Today’s Gospel passage comes from a sequence called Mark’s ‘day of parables’. In the parables, we can meet Jesus as an imaginative friend who is explaining his concerns and hopes to us. He tells us of ‘the Kingdom’, in which Israel’s great hopes and all our human longings, will be fulfilled, for it is to the realization of the ‘Kingdom’ that his whole existence among us is given.

The parable of the mustard seed, included in today’s passage, has a lesson for every age. The ‘Kingdom’ Jesus announces is not a world triumph, but rather initiates the realization of the final achievement of God, a work that is vast and mysterious. The whole life of Jesus, we can say, is a parable, leading us into the mystery of God’s generous and merciful dealings with us. As we come to appreciate the ‘Kingdom’ Jesus announced, and see him caring for God’s people in their needs, we come to know the commitments which shaped his human existence. In fact, Jesus himself said he was the seed that must fall into the ground and die to produce God’s final harvest.