Easter Wednesday Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
EASTER WEDNESDAY...

...Easter, in the northern hemisphere at least, is a time when all sorts of plants are starting to come up. Sometimes there are surprises. I well remember raising my eyebrows a few years ago when bulbs we had totally forgotten about appeared in places we hadn’t expected them.

That, of course, is the point of the little parables of the kingdom here, towards the end of Mark 4. Jesus wasn’t one to let a good source of imagery go to waste with only one or two variations. These parables, though making different points to the ‘Sower’ at the start of the chapter, are nevertheless, so to speak, planted in the same soil.

They are precisely Easter parables: parables of surprise, of seeds sown and coming up unexpectedly, of growth that nobody even understands. There is even an extra ‘Easter’ hint embedded within the first one. The man who’s planted the seed goes to bed and gets up every day – for the early Christians, ‘sleep’ and ‘waking’ were a natural code for ‘dying’ and ‘rising’ – and the seed is doing the same thing, but he doesn’t know how. It’s as though there is a hidden truth there which is both very obvious and deeply mysterious. It’s just like the deepest truth of Jesus’ whole public career: he was planting seeds that would ‘die’ and then ‘rise’, and he himself would ultimately be the seed that would die and rise, and bear much fruit – even though the people of God then, and the world ever since, can’t figure out what Jesus was all about. Much like the man going to bed and getting up again, in fact...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright