
How many of you thought about the ad telling you how to invest in your supper?
How many of you thought about Paul Kelly & The Messengers who recorded this piece as a protest song in 1991? The song which tells the uplifting story of the Gurindji people from the Northern Australia who struggled for equality and land rights.
How many of you thought about „the Kingdom of God which is like a mustard seed which at the time of its sowing in the soil is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet once it is sown it grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade.”
Why did we connect the song to the ad? Because we hear the ad so often. Why didn’t we connect the song to the Gospel? Maybe because we don’t expose ourselves to the Scriptures frequently enough.
My Dear Sisters and Brothers!
When Our Blessed Lord compared the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed he didn’t speak about some abstract idea. He was looking at the small band of his disciples, and in them he saw the Kingdom of God already growing. A dozen of insignificant people with no background that could impress the great of the Roman Empire, but their small community had someone who had generated the power, which originally created heaven and earth. The Lord Jesus was with them. Their faith and commitment to him made them not just observers and recorders of events but a transformed community of disciples. Their little community was thrown into the vast and challenging field of the ancient world like a mustard seed thrown into the soil. Have you ever thought why they didn’t diminish but grew into what now is recognised as Christians? As there is something in any seed that makes it sprout in the darkness of the soil as there is the Holy Spirit in the Church, the Spirit sent by the Risen Christ, to fill the Church with the divine grace to be the growing Kingdom of God.
Can you remember the Gospel we had last Sunday on the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ? It was about the Last Supper. How insignificant it looked from sociological point of view. But still it was a powerful moment in the history of this planet. God himself gave his Church his very self for perpetuity so that the growth of the Kingdom of God could continue until the day of the Lord.
We know from our own Christian history, that from little things big things grow, but the reason for the growth is the Lord Jesus who gives his Holy Spirit to those who may be little or irrelevant according to the world standards but they listen to what the Lord and Master sees in them, like his Apostles listened to what he was telling them. That’s why the Apostles not only left us a few pages about Jesus’s life but they have given us the Church which grows as the Kingdom of God.
I hope that the next time you hear on TV: „From little things big things grow” you will hear the gentle sound of the Church growing in the midst of our 21st Century word which is as challenging as the ancient world was challenging to the first Christians.