Knowing God, part 2

Text: Mark 4:25-34

In Mark’s gospel the disciples just don’t get it. They desire to know Jesus. They want to understand his teachings. But they are a little thick. You can detect the frustration in Jesus as he says a little earlier in the chapter we just heard, “Don’t you understand this parable? How will you understand [any of] the parables?” And though he explains it then, and though Mark says in the passage for today that he explained everything all over again in private, it never quite sinks in. Perhaps we are to conclude from this that the disciples are dummies. Or perhaps instead that they are just trying to comprehend something that is really hard.

Jesus speaks to his disciples and to others in parables. A parable is a way of coming upon a truth obliquely. The word means “on the side.” Parables are sideways truths. They serve when more direct words fail to convey the idea. They are not allegories (though they are often interpreted that way, even in Mark). They are not metaphors. We cannot conclude from these parables that we are like the farmer, or like the seed, or the plant, or the birds in the bush. We cannot conclude from these parables that God’s kingdom starts small and becomes great, or that it unfolds slowly. These things may be so, but the parables do not teach them.

Parables are like koans, little mind tricks that purposely derail our usual train of thought. In that regard, they are like jokes. They should (and would have when Jesus told them) startle those who hear them. They should make us uncomfortable and thoughtful.

These parables we heard today are two of three agricultural parables in this chapter of Mark, all of which are about seeds. These parables make us think about growth and fruitfulness, about the force of life causing great abundance. About one-hundred-fold yields and giant mustard bushes.

But they also make us think about things that are hidden and about how God reveals God’s self to us. The plant exists in the seed, planted underground, invisible. Then visible. Then blossoming. Then ripe. There is an unveiling here, a disclosure. How does this all work? The farmer does not know. “He does not know how,” Jesus tells us.

We long to know God. We do not know how. Jesus tries to explain things to us. In this passage, he casts about for a way to do that. “With what can we compare the kingdom of God?” Is he speaking to us or is he wondering himself how to explain it? The language here in Mark is strange. What parable shall I use? he asks himself. In one version of the passage, he says “In what parable shall we stand?” In another, older version, he says “with what parable should we parable-ize this?” It is as if Jesus acknowledges that a straight-on explanation of the kingdom of God would not reveal God. “With many such parables he spoke the word to them,” Mark says, “as they were able to hear it.” Each might hear differently.

We desire God. We desire God as essentially as one desires a lover. That desire is as built into us as the hunger for food is or the need to breathe. We wish to court God, to have God near us. We do not know how. God seems partly hidden. Declarations about God (sentences that start out “God is …” followed by some title or characteristic) are unhelpful. So are metaphors regarding God (“God is like …” something; a father, the wind, light).

This kind of language does help us to think about God. And in that way it does help us talk to one another about God. But it is not the language of a suitor, not the language of desire, of longing. The description of God is not the same as God. The word is not the thing.

What happens in the parables is not that the farmer seeks to know the plant, the harvest. The farmer longs for it. He cannot live, cannot survive, without it. Do the disciples want to know about God or do they long for God? Our imperfect ability to know about God has nothing to do with our need to know God, any more than the imperfect knowledge of the farmer has anything to do with the farmer’s longing for the sprout, the fruit, the harvest.

The language of worship is the language of desire. Prayer, and praise, and song are words of desire for God. That is why there is no right way to worship. Martin Luther called most of what we do in worship “adiaphora,” which means “it does not matter” or more literally “indifferent things.” Things which are fine but not essential. There is a lot of room in worship.

At the Synod Assembly last weekend there were a whole bunch of different ways of worshiping. And by a “whole bunch” I mean compared to the limited traditional palette; but really, a smallish bunch compared to the total variety of Christian worship. There were unfamiliar (to many of us) songs in unfamiliar languages, strange and wonderful music, odd ways of praying, visual extravagance and quiet meditation. Some people thought all this craziness was great. And some thought it was untoward, inappropriate, and they were a little crabby about it. They did not like this way of approaching God. It was not their way.

Nonetheless, all the people there, as far as I could tell, desired God. Even though we worshiped in common, in a gathering as we do here, each person was courting God in his or her language (as they were able to speak it, Mark might have said), borrowing words and sentiment as they could from the common pool of the liturgy. I’m sure that no one got it exactly right. Whoever speaks the exactly right thing to one’s object of desire? Perhaps we all got almost all of it wrong. It does not matter. Being too worried about where one sows the seeds is not God’s requirement, if you recall the parable of the sower.

We do not know whether we have our theology right. We do not know whether our image of God conforms to what God really is. We do not know whether we have heard God correctly. We do not know whether our sacred rites are effective. We do not know whether our meditations are pure.

We know anything only imperfectly. We are as much dummies as the disciples were. It does not matter. Like lovers, we speak from our hearts as best we can, in ways that are as true as we can be, to the God whom we desire.