In Incalculable Proportion

In the Gospel of Mark is the following parable:

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.  For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, and after that the full corn in the ear.  But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come. (4:26-29)

This parable of Jesus, which is found only in Mark, is a very simple one--so simple indeed, that is has seemed almost self-evident.  The work of the Word of God, when placed in the heart of humans, does its work imperceptibly--or some such is the standard preacher's notion of the parable.  Of course, if God is he who casts the seed, then it would seem ridiculous to say, of the the seed's growth, that "he knoweth not how."

The above parable centers on the inability of imperfect persons to understand the processes that surround them.  We do not know how things work, any more than we know where things come from.  In this regard we can begin to understand the miracle of Creation in a more wholesome manner.  God as the Creator is not he who begins Creation (and then, presumably, will end Creation, or transmute it fundamentally)--at least, that is not the proper understanding of "beginning" and "ending" in the kingdom of God.  God is always beginning and ending things, although it would be more proper to say that God is the author of the ineffable processes that support our self-perceived existences, existences that we strew with our own conceits of beginnings and endings.  In any attempt we might make to conceive of a reality overseen by God, we must understand our pitiful and ultimately indefensible parcelings-up of reality as reflections of our inherently limited conceptions.

It is to our shame that we seize on pretexts by which to claim that the divinely-ordered Creation is presented to us in graspable parts.  When given insights into the trends of Creation's activity, we try to find therein assurances to which we cannot legitimately lay claim.  We can remember God's declaration to Noah, "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease"--though apparently God indeed made the day cease, and the sun stand still, on an occasion in which his people were engaged in defeating their enemies in battle.

Moreover, the effectual ceasing of seedtime and harvest was threatened (and occasionally levied) against the people of God if they disobeyed--witness the innumerable references to famine and to the heavens being shut up so as to withhold their rain.  What happens with the vagaries of nature is always a mixture of patterns and anomalies--or at least it seems so to us, as we try to sort through the "parcelings-out" to which I referred above.

In the existence we experience, the inchoate pattern of Creation that we introduce frequently to our minds--the "remembrance," as it were, of God starting the world (along with the less serene remembrance of his potential to end the world)--is a pattern that we ought better to see as ever-present and all-encompassing.  God is more than just the maker, the suspender of the universe upon a weakly-conceptualized "nothing," as we would have it.  God is the author of all proportion, such that it is incessantly God's will that prescribes the effectual content of every conceit we might possess.

What is important to understand here is that there is a penetrating implication to our transient self-assessments, an often disregarded implication that bears with crucial weight upon the idea of the "kingdom of God."  We want to know that we are in the kingdom of God, but it is the very phenomenon of our attempted self-assignments to that desired end that is the phenomenon that frustrates that end.  The kingdom of God is that which happens--that is to say, that which "reigns" rather than lies there as a territory--when we are unaware of it.  This "unawareness" is a much a feature of the "kingdom life" as is the agonizing fact that Jesus will tell us only whether we are near or far, and will tell us only that striving for a goal of "narrow-gate-ness" is the "way."

God is the author of all proportionality.  This is the aspect of God's continual process of creating Creation that is most crucial to our obtaining the kingdom, while yet it is the aspect of our existences that frustrates us most acutely.  We can imagine that we are near the kingdom or far from it, and we can imagine that we are close or far on some measure of sanctity or righteousness or orthodoxy, but envisioning ourselves as suspended between Heaven and Hell, even when assigning ourselves the greatest imaginable proximity to the latter, is to arrogate to ourselves a view-point as suspended apart on some god-like vantage.

It is for this reason that it makes sense that Jesus says to us that we must be forgiven our trespasses by those we have wronged before we might approach the altar (however we might deign to conceive of it.)  We might never receive such forgiveness (just as, to put the matter in more comprehensive terms, we might never do well enough in recalling our trespasses to begin with.)  The preachers will tell their congregants that they can only give a good faith effort to elicit such forgiveness, at which point (assuming the wronged parties answer with a refusal) the individual congregants have done all they can--and the wronged parties will have to answer separately to God for their stony countenances.  (As a separate consideration, certain of the Protestant preachers will assure their congregants that salvation is obtained only by faith--as though the horrid punishments Jesus describes awaiting those who cannot obtain forgiveness from their fellow humans are to be taken as punishments of only relative horridness.)

Again, we might never receive forgiveness from those we have wronged.  A person who will square himself or herself to the above demands made by Jesus will realize quickly that questions of sin or of guilt, while providing the conceptualities that illustrate our distance from the kingdom of God, provide no calculable assessment of that distance.  God's sovereign grasp of all proportionality crushes all notions we have of our standing before him.  We are left not standing on some basis of sin or guilt, and we are left not crushed under a burden of sin or guilt--we are left, rather, ground into shame, soaked in shame, perfused by shame, obliterated in all natural-world metaphors by an ether of shame.

This is when the ineffable nature of the kingdom of God--the seed-growing-we-know-not-how nature of the kingdom of God--is revealed to us (or rather, glimpsed by us from afar.)  When we slip from our arduously-maintained self-awarenesses, when we succumb to exhaustions of all types, when we collapse effectively insensate from our batterings of self-doubt and self-incrimination, then all that suspends us in our existences is the will of God--the will that prescribes proportion in the unmeasurable potentialty encompassing Creation.

We cannot bear the weight of our shame--and yet we wake from troubled sleep, or are roused from troubled reverie.  The journey of life has gone on.  The march toward death has gone on.  That which is nearest to us through all this--nearer than kin, or friend, or sentiment, or memory, or aspiration--is that mirror of our conceptualized existence that is ever our side.  This is the mirror of shame, the realization of the created thing as being other than the Creator--the realization that the divine, the only Existence that "ought" (in our feeble use of the term) to exist, is conceptualizable by us in only the feeblest of terms precisely because we are separated from the divine in incalculable proportion.