This Sunday's readings all use gardening images to describe the relationship between God and humans. The Gospel text in particular relates the teaching of Jesus on the kingdom of God being likened to a planter who scatters his seed on the ground and watches it bloom, as well as the kingdom being compared to a mustard seed that grows to provide shelter for all the birds of the air. It may be that I am drawn to these images because I enjoy gardening, but Jesus uses these images more than any other to describe the kingdom of God. Why?
Many will answer this question by talking about the great pedagogy of Jesus who used images familiar to his audience in order to convey a deep truth about God, and no doubt that statement is true. One of the overlooked truths Jesus intended to teach is that the kingdom of God is natural to human beings. God intended us to live within his kingdom by the very fact that God created us in his image and likeness. Being in a relationship with God is as normal and natural as breathing air or drinking water. Whether a person acknowledges God's presence in their life or not the fact remains that we have a relationship to God just as we have a relationship to the natural created order and the entire cosmos.
This truth has been obscured over the centuries because there was such an emphasis on the great divide between God and humans caused by human sin. The sin of humans was so great an obstacle that only the intervention of God could repair and restore the relationship. Despite this redemptive act on the part of God through his Son Jesus, theology continued to stress the depraved fallen nature of the human person that required the constant imparting of created grace in order to achieve salvation - and then only with difficulty. Theologians would often cite the teaching of Thomas Aquinas that grace perfects nature, that nature requires the supernatural in order to be lifted up and redeemed.
However, this teaching became overemphasized to the point that it created a false dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and the spiritual. Recall what Aquinas says: grace perfects nature. He does not say that it replaces nature, and so nature is itself a good. We cannot be so depraved in our nature that God could not visit our abode and pitch his tent among us. We have an innate goodness to our nature by the very fact that God created us in his image and likeness. The relationship, then, between the natural and supernatural is not an adversarial one, but one of cooperation and union akin to marriage.
Thomas also teaches that the distinction between soul and body is one that exists in thought, not in reality. Thomas recognized the biblical teaching that the human person is radically one and hence the whole person is created by God, redeemed by God, and sanctified by the Spirit. The image of Jesus, then, in these parables speaks a great truth about how the kingdom of God is not some external imposition upon us by God, but rather the full realization of what is means for us to be human as individuals and as community.
People are often disconnected from the Church because they do not experience its life as in any way natural or a fulfillment of our human vocation. Instead they see a lot of external rules and practices that seem to have no connection to our lives. And yet people were attracted to the teaching of Jesus precisely because it was connecting to their lives and to the natural vocation we have as persons. In the renewal of the Church to which we are called, the Second Vatican Council urged us to adopt a pedagogy that is not polemical but one that everyone is able to understand. Let us, then, imitate the Lord Jesus in his methods and adopt an approach that does not deal in false dichotomies and Gnostic dualities, but rather one that speaks to the radical unity of the human person and our natural vocation to be in relationship with God and with one another.
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