This week’s gospel text offers us the only two parables in which Jesus explicitly names the “kingdom of God” as their content. The somewhat stilted formulaic introduction of both these parables (v.26, 30) clearly makes the focus of Jesus’ remarks the kingdom of God itself.

The first of today’s parables, the parable of the growing seed, begins much like the previously told parable of the sower (4:1-9). But the activity described is decidedly different. Instead of being “sown,” the seed in today’s parable is simply “scattered,” an action that suggests an even more random and haphazard method of crop propagation than that described in 4:3. Once this seed is “scattered” the success or failure of the crop is apparently out of the hands of the one who dropped the seed. The focus is not on any …