"How he does not know" (Mark 4:27)
In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus compares the mysterious growth of his life in us to the process of seeds sprouting underground.
Jesus is the kingdom of God made flesh and so we can understand him to be the sower in the parable: he throws his life, his seed, into the world, into us. But his life needs a spiritual death and burial in us before we can mysteriously bear fruit.
Of course, unlike the sower, Jesus does know how we grow spiritually; but we, like the sower, do not. Our growth in divine life involves suffering and death to our disordered desires. It is a gradual and hidden process, that has its own stages and steps: "first the shoot, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear" (4:28).
