Seeds of the Kingdom
Back in my days as a student at Mundelein Seminary I would occasionally go with friends to visit Willow Creek Community Church which was only a short drive from the seminary. We went in order to see what was behind this enormous mega-church that in many ways resembled a mall more than it did a church. I still remember the first bit of preaching I heard proclaimed there. At some point during his preaching, the young man held up his Bible and proclaimed it to be the central revelation of God that we have received. I immediately wanted to shout, “No! The book in your hand is not the central revelation we have been given. The central revelation is Christ!”
Perhaps I had been soaking up more of the documents of Vatican II than I had realized. Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, describes the Church as the Kingdom of God and reminds us that,
…principally the kingdom is revealed in the person of Christ himself, Son of God and Son of Man, who came “to serve and give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45)
The document recalls that Christ founded the Church through his ministry of preaching the kingdom, by his death and resurrection and by the fact that he poured out the Holy Spirit upon his first disciples.
…the Church, endowed with the gifts of her founder and faithfully observing his precepts of charity, humility and self-denial, receives the mission of proclaiming and establishing among all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is, on earth, the seed and the beginning of that kingdom. While she slowly grows to maturity, the Church longs for the completed kingdom and, with all her strength, hopes and desires to be united in glory with her king.
The image of a seed presented here is a brilliant analogy as seeds contain the entirety of what they will eventually grow to become, but yet there is still unrealized potential. The Church on earth represents the kingdom that will come to full maturity in heaven. The council fathers remind us that this seed is fertilized with charity, humility and self-denial, the same virtues that Christ lived for us as an example of what it means to be like God. This is a great challenge to those of us who claim to be Christians. To be true to our calling we must find ways each day to proclaim God’s kingdom through words and acts of love, spoken and done in humility, always with the other person in mind.
May we continue to cultivate the seed planted by Christ so that it will grow to full maturity.
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