St. Thomas Aquinas, Priest & Doctor of the Church
II Samuel 11:1-4,5-10,13-17  +  Mark 4:26-34
January 28, 2022

“This is how it is with the Kingdom of God ….”

Jesus today proclaims two parables about the Kingdom of God.  In wanting to understand these parables, we might wonder what exactly the Kingdom of God is.  Is the Kingdom of God the realm of Heaven, or is it the Church, some measure of both, or something else entirely, such as the individual Christian’s soul?

Jesus never directly addresses this question.  But even without defining “the Kingdom of God”, we can say that the kernel of each “Kingdom parable” describes in some way the reality of Heaven, and/or the Church, and/or the Christian’s soul.

Take Jesus’ second parable in today’s Gospel passage.  The change from the “smallest of all the seeds” to “the largest of plants” seems more easily applied to the Church and the Christian soul than to Heaven.  Tertullian wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”, a phrase through which we can see how this parable applies to the Church.  With God, all things are possible:  from a natural death, springs supernatural life.  Or as the Church prays to the Father in one of the prefaces for martyrs at Holy Mass:  by “your marvelous works” “in our weakness you perfect your power / and on the feeble bestow strength to bear you witness ….”