Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Mark 4:26-34

With many such parables He spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it.

St. John Paul II added the Mysteries of Light to the Rosary: they shed light upon, or illuminate, the Person of Jesus Christ, revealing who He is.  The Third Luminous Mystery is Jesus proclaiming the Kingdom of God.  St. John Paul did not go into great detail about the meaning of each of the new Luminous Mysteries.  On the one hand, it’s very clear how, for example, the Transfiguration sheds light upon—that is to say, illuminates—who Jesus is.  But how does Jesus proclaiming the Kingdom of God do so?  What exactly is the connection between Jesus and the Kingdom of God?

Jesus never directly answers this question.  His parables are meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive.  But even without defining “the Kingdom of God”, we can say that the kernel of each parable about the Kingdom of God reveals a facet of beauty of Heaven, and/or the Church, and/or the Christian’s soul.  Each of these three have a clear relation to Jesus:  the reality of Heaven, the life of the Church, and the nature of the Christian soul.

As an example, take Jesus’ second parable in today’s Gospel Reading.  Jesus speaks about the change from the “smallest of all the seeds” to “the largest of plants”.  If we reflect on this image—this symbolism—it seems easy to apply to the life of the Church, and to the life of the Christian soul, but not to the “life” of 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.  In terms of the individual Christian soul, the “bread and butter” of spiritual growth is freely chosen sacrifice, especially every Friday, the day of the week on which Jesus freely sacrificed His life on the Cross for you.