Parable of the Bean and Potato Plants

It's busy out in the Potato Plot. The busy Beaker Folk beaver away, bringing bushels of bulbous tubers back to the barn.

And I wonder, if there's a parable there. You know the problem with analogies - if you have to explain them, they lose some of their power.  I don't mean like where Jesus gave a parable and everyone went, what does that mean, and he skipped off leaving them to work it out - the power there is in the working out. And I guess that the fact he then tended to explain them to the disciples in secret maybe means that he didn't choose the brightest all the time, knowing he could leave the women and Gentiles and tax collectors to work these things out for himself while Peter's going - "so tell me again about the lost sheep?"

But when somebody's decided to explain the Trinity using the quantum theory, or good and evil using the law of entropy. And they have to then explain what quantum theory or entropy is - normally badly - and you've forgotten what the point is before they get back to the theology. And after all that you're thinking, surely entropy is a good thing because that's the way God gets us from the start of the story to the end, and not the bad thing the vicar's talking about. 

But I have the same feeling sometimes with the parable of the mustard seed. First thing any preacher has to do is explain what a mustard plant isn't (ie the little seeds we stick on damp cotton wool to get a quick salad sandwich) and then how big it was. By which time it's time for coffee. Or, in these Zoom-enlightened times, for the ritual "wave of goodbye". 

Here's a picture of a bean field near Northampton. The farmer grew the beans until they were knee to waist high (depending on the height of people's knees and waists) and then zoomed round the field with a harvesting type device, leaving everything below 4 inches behind. In the distance, if you squint at the picture, you'll see the tractor which is ploughing everything back in. Yet in the foreground, you can see the beans they failed to harvest, because they were too low - some of which will no doubt, unless doused with herbicide, sprout up in the middle of the oilseed rape or winter wheat or whatever is planted next.

Is the Kingdom of Heaven like those remaining bean plants - apparently dead, apparently useless, but full of potential life, going under the radar, waiting for the chance to spring back in a way that the farmer now thinks is maybe weeds instead of wheat?

Or consider the Beaker Potato Plot. We knew it was time to start harvesting when the plants on the surface were starting to die off and look scraggy. And every fork you turn over is a new surprise - will you get massive potatoes fit for roasting in the ashes of the Wicker Man at Samhain? Or little squitty ones fit only for boiling and mixing up with salad cream for Sunday tea? Until you pull them out, you won't know.

Maybe the dying, scraggy greens on top are the way the church looks today. Clinging on to old ways against the changing seasons, battered, trying to keep growing when that's no longer what it's for. While under the surface - that's where the truth and hope and future is. It's been growing unseen. A new surprise with every fork turned over. A bit nobbly and grubby, but full of potential and taste and - for some at least - the start of next year's crop, once it's been through the dark times. And a crop 5, 10 or 20 times what was planted.

Let's hope so. Otherwise maybe we've had our chips.

  

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