He Knoweth Not How

She woke up at ten past six and checked, and there was nothing there.

That is the whole event of this morning. Last night meant something. She would defend that to anybody. She was not worked up, she was not in a strange mood, and what happened was quiet and real and she went to bed different.

And then she woke up, and in the first four seconds, before she had properly opened her eyes, she checked.

She was looking for a residue. Some feeling left over. Some sense of being altered. Some evidence, available on inspection, that the thing she meant at eleven at night was still there at ten past six in the morning.

Nothing.

Not the opposite of it. Not a collapse or a reversal. Just an ordinary Tuesday interior, the same as any other Tuesday, and the immediate conclusion that arrives with it: it did not take.

And now she is doing what she does, which is checking again. On the stairs. While the kettle boils. Halfway through the school run, at a set of lights, she will check again. By ten she will have looked eleven or twelve times, and each look will return the same nothing, and each nothing will be added to the case.

That is you at ten past six.

You've been running an inspection since you opened your eyes. You are looking for something you can feel as proof that something happened, and the looking is honest and reasonable, and it has never once been the right instrument for what you are trying to detect.

The parable puts the growing where nobody can watch it

Jesus tells a short story that almost nobody preaches, and it is the one you need this morning. Watch what the man does and what he does not know.

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.Mark 4:26-28

He knoweth not how.

Read that as the relief it is. The man in the parable is not given access to the mechanism. He sows, and then he sleeps and gets up, night and day, and the growing goes on somewhere he cannot see, and the not knowing is stated as a normal feature rather than as a problem to be solved.

You are not equipped to observe this, and the parable says so as a plain fact about how growing works, and I am not softening anything: Mark 4:27 says he knoweth not how, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can take an inspection off somebody at ten past six.

Now the next phrase, which is the one that undoes your morning. The earth bringeth forth fruit of herself. The producing is not being done by the man and it is not being supervised by him. He is not in the loop. His job was the sowing, and the sowing is finished, and everything after it belongs to the ground and to God.

Which means that eleven checks before ten in the morning are not diligence. They are a person trying to audit a process they were never given a window into.

You have already done your part, and the part that is going on now was never yours to watch, which is written into the parable rather than into my sympathy for a hard Tuesday, with the Spirit of God able to settle it where eleven inspections have only made it louder.

And then the sequence, which is worth having because it names your morning exactly. First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn. Three stages, and the first one is a blade, which is a thin green thing that looks like grass and could be mistaken for a weed by anybody who was not paying attention.

The first visible stage of a real crop looks like almost nothing. That is not a defect. That is what a blade is.

This is going on this morning underneath a Tuesday that looks exactly like every other one, because Scripture puts the growing out of sight and calls the not knowing normal, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen at ten past six.