midst of the old world? Here in his first parable Jesus leaves his disciples in no doubt on that point. The seed', he says, 'is the word.' The preaching of the gospel will be the seminal agent of change. It will germinate God's cosmic revolution. It brings in the kingdom. 'The seed is the word of God.'
It's hard to overestimate the importance of that single brief sentence. Sadly, the church through the centuries has not always believed it. Again and again, other things have usurped the prime place the Word ought to have on the Christian agenda. Once, for instance, the church revered bread and wine more than the Bible; the altar instead of the pulpit stood at the centre not only of her architecture but also of her theology.
There are still those who even today would take us back to such sacramentalist superstition if they could. But in our generation the threat to the primacy of the Word has usually come from other directions: social action, for instance. In recent years many Christians have become much more politically involved. For too long, Christians have treated the political arena as a no-go area, as if Jesus were Lord of everywhere else except there. Not so. Christians have a responsibility to be the salt of the earth in Council offices and in parliamentary debates, just as much as through evangelistic crusades or overseas missions.
Nevertheless, there is a danger of over-compensating for our previous neglect of social issues. People can lose touch with Jesus' priorities. The pendulum can swing to the opposite extreme. God's new society is not brought in by Act of Parliament, still less by machine gun. It is brought in through the Word.
Jesus was familiar enough with the revolutionary politics of his own day. Many of the zealot freedom fighters came from his home area of Galilee. But their tactics were not for him. It was the wrong seed, and he knew it. The seed is the Word. A Word which, when you
