Over the past few weeks, I’ve been circling around the same question: what kind of power does God’s kingdom reveal? My reflections on the wheat and weeds explored a kingdom growing in untidy places, while my post on Romans 8 asked what we really mean when we sing that “our God is greater”.
This weeks readings bring those threads together. Through Paul’s promise that nothing can separate us from God’s love, and Jesus’ images of mustard, leaven and treasure, it asks whether God’s greatness is found not in control or domination, but in a love that quietly disrupts, transforms and refuses to let us go.
Readings
I often struggle with prayer. There is so much going on in the world, so many people and situations which need praying for, that I often do not know where to begin. Sometimes we are not even sure what we should be praying for, and it can feel a little overwhelming. Fortunately, we are not simply left to work it out for ourselves. The Spirit meets us in our weakness, carrying the prayers we struggle to express. God meets us in ways that do not depend upon us having the right words, only hearts that respond to the prompting of the Spirit.
Paul does not describe uncertainty in prayer as a failure of faith. He accepts that there will be times when we cannot see what the right outcome would be, when our understanding is limited and when words fail us. In those moments, the Spirit does not stand at a distance waiting for us to become more confident. The Spirit joins us in our weakness and carries before God what we cannot express for ourselves.
This is the setting for some of the most familiar and I think misunderstood words in Romans: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
Taken out of their context, those words can sound rather triumphalist. They can be heard as though Paul were saying that Christians have God on their side, and that those who oppose them are therefore opposing God. It can become a way of dividing the world into those who are with us and those who are against us, with the assumption that we must be the people in the right.
Paul knew how dangerous that assumption could be, after all he had once persecuted the followers of Jesus. Paul had believed that his actions defended faithfulness to God, only to discover that certainty about being on God’s side had led him to harm others.
Paul’s readers knew that powerful people could stand against them. They lived at the centre of an empire maintained by military force and the threat of punishment. Judea remained under Roman occupation. Soldiers, taxation, crucifixion and the sword were part of the political world in which they lived.
Rome promised peace and security, but Roman peace depended upon control. It was secured through the ability to defeat resistance, punish opposition and remind subject peoples of the consequences of challenging imperial authority.
So Paul isn’t pretending that nobody can be against the followers of Jesus. In the verses which follow, he speaks of hardship, distress, persecution, hunger, danger and the sword. He quotes a psalm which speaks of people being treated like sheep waiting to be slaughtered. He knows that religious authorities, political rulers and violent systems can oppose people, take away their security and even take their lives.
His question doesn’t mean that nobody can hurt us. It means that nobody who hurts us can make God abandon us.
This also changes the way we hear Paul’s claim that “in all these things we are more than conquerors”. Rome understood conquest through armies and the defeat of enemies. A conqueror proved strength by overpowering somebody else and extending control over them.
Paul uses that language while speaking to people who may suffer, be imprisoned or killed. He doesn’t promise that the Church will become stronger than Rome or defeat the empire by becoming a more powerful version of it. Their hope lies in the conviction that empire cannot determine the final truth about them. Authorities may condemn them, but they cannot decide their worth. Violence may wound them, but it cannot define their identity. Death may take their lives, but it cannot sever their relationship with God.
Nothing in all creation can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
This offers an entirely different understanding of power. We often think of power as the ability to control an outcome, remove obstacles or force others to comply. Paul instead speaks of the Spirit helping us in weakness, groaning with us and carrying our prayers. He speaks of Christ interceding for us and of God remaining present within a creation which is already suffering.
God’s love is active, but does not dominate. It invites and works through relationship. People can resist love, and that resistance can cause terrible harm, but it cannot change the character of God or make God cease to love.
God’s greatness is not shown by ensuring that nothing can resist God. It is shown in the persistence of a love which nothing can finally defeat.
That brings us to the Gospel reading, because Jesus’ parables ask what the kingdom of such a God looks like.
Jesus doesn’t compare the kingdom with an army, a palace or an emperor. He speaks instead of a seed, yeast, treasure and a pearl. These were images drawn from the ordinary life of his hearers. They would have understood farming, bread-making and trade without much explanation, whereas many of us are now further removed from those practices. What was familiar to Jesus’ audience often needs unpacking before we can discover the surprise hidden within it.
The mustard seed is deliberately planted. The kingdom is not an accident, and God is not absent from the world. Something has been set in motion.
Yet the seed begins almost invisibly and grows into something vigorous and untidy. Mustard could disturb the predictable order of a cultivated field. Jesus didn’t give his hearers a majestic cedar as an image of royal greatness. He gave them a common plant which grows beyond expectations and becomes difficult to contain.
Even so, the birds find shelter within it.
The kingdom changes the field, it does so by creating room for life. It doesn’t dominate the landscape from above but grows from below, crossing prepared boundaries and offering shelter where it is not expected.
The parable of the leaven may be easier for us to picture. Many people became familiar with making sourdough bread during the pandemic, feeding a starter and using a small amount to begin a new batch. For Jesus’ hearers, leaven would have been closer to a piece of fermented dough kept back from earlier baking than to the neat packets of yeast we often use today.
The woman deliberately takes this small amount and places it into a much larger quantity of flour. At first it seems insignificant, but it does not remain contained in one part of the mixture. It spreads until the whole batch is changed.
This is the surprising power of God’s kingdom. It may begin in something easily overlooked: an act of welcome, a refusal to accept prejudice, a generous choice or a relationship restored. Yet love can spread beyond that first moment, changing other people and gradually reshaping a community. The kingdom works from within ordinary life, and what begins small has the capacity to transform the whole.
Where Rome changed the world through conquest and control. God’s kingdom changes the world through persistent life, relationship bringing transformation from within.
That doesn’t mean that the kingdom is passive or harmless to the established order. Mustard alters the field. Yeast changes the flour. Love disturbs systems built upon fear, exclusion and the protection of privilege because those systems prevent people from flourishing.
The kingdom of love disrupts the powers and patterns of this world without becoming another form of domination.
This has consequences for the way we understand the life of the Church. We can be tempted to measure faithfulness through influence, numbers or public importance. We may imagine that the Church would be more successful if it had greater power and could make people listen.
The kingdom Jesus describes doesn’t overcome empire by becoming a stronger empire. It grows through ordinary people, hidden acts of faithfulness and relationships shaped by love. It may be seen when someone offers welcome, refuses prejudice, practises generosity or begins to see another person differently.
We should also be cautious about assuming that we are always the people planting the seed or placing the yeast. We are also the field in which something unexpected may be growing and the flour which still needs to be changed. God’s kingdom works within us, challenging assumptions and loosening the hold of fear, status and control.
The parables of the treasure and the pearl develop this further. One person discovers treasure unexpectedly, while another has been searching for something precious. Their journeys are different, but both recognise something whose value changes the way they see everything else.
They sell what they possess because they have discovered something worth the risk. The kingdom draws rather than compels, yet the discovery rearranges their priorities and alters their understanding of security. They possess the treasure, but the treasure also seems to take possession of them.
That leaves us with a question about what we allow to define security in our own lives. It may be wealth, status, familiarity, being right or keeping control. These things can become so important that we protect them even when doing so prevents others from flourishing.
Paul’s assurance that nothing can separate us from God’s love offers another kind of security. When our worth no longer depends upon having power over others, we may become more willing to practise generosity, make room for people who have been pushed aside and allow familiar patterns to change.
“God is for us” does not mean that God supports our side against everybody else. It is a promise spoken to people who knew vulnerability and opposition, assuring them, and us, that no power can have the final word over our lives.
The Church is not called to conquer, control or impose. We are invited to participate in a kingdom which grows differently: quietly, persistently and from within.
Many powers may stand against us, and Paul doesn’t deny their reality. He insists, however, that none of them have the final say. The kingdom can’t overcome the world by copying the world’s methods. It grows like mustard, works like yeast and draws us like treasure.
Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love in which that kingdom is rooted. That love is already growing among us, working within us and drawing the world towards life.
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