Be Fruitful and Multiply
April 28, 2024
Pastor Mike
Genesis 1:26-31 & Mark 4:26-29
Last Sunday, we began a twelve-week series on the biblical theme of fruitfulness, exploring what it means for you and me to be followers of Christ who “bear fruit that will last,” as Jesus asked of us. This second meditation has to do with fruitfulness as a part of God’s character. We are made in the image of a fruitful God. This is why, late on that sixth day of creation, God blessed human beings with those well-known words: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”
Fruit contains seeds. Biologically speaking, that’s why fruit exists. Whether it be berries or melons or stone fruit, each piece of fruit contains the seed, the pattern and possibility of new life. Fruit might fall to the ground and rot and offer its seeds to the surrounding soil. Fruit has also evolved to be eaten, to sow its seeds on faraway ground with the help of the digestive systems of birds and animals. So long as a plant can produce a bit of fruit, it has a chance of securing a future for its species. Fruit is one way that life expresses its fierce desire to keep living. This is why children came to be known as fruits of the womb.
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” In the opening chapter of the Bible, which tells of the creation of the world, God speaks these words to the first human beings after creating them in the divine image. God, the source of all life, the heartbeat and breath at the sacred center of the universe, brings new life into being. God is Creator. God chose, out of sheer grace and delight, to share life with us.
God places a seed called the divine image into human beings, hiding the pattern and possibility of becoming like God deep within us. Since God is a life-sharing God, we have been made to be life-sharing creatures: Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill. God fashions an earth whose great drama is life emerging in “endless forms most beautiful,” to borrow Charles Darwin’s phrase.
Humankind was given this blessing by God at our beginning, but it is very important to realize that we were not the first ones to receive it. On the fifth day of creation, God made the creatures of the sea and the birds of the air, and God commanded them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Early on the sixth day, before the fashioning of humankind, God made the land-dwelling animals of the earth and saw, that they too were good, worthy of a place in the world.
Creatures of sea, sky, and land – all share in the blessing of their Creator to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The call to this kind of fruitfulness is not unique to us. What is unique are those other two words: subdue, have dominion. In a pre-sin context, those commands mean something like maintaining balance, tending soil, mirroring God to the planet. As United Methodist theologian Marjorie Suchocki has put it: “We are never addressed by God as if we were the only creature in the universe: We are addressed by God as a living participant in the fullness of God’s creative work.”[1] But one of our great sins is that we forget or fail or outright refuse to hold space for the fruitfulness and multiplication of other creatures. For today, however, I want to let dominion be and focus on fruitfulness.
Those three words of blessing – be fruitful, multiply, fill – show up all over the book of Genesis. God does not only bless every creature with the gift of producing more life, but God also promises fruitfulness to a very specific human family, for a very specific purpose.
As Genesis tells it, several generations after human beings were deceived by the serpent and fell into sin, they had already made such a mess of themselves that God decided to wipe them out, with all land-dwelling animals as collateral, with a great Flood. But to start the story over, God would need a piece fruit. So, God spared Noah’s family and a breeding pair of every animal, and God preserved them from the Flood in an ark. After the devastating Flood subsided and the Ark had come to rest on dry ground, God commanded Noah and the animals to come out of ark. “Then God said to Noah, ‘Go out from the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons' wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—that they may swarm on the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth’” (8:15-17). “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’” (9:1). The original blessing outlasts the judgment and the devastation of the Flood. Life cannot deny itself. Upon animals and human beings, God affirms what God had established in the beginning: Be fruitful, multiply, fill.
After that, God decided to start a story of the world’s salvation with an elderly, barren couple named Abraham and Sarah. Impossible as it seemed, God promised them countless descendants, more than the stars of the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. The scripture says, “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly. …I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you. …” (17:1-2, 6). Important to notice here that God has a part to play: ‘I will make you fruitful.’ It is one thing for life to beget more life. But for life to overcome the impossible, to defeat death, to open a closed future, the power of God must be added to the blessing.
Abraham and Sarah grew impatient for their child, and at one point decided to try and force the issue themselves by using a surrogate mother. Abraham impregnated a servant-woman of Sarah’s named Hagar. Hagar conceived and had a son named Ishmael only for Sarah to burn with envy and make life so miserable for them that Hagar took her baby and ran away into the wilderness. But God’s angel found her in her exile and told her: “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered” (16:10). Later, God repeats this promise to Ishmael “Behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation” (17:20).
The promise of fruitfulness goes on and on, passing from one generation to the next, spoken both by God’s mouth and by the mouths of fathers to their sons.
Isaac, Abraham’s son, receives the blessing while he’s wandering through the land of Canaan looking for a place to settle his family.
When the time came, Isaac laid his hands on his son Jacob – Jacob who deceived his family and stole his older brother’s inheritance – and Isaac blessed Jaco with the word of fruitfulness: “[May] God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples.” (28:1-4). God appears to Jacob years later to affirm that word: “ ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.’ So, he called his name Israel. And God said to him, ‘I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body’” (36:9-12).
When Jacob grew old and had fathered twelve sons, sons who would become the founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, he blessed them with the same words he had been blessed with. Particularly poignant were the words spoke to Joseph: “Joseph is a fruitful bough, / a fruitful bough by a spring; / his branches run over the wall” (29:22). Joseph’s brothers had faked his murder and sent him off to Egypt as a slave. That didn’t stop the promise. Joseph, too, was fruitful.
As Genesis ends and Exodus opens, all three verbs are there to meet us once again. Even though at that point the Israelites were living in Egypt and laboring unjustly for Pharoah, the scripture says that they “were exceedingly fruitful; they multiplied greatly, increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them.” For this very reason, Pharoah became afraid of them and oppressed them all the more.
The promise of fruitfulness obviously really mattered to them – and really mattered to God. And when you lay it all out there like that, it sure starts to feel like God can make good on God’s promises regardless of our capability or our circumstances.
Elderly and out of possibilities like Abraham & Sarah? I will make you fruitful.
A social outcast like Hagar? I will make you fruitful.
Born into a dysfunctional family with the deck stacked against you like Ishmael? I will make you fruitful.
Have a checkered past like Jacob? Have you been betrayed by the people closest to you, like Joseph? Are you making do in the land of injustice like the Israelites? Starting over after the end of your world, like Noah? I will make you fruitful. I will make you fruitful. I will make you fruitful.
Now, in all these stories from the Hebrew Bible, fruitfulness is very closely tied with continuing the family line. The promise given to all these characters is that they will have children who have children who have more children. God starts with the patriarchs and matriarchs, then works with the twelve tribes, then eventually with the nation. As Christians, it’s important to ask what being fruitful and multiplying might mean for us. When Jesus opened the door of salvation to the gentile nations, to people of all flesh, he freed the promise of fruitfulness from the necessity of childbearing. Jesus never once commands his disciples to multiply by having children. Instead, Jesus came to teach us all that we all are children of God. He sends us into the nation; he doesn’t ask us to make a nation. With Jesus, fruitfulness, multiplication, and filling take on more spiritual meanings. Sowing love in the world. Multiplying resources so that all are fed. Filling the world with his glory. How are you being called to do that?
All the more, then, it is true that no matter how God has called you to be fruitful in your own faith journey, you can trust that God will make it so. You might think you aren’t prepared, aren’t knowledgeable, aren’t strong or wise or generous or interesting enough. You might look at your life stage and think, No way. You might look at your past behavior and think, Can’t be me. You might feel the injustice of the world pressing in around you and think, It’s all I can do just to get by. You might wonder how the great thing whispering to your heart could ever come to pass when you have so little to give to it.
This is a good time to bring in the parable from Mark’s gospel. Parable means a word thrown alongside, a word that illuminates some other reality. According to Jesus, the kingdom of God is like a farmer who scatters seed on the ground, and then sleeps and rises night and day while the seed sprouts and grow. The farmer doesn’t understand how the growth happens. The earth produces of itself, and only when the grain fully ripens does the sower come back into the picture as the harvester.
The power of growth comes from beyond the farmer. It resides in the seed and in the earth. The process of growth is not something the human farmer controls. The seed has its way, its own internal logic and flow: first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.
How often, when the desire to be fruitful for Christ rises in us, do we feel that the power and the process must come from us? How often do we become servants of anxiety, bound to activity? Certainly, there is more we must know, more we must do to make the fruit come. And this compulsion actually drains the power and confuses the process.
The good news of Jesus’ parable is that the earth produces “of itself”. The Greek word for “of itself” is automate – automatic! The mysterious power lies beyond us. Our call is to very simply to trust in the one who made the promise. God’s kingdom is not a kingdom made by human hands; it is not a kingdom of works, but a kingdom of grace.
Instead of anxiety, God call us to joy. Instead of control, God calls us to rest. Instead of compulsive busyness, God call us to presence and attention, a readiness to do our part when the time is right, but not before.
I want to hold all this up next to another sacred text; at least, it’s sacred in my house.
{Read “The Garden” from the Frog and Toad series.}
Amen? Amen.
[1] Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Whispered Word: A Theology of Preaching (St. Louis: Chalice Pres, 1999), 11.