Yesterday's Gospel and today's, both from Mark 4, use images which indicate the work and continual and necessary activity of God in the world: the seed and the lamp on the lamp-stand are venerable and irreplaceable operators in the world, nothing artificial here, nothing man-made.
What man does is simply receive and cultivate each in it's proper place and tries to facilitate the proper conditions for maximum benefit and least harm. Misuse is death, proper reverence and veneration yields great abundance of life and light!
No hint here of the enlightened "god the mechanic." Here God is the seed and the fire without Whom the world is total darkness and total death.
The point is that God works in the world and that His work in the world is His working and it is according to His nature! Not man-made but above man! Nature is above man! Every form of nature! Above man's manipulation, like the nature of the seed and the nature of fire which are complete and ready made and all-or-nothing.
Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is real Life and real Light, sine qua non!
N.B. The word "god the mechanic" is found Tracey Rowland's Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed (citing Ratzinger's Values in a Time of Upheaval, 156), 122
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