York Minster

The Mustard Seed

Date: 14th June 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

Swine ‘flu became the first Pandemic of the 21st century this week. It’s amazing how such a small thing as a virus can have such an enormous effect. Medical work and alerts on a global scale, 10s of millions of anti-viral drugs in stock and more in production, 30,000 known to have the disease and perhaps 10 times that number of unreported cases: all from something too small to see.

This is more or less precisely what Jesus was saying when he compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed: it’s such a small thing in itself, but can have global consequences when taken seriously. Some commentators on this passage have got slightly overheated about the fact that the mustard seed isn’t, in fact, the smallest of seeds, as Jesus says it is. For some this has been a sign that Jesus is fallible: he doesn’t know everything, so he is not God. For others, in staunch defence of Jesus, it is clear that at the time this was the smallest seed they knew of, and so Jesus was simply acting appropriately, and to have talked about even smaller seeds, which no one could see and which aren’t even indigenous to the Middle East, would not have helped his mission.

Well, the truth is that Jesus was just using a common expression from his culture: the mustard seed was simply a normal way of referring to a very small amount of something, something that was very little. It was not meant as a bit of pre-scientific botany. It was also well-known that it grows, in that region, into a very substantial bush, virtually a small tree. And even today, when we can know all there is to know about the genetic structure of that mustard seed and the processes by which it is transformed into a bush of such substance, there is still something miraculous about that transformation. Anyone who has grown anything from seed will know what I mean. So this is not meant to be botany, nor even a demonstration of the divinity of Jesus; it’s just a good form of communication.

There is one more sort of technical matter to look at before we come to the meat of this parable, and that is the reference to the birds of the air. Jesus, and the people to whom he was talking, were not astonished that birds might make their nests in the shade of a fully grown mustard bush. Birds, as we know, will make their nests wherever they want, wherever they can find food, and wherever they feel safe, whether that is in a bush or a tree or the many nooks and crannies of a great medieval cathedral. This, too, is a standard Rabbinical way of referring to the Gentile nations, nations which stand outside the covenant of God with his chosen people. Here the reference is to the fact that as the kingdom of God’s covenant people grows, so it will provide shelter for all the nations of the earth, just as birds will find shelter in the branches of the mustard bush. But this is a matter to which we will return later.

This parable of the mustard seed, as it is known, is one of a very large number of parables and other figures of speech in which Jesus talks about the kingdom of God and what it is like. Trying to get people to think about and understand the nature, scope and importance of the kingdom of God was a significant part of the teaching Jesus offered during his ministry. One of the longest, most sustained and most important bits of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom comes in what we have traditionally called the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s gospel. And then there are small and scattered bits of teaching such as the one we have today. In Luke’s gospel, many of the sayings and parables about the kingdom have a major focus on the poor and marginalised and how God will, in the words of the Magnificat, lift up the lowly.

The kingdom of God was not an odd idea to Jesus’ listeners, but was given fresh content and direction by Jesus in his teaching and ministry. The popular expectation of God’s kingdom was one in which God’s people would be led to crush and eliminate their enemies and in which they would have supreme political and religious power, always looking back to David and his kingdom as the archetype. Jesus points in another direction altogether, when he suggests that God’s kingdom is more about living God’s justice, about compassion to all, and about the indiscriminate grace of God available to everyone. Anyone who is open to God in faith and in life can belong to this kingdom, and Jesus demonstrates his understanding of the kingdom by the ways in which he sits at table with those who the rest of society shuns – tax collectors, prostitutes, the unclean, and so on. He shows it in his healing ministry and the way he crossed social and religious boundaries in exercising it. To his contemporaries who expected some sort of God-led grand military and political victory, the kingdom Jesus preached would have seemed like a small and perhaps pathetic thing, hardly more than a mustard seed.

The parables of Jesus give us broad brush pictures of what the kingdom of God entails and the kinds of values it calls for in those who would be a part of it. So Jesus would have us be alert to the signs of the kingdom wherever they may arise, and however unexpected they may be; the kingdom of God is shown by the responsibility we take for each other, by the ways in which we live by prayer and faith, in how we show generosity, humility and forgiveness; members of God’s kingdom are to be clean on the inside and not just on the outside; we are to understand that justice, compassion and mercy have a greater weight in God’s kingdom than religious observance and scrupulous keeping of the Law. Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom was a radical departure from the expectations of at least some of his contemporaries, but it was also one that picked up and developed profound strands from the Law and the greatest of Israel’s Prophets. And when these more profound understandings and values are lived, then the mustard seed of faith can grow into a kingdom in which all people can find shelter and a home.

I’ve spoken before about the fact that it took Jesus a little while and some interesting experiences to come to a realisation that his ministry was for all people and not just for Israel, for those of the  household of faith. I think the parables Jesus tells as he develops his ministry point more and more to God’s kingdom being for everyone. God’s kingdom was not to be a place from which a small band of chosen people could rule the world, but a broad place of many mansions, where all people can find a home and a welcome, where the birds of the air can nest and make a home.

There are interesting ideas at work here as Jesus makes these familiar images his own. St Paul, however, especially in his letter to the Romans, moves this image in a different direction when he writes about the Gentiles being ‘grafted’ on to the tree of God’s family, as it were. A ‘wild’ branch –the Gentiles – is grafted on in place of an original branch which no longer bears fruit. This is not the direction Jesus takes, and I suspect the way St Paul develops it shows some of the pressures the church was under at the time as it expanded out into the Gentile world. For Jesus, a redeemed and faithful Israel working for the transformation of the world into God’s kingdom, is the place where the whole world can be at home. The birds of the air don’t become the bush when they build their nest in it, but they do become a part of its life. Even here, even in understanding an idea as important to Jesus as the kingdom of God, there is not only room for, but a celebration of diversity.

It won’t do to push this parable or the image in it too far or to read too much into it: Jesus was not some kind of post-modern universalist. But as many incidents in his ministry and much of his teaching indicate he was not only open to the possibility of God being at work in people outside of the household of faith, he seemed to expect and particularly to value it. More than once he comments on how the faith he finds in Gentiles and Samaritans puts the faith he finds in Israel to shame. In his understanding of God there is a broad welcome to those who will live by the values of the kingdom. There are sheep of his who are not of his fold; there are many mansions in the heavenly home to which he goes; there is room in his view of God’s love for the birds of the air to nest in its branches.

In a moment or two we’re going to baptise a girl called Lydia. This is an important moment not only for her and her family, but for all of us as we remember our own calling to faith in Christ. In Lydia’s baptism the seed of faith, the seed of God’s love, already shown to her in the love of her family, is sown; in her baptism, small though she is, she carries within herself the potential, as a child of God, to transform the world into the kind of kingdom of which Jesus speaks. In Baptism, and throughout our lives, Jesus calls us to join with him not only in proclaiming the truth of God’s love for the world, but to join with him in transforming the world by God’s love into his kingdom of justice mercy and peace

Amen.