Seeds, Weeds, and the Kingdom of God

“Jesus said, ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it?  It is like a mustard seed, which when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’”  Mark 4:30-32

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
June 17, 2012

Emmanuel Church

              Oftentimes when I am listening to Jesus teach in the gospels, I find myself secretly wishing that he would speak more directly, more transparently.  “Just tell me what I am supposed to do, what is expected of me,” I want to say.  When Moses taught, for example, his approach, typically, was to lay down the law simply and clearly.  Thou shall not murder.  Thou shall not steal.  Honor thy mother and thy father.  What such teaching lacks in lyricism, it more than makes up for in precision.  With the Ten Commandments, you know where you stand.  There is no ambiguity.

              This is not how Jesus taught, however.  Rarely does Jesus teach through laws, maxims, or directives.  Rather, as we hear in today’s gospel text, Jesus loves to teach in parables.  Parables are short stories that use pictures and images to suggest a truth or a reality without completely revealing that truth or reality.  Parables work indirectly and gradually.  Parables tease us with their meaningfulness.  Like an onion, we keep peeling back the layers, only to discover more.  Parables sometimes work by analogy, sometimes by metaphor, sometimes by allegory.  And parables are often subversive, inviting us to think about something in a whole new way by upending conventional ways of thinking. 

              That Jesus prefers to teach in parabolic form, rather than in a more “straightforward” way, is itself a fact deserving of our attention.  Why talk about God in parables?  One way to come at this question is through the lens of a favorite poem of mine by Emily Dickinson, entitled “Tell All The Truth.”  It reads:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,


Success in circuit lies,


Too bright for our infirm delight


The truth's superb surprise; 



As lightning to the children eased


With explanation kind,


The truth must dazzle gradually


Or every man be blind.

Dickinson’s poem suggests that Truth often cannot be conveyed directly; rather, it has to be told at a “slant.”  It is like the bright noonday sun:  if we look at it straight on, we are likely to go blind.  We know of the sun’s presence because its radiance illuminates everything around us, because its fiery energy warms our skin, and because the power of its gravitational pull keeps everything on our planet in its place; but we dare not stare at the fullness of the noonday sun with the naked eye.  For it is “too bright for our infirm delight.”  Truth is thus like the sun in that it “must dazzle gradually” and not all at once.

                  Jesus talks about God in parables for just these reasons, I think.  God’s being is too vast, too mysterious, too sublime to be captured in neat and tidy linguistic categories.  God is not an object like other objects in the world; he is the source of being and beauty and truth and life itself, beyond conventional description.  We can approach God only indirectly, a glimpse here and a glimpse there, never full on.  And this is why the language of poetry and metaphor, and the telling of parables, is often more suited to talking about God.

                What, then, are we to make of today’s parable, comparing the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed?  It is, of course, a familiar parable.  And there is a relatively simple and conventional way of interpreting it, as you heard just a few moments ago in our children’s story:

                Big things often start out small.  Don’t be discouraged by modest beginnings because great and wondrous realities frequently grow out of the smallest things.  On this reading, the parable is fundamentally a message of hope.   It expresses the conviction that we should persevere in our faith, even when the world around us may not appear to reflect God’s Kingdom, because we trust in God’s promise to make something big of even our humble faithfulness.  And this interpretation of the parable is true enough so far as it goes.

                But this traditional reading doesn’t do full justice to the story; indeed, it tends to domesticate Jesus’ real message.  Because the really striking image in the parable is not so much the size of the seed, but that Jesus should compare God’s Kingdom to a mustard plant.  The little mustard seed might seem like a sweet little image, as if it's the little underdog, the good seed that survives against the odds and flourishes, triumphant over the “big seeds.”  But this choice of metaphor would in fact have been shocking to Jesus’ listeners at the time because the prevailing botanical image for God’s Kingdom in the prophetic literature was not some small, dusty, old shrub, but the tall and majestic cedar of which Ezekiel speaks in our first lesson and to which the Psalmist alludes in our psalm for the day. 

              The great Cedars of Lebanon were well known in the ancient middle East as a strong, tall, beautiful tree, a fitting symbol for the divine.  The trees were used by the Phoenicians for building great ships, as well as for houses, palaces, and temples.  The sawdust of cedars has been found in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods to which Gilgamesh, the hero, ventured.  And wood of the cedar tree was used in the construction of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.  The great cedar tree is indeed mentioned 75 times in the Bible.

               By contrast, guess how many times the mustard plant is mentioned in the Old Testament?  Zero.  And no wonder.  There is nothing majestic about a mustard shrub.  Nor is it especially beautiful.  It is a mundane plant, without noble lineage in ancient literature, and of only modest use.  Indeed, the mustard plant is frankly more like a weed than anything else.  It is an invasive plant that grows easily, insinuates itself into gardens and plots of land, and is hard to get rid of.  It is wild and unpredictable.  Once mustard gets into your garden, you have a hard time controlling it.

               So, this is what the Kingdom of God is like?  What is Jesus getting at? 

               Most of us, I suspect, like our spiritual lives to be neat and tidy, well-kept and beautifully maintained, much like an English garden.  We’re good Anglicans after all.  God happens on Sunday mornings, in gorgeous little chapels like this one.  We hear our lessons, say our prayers, and check church off the list.  But what if life with God is not like that?  What if life with God is not tame, and domesticated and easy to control?  What if it is like a wild and relentless shrub that once you let it into your garden, it won’t go away, but will keep looking for new and unexpected places to pop up.

              Imagine, for a moment, what our lives might look like if we let that tiny seed of faith in our hearts begin to run wild.  What if we were to let love and hospitality and compassion invade every nook and cranny of our being?

              What would happen, say, if you interrupted your business day by taking ten minutes at lunch to leave your downtown corner office to buy a meal for the homeless guy you always see hanging out on the street?  What would happen if I took an hour on a Saturday morning to visit the nearby nursing home to brighten the day of someone who otherwise has no one in her life?  What would happen if each one of us volunteered just one hour a week to tutor a kid from an underprivileged background?  What would happen if we picked up the phone and called that long-lost friend or classmate that we have been meaning to re-connect with, but have never found the time?  What would happen if we let our faith grow like an unruly and persistent mustard shrub in the garden of our hearts?  I suspect that both the world and each one of us would find ourselves changed for the better.

              The parable of the mustard seed, it turns out, is a somewhat disturbing and challenging story.  Just as God defied all messianic expectations by coming into this world not as a great king or warrior, but as a poor and humble servant, a child of homeless teenagers, so too is God inviting us to defy all conventional notions of respectable piety by practicing our faith not just by attending church once a week, but by loving recklessly and spreading his Kingdom every day of our lives as if it were a wild weed.  Because if we truly let that mustard seed sprout, and grow, there is no telling what will happen.  I’ll warn you, however:  it does mean giving up control of your garden and letting God take over.  And that can be scary at times.  But the mystery of God’s grace is that He knows what He is doing.  And the wonder of God’s grace is that He loves inhabiting not only tall, beautiful and majestic cedars, but little old mustard shrubs like you and like me.  Let Jesus spice up your life with a little mustard seed.  Amen.