Mustard Seed Church

Instead of the club understanding of Church Jesus offered the parable of the mustard seed: “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in their garden. And it grew and grew and became a great tree with large branches so that the birds made nests in it.”

The power of this parable relies upon us knowing some basic botany. The mustard plant is an annual that grew wild in Palestine. Pliny, that great Roman observer, writes: “It grows entirely wild … when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it.”[i] It was, in other words, a weed. It was the oxalis of the ancient world.

In the parable the person plants the mustard weed in their garden. Apart from being a stupid thing to do [think oxalis], it violated the law of diverse kinds in Leviticus 19:19. This law was designed to maintain order and separation, keeping plants in their proper place and not mixing them. Normally mustard was sown in small patches on the edge of a field. It was prohibited to plant it in a garden because it would result in mingling. By planting it in the garden, the planter makes the garden “unclean”. The mustard seed grew, and grew, and grew … as weeds do.

Jesus was inviting his hearers to imagine God’s reign to be very different from their religious club. The Jewish purity regulations were a result of needing club boundaries. All clubs need boundaries in order to create safe cultures, delineating insiders from outsiders. Jesus however was saying that God violates boundaries, violates biblical principles, disregards common botanical sense, and makes a mess of good order.

Jesus could have likened God’s reign to a cedar of Lebanon that grew tall and strong with many branches, capable of holding nests for many birds.[ii] In the great tree of the religious club all birds, read people, could find a home.

Mustard seeds don’t grow into great trees with branches. They grow into shrubs, with a maximum height of 1.2 metres. It takes a lot of digital re-imaging, or G.E., to make mustard into a large tree. Jesus was either botanically challenged or was deliberately mixing it up. The lowly, virulent, and problematic mustard can hardly be mistaken for the lofty, virtuous, and powerful cedar. Indeed his audience was probably smiling at the thought. What was Jesus trying to do in stirring his metaphors?

Jesus often did the reversal thing, trying to turn people’s thinking upside down. Consider, for example, the man beaten on the road to Jericho. The hero of the story is the unclean and despised Samaritan. The reign of God is meant to be mighty, exalted and significant, like a cedar. The mustard seed though is proverbially small, despised, and insignificant. Yet in the topsy-turvy, upside-down mind of Jesus, God is seen clearest of all in the small, despised, and insignificant.

There is disorder contained in the mustard metaphor. The reign of God is not like the Auckland Botanical Gardens were everything is carefully laid out, well tended and watered, named and admired. The reign of God is not orderly, where people all have allocated places and behave themselves. Rather the reign of God is like oxalis. It crops up all over the place, despite our best efforts to keep it out. Just when you had that patch of garden looking great, up she pops with her little yellow flowers.
It didn’t take long for the early Church to try to domesticate the breadth and wildness of God’s reign and call itself the Kingdom of God. Constantine made an empire out of it. All theistic religions have a tendency to want to own God and declare their institutions are God’s creation. Jesus in his day was trying to help his Pharisaic colleagues to broaden their thinking, see the divine in the weeds as well as the cedars, in the impure as well as the pure, and above all not to imagine that they could domesticate God.

[i] Pliny, Natural History, 29.54.170 [LCL, 529].
[ii] Ezekiel 17, 34, and Psalm 104.