I have been struggling with the parable of the mustard seed. The one we all learned in Sunday School. In Luke’s gospel (13: 18-19) the writer asks: “What is the Kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like the mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made their nests in its branches.”
The conventional wisdom has been that great things grow from the smallest of seeds, but Fr. Thomas Keating offers another, much more radical, understanding of the passage in his Meditations on the Parables of Jesus.
Keating plants the mustard seed in political history and biology. For the Israelites in the time of Jesus, the mythical vision of being God’s chosen people was to escape from Rome’s oppression and a return to national power and prestige, something that had ebbed for centuries. The image of power was not captured in a mustard bush, but in the towering Cedars of Lebanon, a tree comparable to the California Redwood. Giant, massive, strong!
The mustard seed, and the bush it produces, is small, insignificant, nearly a weed. Keating suggests that rabbinical law would have forbidden planting it in a vegetable garden. But the larger point is that a mustard seed doesn’t grow into anything significant. The Gospel writers have it turning into a substantial tree, but Keating says that is biologically impossible, and it certainly runs counter my experience. Wild mustard is invasive, noxious, sometimes poisonous, and very good fuel for wildfires. The Gospel writers “lost the radical thrust and the incredible freedom to which the parable called them,” Keating writes.
Look for small things, changes in our attitudes, he says. “The kingdom is manifested in ordinary daily life and how we live it. Can we accept the God of everyday life? If we can, then we an enjoy the kingdom here and now, without having to wait for an apocalypse or someone to deliver us from our difficulties.”
“Maybe the “In God We Trust” phrase on our currency should be replaced with “God Trusts Us to Get it Right.””
Still, you and I desperately want to be delivered from big evil, big danger, big oppression. I have a list. You do too. The question is where is God in the big stuff? Keating tells us that “In this parable [Jesus] intimates that God is not necessarily going to intervene in this world for the triumph of the just. He may not intervene in an apocalyptic manner to deliver Israel or bring about justice and peace. He has entrusted the latter to us.”
Is Keating arguing for secular government? For civic engagement while “resting in God?” For building the city on a hill based on ordinary kindness?
Maybe the “In God We Trust” phrase on our currency—it’s also our national motto—should be replaced with “God Trusts Us to Get it Right."
Photo: Teigan Rodger from Unsplash