Listen now Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The author Brian McLaren once wrote: ‘Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself.’

Jesus loved telling parables, short stories, particularly about the Kingdom of God. Our passage today from Mark says that he only spoke to the people in stories or parables, whilst explaining everything in private to his disciples. Very few of those explanations made it into the Bible – so both the crowds then, and us now, are left to puzzle our way to our own understandings.

And that’s probably a good thing rather than a bad one. The parables are open stories which we’re invited to engage with. As we return to the same ones over the years, there’s every chance that we pick-up something different each time. Often that’s because we ourselves change. Our life experiences play a part in that. If you happen to be financially well-off you might see the parable of the Landowner with the Barns rather differently than if you have to decide whether to pay the fuel bill or buy food for the children but not both.

Didn’t get it

Poetry and story-telling work because they have a multitude of meanings – and we do them, and the people who created them, a disservice if we try to pin them down within an inch of their lives with a single meaning.

Certainly, in Mark, most of the time we’re told that the disciples didn’t get it. So, they wouldn’t be the best placed to preserve a meaning of the parables anyway. We’re left to be challenged by often difficult and provocative stories which dare us to look at our own lives and values. Sometimes they bring to the surface answers that we’ve always known but not acknowledged. We would rather move on to the next part of the service and say a creed than wrestle with the implications of what we might be called to do.

Guilty as charged

If you know your OT, then you might remember the parable told by the prophet Nathan of the rich man with a large flock who took the only lamb of the poor man and served her up for dinner. Thinking it was a true story, King David was incensed and condemned the rich man to die – until Nathan pointed out that the man was David himself (2 Samuel 12) in reference to what had happened with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. A direct approach from Nathan would probably have gone, at best, unheard, but, at worst, punished. This way David pronounced himself guilty as charged.

And we need to listen for any echoes of earlier scriptures. A parable which starts: “A man who had two sons…” is likely to remind Jesus’ listeners of stories of other fathers who had two sons. Adam with Cain and Abel; Abraham with Ishmael and Isaac; Isaac with Esau and Jacob. The listener would have certain expectations of how the story might unfold. But might also the later parable shed a different light and new insights on the earlier stories?

Smallest of all seeds

Today’s Gospel from Mark includes the well-known parable of the mustard seed. ‘With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.’

There are versions of this in Matthew and Luke too, each with subtle differences. Instead of ‘ground’, one has ‘field’ and the other a ‘garden’. In Mark the seed grows into a great shrub – in Matthew and Luke it becomes a tree. In the King James version of Mark’s Gospel, it’s a ‘herb’ and not a ‘shrub’ whilst other translations have it as a ‘vegetable’!

So, we need to be a little wary of over analysing the English words which have come down to us from a book written in Greek of a story told in Aramaic. All we can say with any certainty is that Jesus told a parable about a small mustard seed, which grew and produced branches and birds took shelter. Whether he told the story many times but in a slightly different way or whether he told it just once and each Gospel writer gave it their own nuance, we’ll never know.

Ultimate importance

Commentators and preachers tend to focus either on the contrast between the very small seed and the very large plant – or in attributing a symbolic meaning to every single image within the story.

Frequently the lesson is that small acts of witness can be of the ultimate importance to the Kingdom. And that’s true enough.

Another argument picks up the echo from OT readings such as the one from Ezekiel that we had today and contrasts the lowly mustard plant with the noble cedar, which also has birds sheltering in its branches. Are we meant to think that God’s kingdom comes but not in a form that we would expect? Not in the grand but in the humble.

Incorrect

Well, let’s look a bit closer. Mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds – and they do not grow into giant trees. There were two main sorts of mustard plants in the region at the time – one grew to about eight feet given perfect growing conditions but the other was a modest bush just a foot in height. The seed of the cypress tree is actually smaller and obviously grows much bigger. So, Jesus could have picked a better example if his point was just that great things come from small beginnings. What he was saying was factually incorrect, and, rather like the parable of the yeast in the dough, he seems to be deliberately exaggerating to grab our attention – but on what supposed to focus?

Perhaps that parable of the yeast, or leaven, is a good one to think about. A woman in a village puts yeast in a dough, leaves it to rise and bakes an industrial sized quantity of bread – enough to feed the village for a week.

With both yeast and seed, on their own, you can do very little. But with bread and mustard plant you can do much. The movement from one to the other produces something desirable and more than the sum of its parts. Whilst great outcomes from small beginnings is a nice point to make – maybe we would better thinking about what those outcomes actually are.

Pliny

The first century Roman naturalist Pliny said this of mustard: ‘it is extremely beneficial to the health and helpful in the treatment of snake and scorpion bites, toothache, indigestion, asthma, epilepsy, constipation, dropsy, lethargy, tetanus and leprous sores’. End of quote. So, if any of you have a scorpion bite you now know what to do when you get home…

Mustard is a curative – it serves to cure or heal. And it was available to anyone listening to Jesus since the plant grew widely in the region. Like the vast amount of bread, the mustard plant offers much more than one person could ever want – and so the invitation is a universal one for others to partake, as the birds demonstrate. Mustard is a gift of nature; yes, it’s small but if allowed to do what it does naturally, then it produces prodigious effects.

Stop meddling

Perhaps we learn about potential and action. For the transformation of yeast and dough into bread and the seed into a plant, both need something to happen: the yeast needs putting in the dough and the seed needs planting in the ground. Somebody has to do those things. Even small actions have the potential to produce great things – but those actions do need doing or the yeast stays as yeast and the seed stays as seed.

But then, both need leaving alone to do what they do. To let God or nature do their thing. Keep messing with the dough and it won’t rise. Keep digging up the seed and it won’t germinate. Sometimes not everything or everyone needs our constant attention. We are part of a much bigger picture. We may initiate something but then it might do well-enough on its own without our meddling.

Because ultimately, it’s not about us. It doesn’t really matter who does the baking or who sows the seed, as long as it is done. What’s important is the bread and the plant that result. The consequences of the actions rather than the human actors who helped them on their way.

That welcome at the church door, those small acts of kindness during the week, that card to say that I’m thinking of you, can have a big impact, days or weeks later. On their own they may not mean much but they might have a cumulative effect.

Doing what we can

The parable of the leaven and the parable of mustard seed are both in local, domestic settings: ovens and fields. Set as we are in the middle of farmland, the kingdom of heaven is around us in the everyday stuff of life – in nature doing what it does best and in the daily lives of men and women like you and me doing what we can or what we should. The kingdom of heaven is all around us and appears in its own good time, like the time that dough takes to rise and seed to sprout.

So, maybe the lesson of the mustard seed – and today’s first parable of the seed being sown – is that the kingdom of heaven is present around us when humanity and nature work together, when we each do our bit, however small.

But, with God’s grace and direction, we do each need to do our bit. Amen

‘The mustard seed’ was delivered by Ian Banks at St John’s, Bircle on June 16th 2024. It was based on Mark 4:26-34

References:

• Anderson, H. (1976). The Gospel of Mark. Eeerdmans.
• Hurtado, L.W. (2001). Mark. Hendrickson.
• Levine, A-J. (2015). Short stories by Jesus. HarperOne.
• Levine, A-J & Brettler, M.Z. (Eds). (2011). The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Oxford.