We love a good story – especially when there’s a good plot, exciting characters, and an ending that satisfies our need to have things tied up neatly or that leaves us with a juicy nugget of life lessons. It’s the moral of the story that we are looking for. Our love of storytelling goes back thousands of years… so much of early human history was shared orally rather than in written word. Heck, even Jesus used story to teach the disciples and the crowds that followed him around. In particular, Jesus loved sharing God teachings using the forms of the parable.
I think most preachers have a complicated relationship with the parable. You see, it is mildly frustrating when the thing you are supposed to be reflecting on isn’t easily understandable. A parable is meant to be a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson. The problem is that Jesus tells these seemingly simple stories but often they need some unpacking or deciphering. He was constantly explaining the meaning of his stories to his disciples – of course, never in the hearing of the gospel author. Many Biblical commentators tend to look at parables as puzzles to be solved, so that they reveal the little life instruction that is so desperately wanted. But what if that’s not the point? Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor and theologian, suggests that “parables are not neat little moralisms dressed in narrative. They are meant to be swallowed whole. Parables are living things meant to mess with our assumptions and subvert things we never even thought to question.”[1] Wait, what? Jesus chose the parable to teach the people knowing full well that they’d leave the listener scratching their head and rethinking what they thought they knew?
Eugene Peterson, the author of The Message translation of the Bible, explains a parable like this: “like explosive, narrative time bombs. We hear them ticking away and we wonder about their meaning as they continue to go on ticking. We think we may finally have got it, yet it stubbornly continues to tick away and make us ponder. We walk away, but over the course of the next day or so it still continues to tick, tick, tick away. And then, all of a sudden, the truth Jesus meant to convey strikes home and kaboom! When this ticking bomb of a parable explodes, we are surprised and almost overwhelmed with its implications.”[2]
So here we are, Jesus shares a parable with the people that is meant to explain what the Kingdom of God is like… and he offers the parable of the mustard seed. People of the Christian faith LOVE the parable of the mustard seed… great things can come from little beginnings right? All you need is faith the size of a mustard seed – that’s the take away, right? Through God small things become great. It makes sense. But, when we take into account that Jesus’ parables are narrative time bombs, does this interpretation of the scripture make sense?
Those listening to Jesus that day would have been familiar with the words of the prophet Ezekiel – including the passage that was part of the lectionary readings – because we didn’t hear them earlier, I’ll share them now:
Ezekiel 17: 22-23:
I myself will take a sprig,
From the loft top of the cedar;
I will set it out.
I will break off a tender shoot
From the topmost of its young twigs;
I myself will transplant it
On a high and lofty mountain.
On the mountain height of Israel
I will transplant it,
And it will produce boughs and bear fruit
And become a noble cedar.
Under it every kind of bird will live;
In the shade of its branches will nest
Winged creatures of every kind.
Tall, beautiful, cedar trees. Impressive trees that begin small and grow into something truly impressive. These trees become the symbol of Israel’s future greatness that is proclaimed by the prophet. So imagine where the people’s minds went when Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed – insert knowing nods from the crowd here.
Except, right after he says this, the parable takes an unexpected turn, for these seeds don’t produce some majestic tree – rather these seeds produce a fairly impressive SHRUB. In fact it is the greatest of all shrubs. Tick tick tick… the narrative time bomb has been activated. What we need to know, as people on this side of the Bible, is the kind of mustard Jesus is talking about. “You see, the thing about mustard seeds is that while some varieties were used as spice and others medicinally, in general they were considered at the very least pesky and often somewhat dangerous. Why? Because wild mustard is incredibly hard to control, and once it takes root it can take over a whole planting area. That’s why mustard would only occasionally be found in a garden in the ancient world; more likely you would find it taking over the side of an open hill or abandoned field.”
So we have a parable about a plant that starts off as a tiny seed, which grows into an impressive shrub and has the tendency to show up where it isn’t wanted. The farmers in the crowd likely would have had experience pulling this plant up from their fields…over and over and over again. Okay Jesus, consider us caught off guard. Tick tick tick. John Dominic Crossan puts it much more elegantly. He says: “The point, in other words, is not that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said, Jesus was what the kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, (more) like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties. Something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses – if you could control it.” [3]
The ticking gets louder as the parable settles into our subconscious, as our brains work through the story to find what it is that Jesus is trying to teach us. The Kingdom of God is like a shrub with dangerous take over properties, a shrub that you’d only want in small amounts in the garden – as if you could control it. Tick tick tick. The kingdom of God is going to show up wherever and whenever it wants and God is not going to wait for the perfect spot or an invitation. It’s like the milkweed that I have growing in my garden – it shares soil with our strawberries. Last year it stayed put but this year, it is sending shoots up all over the strawberry patch. Everyday there is a new shoot to pull…
We can’t coral God into particular places, we can’t hope that God stays in just one place, because we know that the kingdom’s inbreaking will just find another spot. And more than likely, when the kingdom finally breaks through the soil, it will look unassuming and will be unexpected…something we might just take for granted. But see, that’s where the parable is so smart, God is like an impressive shrub that brings in the undesirables and the rabble rousers to shake up our comfortable lives. God can’t always show up like the glorious cedars of the west coast or the elms that line the streets in Winnipeg… God is going to show up like the mustard plant, or the milkweed or the burdock… The kingdom of God is annoyingly persistent and unpredictable in shaking us out of our status quo, scooching us from our comfortable pews and stirring up our faith so that we might begin to see God’s kingdom, God’s dreams, God’s hope come to life in the places, the people, the times, we least expect it. God takes the ordinary, and reminds us that great things can happen, will happen when we open ourselves up to the presence of God in the world.
Amen.
[1] Bolz-Weber, Nadia. “Ordinary #11B (Ezekiel 17: 22-24; Mark 4:26-34). Christian Century, June 13, 2012. www.christiancentury.com
[2] From David Lose, In the Meantime Blog. www.davidlose.com
[3] Dominic Crossan, John. The Historical Jesus, p. 278-279.
