We teach our little ones in faith formation that a parable is “a story with a mystery.” Jesus told many, many parables, and there is really no right or wrong way to understand them. They are stories that we can listen to and chew on for our whole lives and never really fully comprehend or come to the end of, so to speak. We hear one such parable this weekend.
Jesus says “What is the kingdom of God like? It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”
For the Israelites of the first century there was a great disconnect between their identity as God’s chosen people and the reality in which they were living. Over a few centuries they had gone from the great heyday of national power under Kings Solomon and David to a brutally conquered nation, split and under occupation several times over, and during Jesus’ time, of course, they were under Roman occupation.
Jesus would have grown up with the language of the “kingdom of God” which his family and friends, and all of the Jewish people of his day envisioned as a place of triumph and power. An image often used of this imminent kingdom, found many times in the Old Testament, is that of the “Great Cedar of Lebanon.” These enormous trees would be comparable to the great red woods we have in California – towering some 300 feet or more.
So our Jewish ancestors dreamed of God’s kingdom as a time in the future when God’s chosen people would tower and rule over all nations, just like the image of the great cedar, well-known in Jesus’ time and culture as the greatest of all trees.
In light of this, Jesus’ metaphor is really very surprising and jarring because it turns the whole “Cedars of Lebanon” image on its head. The mustard seed wasn’t highly prized at all. In fact, on the contrary, it was something of nuisance. You didn’t dare plant it in your garden or it would crowd out all the other plants and literally and take over.
In fact the rabbinical law of the day that identified holiness with order and sin with disorder had very strict rules about what you could plant in a household garden and a mustard seed was one of the most forbidden things to plant because it caused such great disorder and upheaval - it grew fast and choked out anything growing around it.
So the first-century hearers of Jesus’ parable here would have known that the person planting the mustard seed in his garden was doing something illegal! Jesus is actually beginning his vision of the kingdom of God with someone breaking the law!
And the rest of Jesus’ story just continues to mystify. Some translations call it a tree, but what grows from a mustard seed is actually more of a shrub. It grows only about 4 feet high and isn’t a particularly attractive plant. Many people regarded it as a bit of a weed.
So (much to the horror of the first people hearing this parable, I’m sure) Jesus has literally cut the “Great Cedar of Lebanon” image of the Kingdom of God down to the image of an annoying, short bush, planted illegally in someone’s backyard garden that causes great upheaval and disorder when it grows…(?)
Scripture scholar CH Dodd defines a parable as “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life that arrests the hearer by its vividness or strangeness and leaves the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application so as to tease it into active thought.” So, a parable is a kind of riddle designed to both confuse and instruct….a story with a mystery!
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