The Holy Little Mustard Seed

One of the greatest mistakes Christians make today - and sadly, have always made - is in believing, and then taking actions that presume that God’s kingdom will come through major social, political, legal, or military movements. How many actions deserving of God’s eternal fire, have been done in the name of God? From inquisitions, to political and ecclesiastical divisions that led to millions of people tortured and executed, to the using Christianity and the lure or fear of the end times as a wedge to divide and exacerbate tribal distinctions so people and resources could be exploited: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

God tells us through his prophets and their own lives that the Kingdom will not be ushered in by military power, or force, or legal or political coercion. The kingdom will overturn our ideas of what true power and justice is so much so that it will be met with denial, misunderstanding, and even violent response. God speaks through Isaiah proclaiming what the kingdom will look like: “[when my kingdom comes] The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” And of course when Jesus comes, he doesn’t come as a politician, a wealthy man, a warlord, or with a military force behind him.

“My ways are not your ways, says the Lord.” The climax of the Christian story, the entire point of the faith begins with a small seed, Christ himself: “it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Like a tiny mustard seed, he seemed unimportant. A dime a dozen. The story of suffering, rejection, an early death at the hands of others. Yet after His Resurrection He became the great tree whose branches fill the world. The Cross looked like defeat. The Resurrection revealed that the tiny seed had become the tree of salvation. It’s a salvation that we can see in retrospect, now extends to everyone in the world who desires it.

It begins with Christ the mustard seed who shows us God’s way, God’s truth and God’s life: God's action, revealed in Jesus’s life, is non-coercive. It’s in fact often hidden because true faith cannot be nurtured through coercion, economics, politics, or military might. It happens, as God showed us in Jesus’s own life: through the nuances of relationship; long, complex, drawn out, relationships between people that develop, grow, shrink, stretch, go into hibernation, and extend out like a branch from Christ the seed, over people’s lifetimes. 

The real difficulty for us, I think, is accepting that real power comes through the vulnerability of becoming humble; of not presuming too much; of not assuming certainty about what we know, or how things should be. Listen to God speaking to Solomon, King David’s son: “And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in … Give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil, for who can govern this great people of yours?” It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. God said to him, “Because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or for the life of your enemies but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind.” Not my will, Lord, but yours be done, Jesus says in the Garden when facing the end of his life and of all things; God’s final judgment: “not my will but yours be done.” Who could know what would grow out of these words of humble faithfulness, submission, and endurance in following God. Everything in God's kingdom begins in hiddenness. Holiness develops quietly.

Jesus shows us that those who are to become his disciples cannot be his disciples and simultaneously seek to fulfill their own greatness; their own presumptuous claims about certainty and justice, or to bring this about with the world’s political, military or legal ways cannot work. Rather, humility grows into glory; obedience into authority; hidden virtue into eternal reward; and patient suffering into becoming a branch of Jesus’s own mission in this world. Thus the mustard seed teaches us not to despise small beginnings where things look bleak or hopeless as they would to the disciples days after Jesus's resurrection. If we are going to follow Christ, our way will not consist of political domination, but through a life of humility where we are made by God into branches of his own life. In this way we become part of God’s quiet transformation of creation: relationship by relationship. AMEN