We are Christ-centered Friends who equip and encourage all people
to respond to God's love and transforming Spirit.

The Mustard Seed Revolution
("Jesus for President" by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw)

1- We've all heard plenty of cute sermons about the mustard seed parable, how God takes little seeds and makes big trees of them, but there's much more going on here.

2- Matthew strategically placed the mustard parable in the middle of the story about the weeds and the wheat. He told his listeners that the kingdom of God is like mustard, which grows like a wild bush. Farmers say it's like kudzu, and a city preacher once compared it to the wild weeds that grow out of abandoned houses and crack the sidewalks. The mustard seed's growth would have been familiar to the first-century Jews, since many of them were farmers and peasants well acquainted with its way of taking over gardens. It might even have been growing in the wild around them where Jesus spoke.

3- Jews valued order and had very strict rules about how to keep a tidy garden, and one of the secrets was to keep out mustard. It was notorious for invading well-trimmed veggies and other plants and quickly taking over the entire garden. When those first-century peasants heard Jesus' images, they probably giggled, or maybe they told him to hush before he got himself killed for using this infamous plant to describe God's kingdom subtly taking over the world.

4- Plenty of people had lofty expectations of the kingdom coming in spectacular triumph and were familiar with the prophets' well-known "cedars of Lebanon" imagery, which described the kingdom as a giant redwood- the greatest of all trees. The cedars of Lebanon as a metaphor for the kingdom would have brought some enthusiastic amens from the crowd, gotten some people dancing. But Jesus ridiculed this triumphal expectation. After all, even mature mustard plants stand only a few feet high-modest little bushes.

5- What Jesus had in mind was not a frontal attack on the empire of this world. His revolution is subtle contagion-one little life, one little hospitality house at a time.

6- Mustard was also known for healing and was rubbed on the chest to help with breathing, sort of like Vicks vapo-rub. Mustard, a wild contagion of a weed, a healing balm, a sign of upside-down power-official sponsor of the Jesus revolution.

7- Jesus added one more thing: "The birds of the air can rest here." These birds are not the mighty eagles that would dwell in the cedars of Lebanon. These are the fowls that would come to rest in the branches of the mustard bush, detestable birds, the ones who eat animal carcasses. Farmers didn't want fowls in their garden. That is why they put up scarecrows. Bless his heart. Jesus was saying the kingdom of God is "for the birds"; the undesirables find a home in this little bush.