A mustard seed and all that comes from it
A sermon for the twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time from Mthr Cara Greenham Hancock
From time to time, a preacher may make use a prop to help illustrate the point of their homily. I remember during Holy Week, one of our priests brought in a tiny bottle of nard, the precious perfume with which Jesus’ feet were anointed. And as I read through this week’s gospel, turning over in my mind what the Lord might be trying to teach us with the parable of the mustard seed, I went looking in my pantry, and sure enough, I had a bag of mustard seeds. I considered bringing one along to hold aloft in the pulpit as an object lesson: but quickly realised that, being so small as to be essentially invisible, this was a pointless exercise. It would be entirely unimpressive. The idea of being small and unimpressive, though, does rather lie at the heart of this rather knotty section of Luke’s gospel – with the insistent message that this is good news of the love of God for all of us.
The passage begins with the disciples asking Jesus for something – and those of us familiar with the way that the stories in the gospels tend to unfold may be prepared to hear what they ask being turned on its head. It’s not as bad as some of the things that they ask Jesus for: they’re not asking to be given special thrones in heaven, this time, or checking with Jesus whether he or not he wants them to rain down fire on people who haven’t yet accepted his message. The disciples ask Jesus to “increase our faith.” This is not so bad: faith is a good thing, and they have rightly understood that faith comes as a gift from the Lord. And yet the way in which Jesus responds to this request starts to show us that it’s not so simple as that.
When they ask Jesus to “increase our faith,” his disciples can be heard as treating faith as an asset: a resource, something to be maximised that it can be more efficient and productive. Something that could be big and impressive and reassure them about what they’re doing.
Jesus hears this request, understanding what lies behind it, and responds by telling these followers of his to aspire to something as big and impressive… as a mustard seed. As this little black speck.
Something small, something unimpressive. And yet, something deeply powerful, because deeply alive. A seed is perfect in its integrity – a seed contains within itself the ultimate goal of what it is to be: it ‘knows’ how to become a mustard plant. In the same pattern, a seed-sized faith contains within itself the knowledge and trust of the final outcome of the life of discipleship: which is nothing less than participation in the growth of the Kingdom, and a sharing in the life of God.
This is the image Jesus sets before the disciples as the answer to their request, and then he follows this with another answer, in many ways even stranger than the first. He tells a parable about a slave and his master, and the way each relates to the other. It’s not an image which is familiar or comfortable for us in the twenty-first century, but if we listen carefully, we hear in this story the same good news as is revealed in the story of the mustard seed.
The shape of the parable is a slave coming into the house from working in the fields, and then being told by his master to prepare the meal and serve him. The slave does not ask for or expect to be given special praise for fulfilling these tasks. Rather, Jesus has him say, modelling speech for the disciples “we are worthless slaves, we have done only what we ought to have done.”
At a first glance, this can seem as though the Lord is promoting a model of discipleship which is about subjugation and joyless task-fulfilment under the severe and thankless authority of an indifferent master. But there are two things about the parable which crack open its meaning, and reveal the good news which it carries.
The first is actually that most jarring word “worthless” – as in “we are worthless slaves.” In the original Greek, this word, ἀχρεῖος, is not about dignity or value, but rather refers to productivity. Translations which render the word as ‘unprofitable’ come rather closer to the mark than ‘worthless.’ We are being told here, again, that who we are as people of faith is not bound up with our productivity and prestige. We are who we are, and who we are is the beloved children of God. Our performance of the duties which go along with this role – good and honourable duties – cannot make him love us one iota more, just as there is nothing that we can do to make him love us one jot less. Love is simply not transactional. God loves us with a love which is free and unmerited: it is by nature undeserved, and can’t be enlarged by fulfilling our duties. This sets us free to love in a way which is likewise non-transactional, as we pour out our love both for God and for one another. Herein is the kingdom.
The second striking thing about this parable is revealed when we remember who is telling it, and the pattern that his own life took. We cannot listen to Jesus tell a story about a powerful man sitting at table in his home being served by his slave, and not recall the fact that on the night before he died, Jesus himself took up a towel and a basin and knelt to wash the feet of his disciples. He took the place explicitly belonging to the slave: and this was how he expressed what it is for him to be God and Lord of all. The whole dynamic of power and authority is unsettled when the Creator and King enters it in a place of humility, and smallness, and tender love. He says to his disciples, including to us, that this is the way we draw the kingdom of heaven a little closer.
We do this, we follow the Lord, not by self-consciously looking for visible productivity and increase, and not by imagining that we must appease the demands of a harsh boss, but by living lives which are rooted in that mustard-seed sized nugget of faith, of trust, of knowing who we are and to whom we belong: to live outwards from that seed is to grow into the fullness of life which lies latent inside every seed. This will, we are promised, tend to look small, and unglamorous, and unimpressive. It isn’t geared towards achieving acclaim or even thanks in our broken, anxious, reward-driven world. It will look like simple gestures: a kind word, a helping hand, a refusal to walk by on the other side: a life of trust and of love oriented always towards the one to whose call we are responding. Unglamorous, unprofitable, small and unimpressive like this mustard seed, and yet the most glorious and sublime life possible; a life of the Kingdom of Heaven. May we rejoice in God’s invitation to such a life. Amen.