The Mustard Seed and the Yeast
Two verses placed in the very first chapter of Mark summarize for us the totality of our Lord's preaching during his earthly ministry. Mark 1.14-15: 14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” The time is fulfilled! The Messiah's reign is about to be established! That is the news that Jesus released like a bombshell in Galilee.
As a result, great crowds flocked into Galilee from all over Israël and began to follow the Master. They heard his teaching and were amazed at his words. John 7.46: 46 “No-one ever spoke the way this man does.” They were witness to his miracles, the healings and the casting out of demons, the multiplying of bread, all the signs and wonders. They could see it all beginning to happen, they were caught up in the sweep of the coming reign. And they begin to ask, Matthew 12.23: 23 “Could this be the Son of David?” After all these centuries, could God finally be intervening to bring the reign of his Christ? And it was all so exciting.
But then something shifted. As time passed and as Jesus simply continued his ministry as an itinerant preacher, refusing to be made king, his listeners began to feel a mounting disappointment. They began to respond to the message of the kingdom's nearness with increasingly bitter criticisms, doubt and rejection. Actually, all their objections could be boiled down to one. Jesus' ministry doesn't really give us the impression that we are on the eve of the fantastic event that he is proclaiming.
The Jews had very definite ideas about the Messiah and his reign. They were convinced that the Christ would set up his kingdom in some blazing manifestation of glory, and unprecedented display of divine power. He would come surrounded in majesty and royal splendor to restore Israel's political might, raise his armies and take off to conquer the world by military force and miraculous power. But that's not what was happening. What they were seeing in the ministry of Jesus was so different from what they had expected and hoped for.
Jesus responds to this difficulty in certain of his parables about the secrets of the Messiah’s reign. And that brings us to the parables of the mustard seed and of the yeast.
Luke 13.18-20: 18 Then Jesus asked, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew, became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.”
20 Again he asked, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? 21 It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
The smallness of the mustard seed had become proverbial among the Jews. They talked about a tiny drop of blood as being no bigger than a mustard seed. They would say about a minute breach of the Mosaic Law that it was a defilement the size of a mustard seed. Even our Lord himself used the same proverbial saying, Matthew 17.20: 20 “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed…” It was common to compare small or insignificant things to a mustard seed. That is why Jesus chooses this particular grain over any other: because of its proverbial smallness. Mark 4.32: 32 “Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”
What is the point of this story? Pretty simple, isn't it? The point of comparison is the contrast between the smallness of the mustard seed and the greatness of the plant that comes out of it. Jesus is telling us that the tiny mustard seed is without proportion to the final result it produces: this enormous shrub, larger than all the garden plants, comparable to a tree.
Since the point of the parable is a contrast, the teaching to draw from it must involve another contrast. It might help us to formulate this correspondence by means of an equation: a/b = c/d (a is to b as c is to d). We already know what is represented by the terms c (the smallness of the seed) and d (the greatness of the plant). What we need to do is determine what a and b represent in the application. We will start with the term b, since it is usually at the end of a parable that Jesus gives the key to the meaning.
The image of a great tree (Matthew 13.32) giving shelter to the birds of the air is a classic figure of speech in the Old Testament to describe a universal political power, a great empire embracing many peoples. For example, Assyria (Ezekiel 31.3-9) or Babylon (Daniel 4.7-9, 19), but especially the mighty reign of the Messiah, son of David. Ezekiel 17.22-23: 22 “‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. 23 On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches.’”
This prophecy is messianic. The cedar represents the royal house of David, the davidic dynasty. God says he will take from this tree a shoot, a traditional image of the Messiah. Isaiah 11.1: 1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse. The cedar sprig is tender to indicate the apparent vulnerability and weakness of the messianic prince. God says he will take this small, fragile shoot, plant it in Israel and will make it become a great tree and that the birds of the air will nest in its branches. What does this all mean? It means that the Messiah, a tiny shoot whose very survival seems precarious, will nevertheless have a mighty reign, a reign whose power and glory would surpass all the kingdoms of the earth.
In the context of Jesus' preaching, the full-grown mustard tree could hardly represent anything else but the reign of God: the messianic reign that the Jews were waiting for and that Jesus had come to set up on the earth and that he announced as being at hand. That reign would be great and, just as the symbolic tree of the prophetic visions, would dominate the whole world. Psalm 2.8: 8 “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.” We have, then, the second term of our equation, b: it represents the reign of the Messiah in its complete fulfillment, in all of its scope, in all of its power.
Now let's turn to the other term, a. What does the tiny mustard seed stand for? It stands for the ministry of Jesus among the Jews, the ministry which would soon give birth to the Messiah's reign in all of its glory. With Jesus, the reign of God had come near, it was at hand. And yet, his ministry seemed so small and insignificant compared to the spectacular display of power and glory that the Jews were expecting. They were looking for the Messiah to show up in Israel like a conquering hero, in a golden chariot pulled by four white horses. They were expecting the trumpets to sound, the call to arms to go forth and the Jewish nation to arise, overthrow Rome and take over the world. They were looking for fire from heaven.
But what did they see instead? A poor, itinerant preacher, accompanied by a band of twelve uncouth, uneducated hicks from Galilee, a so-called Messiah who couldn't seem to make up his mind if he wanted to be king of Israel or not. Even his miracles did not suffice to dissipate the impression of insignificance that the ministry of Jesus made on them.
The Messiah's reign would be sown in weakness, in humility, in suffering, whereas the Jews were counting on something else. And the ministry of Jesus became for them a source of disappointment, of doubt and finally of unbelief. It was their great stumbling block. They could not accept — would not accept — that the glorious reign of God could issue from such a modest beginning.
To which Jesus replies: Look at this magnificent mustard bush. It is much larger than all of the garden plants and could even be called a tree. And yet, it comes out of this tiny, little seed. Likewise, the ministry of Jesus, so humble, so insignificant, so disappointing, would bring forth the kingdom in all of its glory. No matter if it didn't fit what most people were expecting! What really mattered is that the Jews recognize that God was at work in the person of Jesus and that he had set in motion the process that would soon fulfill the messianic hope.
This parable was not really about the distant future. Jesus was not informing the Jews that the reign of the Messiah would spread slowly but surely, little by little, as the preaching of the Gospel made the church grow in number. Jesus didn't teach that his reign would grow gradually, like a plant. He preached that it was coming and it was about to arrive. It would burst forth into the world in a completely unexpected way, almost by miracle, just as the great tree already full-grown springs from the tiny seed. There would be no need waiting years and years for the reign of Jesus Christ to become great. It would be powerful, glorious, universal from the very day it was founded.
The parable of the yeast forms, along with the mustard seed, what scholars call a “parabolic couple”: they have the same point and illustrate the same historical situation by two different images. In the second parable, the disproportion is between the very small quantity of yeast as opposed to the enormous quantity of flour: 25 kilograms or 55 pounds, enough to feed over 160 people.