15 - Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV THE MUSTARD SEED Mark 4:30-32; Mat 13:31 f.; Luk 13:18 f. THE smallness of the mustard-seed was proverbial: “ If you have faith as a grain of mustardseed.” Experts tell us that the plant Jesus has in mind is commonly planted in gardens, and grows rapidly to a height of ten or twelve feet, and that its branches attract birds to eat the seeds though not to make nests. (This last feature may have been suggested by Dan 4:12, Dan 4:21, and Eze 17:23). The cheerful optimism of this parable shows that those are right who refuse to interpret the Sower as an utterance of despair. From whatever point we trace the beginning of the Kingdom, its rise seems so insignificant as to attract practically no attention. But when the Kingdom does arise, even in germ, it is something new. The writer; To the Hebrews ’ speaks of a door between men and God that remained in some sense closed until Jesus opened it, of the road from man to God and from God to man as in some sense blocked till Jesus gave us the new and living way, of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in this sense that our conception of God is our knowledge of Jesus. Others before him had had lofty and true thoughts of God, but it is from the birth of Jesus that we count our dates. The kingdom grows from generation to generation, ever embracing larger numbers under its sway, ever unfolding some new significance.
Almost down to our own day our creed-makers and our organisation-builders forgot that the Kingdom grows like a tree; that we cannot say of the seed, the first shoots, the earliest branches,: This is the tree; thus far and no farther.”
We must wait and see whereunto this will grow. The trees of earth in time reach their full stature, in time fade and die; but the tree of God grows while the world lasts, ever giving us new thoughts of God, ever expanding the circle of those who have claims upon us, ever deepening our conception of those claims.
Let us try as we will to limit God, to put boundaries round ourselves or our Church, to stop the flow of Christian thought, try as we will to narrow the sphere of Christian duty, to restrict the sphere of Christian influence, to stifle the urge of Christian charity, the tree will burst all bonds asunder and go on growing. The tree will bring forth nothing that was not in the seed; but it has brought forth many things, it will bring forth many things, that we never imagined were in the seed. The growth of the tree is the gradual revelation of the meaning of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ; for revelation is not an event but a process, and God is writing still, and will go on writing, the pages of his New Testament. Here and there a branch may be lopped off, as the once flourishing Christian Church of North Africa perished under persecution and disappeared from the face of the earth. But the tree of life grows and grows for ever, because it is the tree of God, planted near by a river, the river of the water of life. Can we identify the tree with the Church?
Yes, the mustard plant is the Church, the fellowship of them that come to God through Jesus, and seek to live their lives in the strength that he gives. How far this Church coincides with those whose names are written in our communion rolls, we leave to God to decide. We can see that the work of the Church, not least its work in foreign lands, is carried on by minorities, often small minorities. But there is the more cheerful truth that the Kingdom may be advancing, surely if imperceptibly, at times when even loyal members of the Church are beginning to question whether there is faith on the earth.
God’s knowledge is deeper than ours, his charity greater.
We wonder at the faith of Jesus, who, in a tiny corner of the world, with so little apparent prospect of success, had such insight into the future. But can we marvel sufficiently at the Christian preachers who went on their missionary journeys from country to country, realizing the immensity of the task they were undertaking, the apparently irresistible might of the forces arrayed against them, the slenderness of their own human resources, the indifference or contempt with which their message was so often met; yet had the faith to go on repeating this parable?