Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading is the mustard seed parable as it appears in Luke. All three of the synoptic gospels have the story, and since Denise Levertov refers to them all in the poem below, I share the Luke and Mark versions for background. (The Matthew is almost identical to Mark’s):
First, Luke (17:5-6):
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Now Mark (4:30-34):
And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
Mark then makes a distinction between poetry and expository prose (or right brain and left brain thinking):
With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.
After acknowledging that most of her readers will never have seen a mustard tree, she says that’s okay because we should focus on the small seed, not the big tree. She imagines the parable originating from Jesus walking through a wheat field, gleaning “intimate milky kernels, good/ to break on the tongue.” Then he downsizes his metaphor, moving from wheat kernel to mustard seed.
We get so hung up on how big the tree becomes—or on how faith is supposed to move mountains or feed multitudes—that we miss the paradox, the dramatic difference in size. The point is not that our faith is supposed to grow to become as big as a tree but that it initially appears to be as small and worthless as a speck of dust. It’s amazing that anything at all will come of it.
Stay small, she essentially counsels us. If we start from this humble premise, then we can appreciate the real miracle, which is how, from a tiny speck, our lives will begin to bloom. We ourselves will become a blossoming tree, providing a home for our soul. And not only for our own soul but for “a great concourse of birds/ at home there, wings among yellow flowers.”
What is the kingdom of God? It is this flowering self, what Yeats in “Among School Children” calls a “great rooted blossomer” swaying to music. The “kingdom of faith” awaits us, and although we have doubts—how could we not given how small and fragile our faith seems?—our task is to plant the seed.
On the Parables of the Mustard Seed
By Denise Levertov
Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.No, He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique —
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.
