“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 and 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.””
In June 2016, the Louisville Courier-Journal published an obituary for hometown hero, Muhammad Ali. Ali’ body was laid to rest at Cave Hill Cemetery—a very short drive from the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. The Courier-Journal has had stories about that center, about Ali’s life and career and family—all things Ali. Do you know what the Courier-Journal had the gall to not publish? In January of 1942, he was born and the Courier-Journal said nothing. No picture of a little baby with little boxing gloves, little boxing shorts—disrespectful.
Now, of course, we wouldn’t expect it. He wasn’t even Muhammad Ali yet. He was born Cassius Clay, and there were no ultrasound signs that he would be an Olympiad or the heavyweight champion of the world. None of that was obvious and we don’t expect that it would be. He was just a baby who was born and that happens every day. No newspaper can see what a baby will become.
Tonight’s parable captures this same dynamic. We can’t see what will become. We ought not to judge by the seemingly babylike smallness of what the Lord is doing. It will become greater than we can now see. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense; that’s William Cowper’s line and that’s the claim of this sermon: Judge not the Lord by feeble sense.
We will study this in two points. First: like a mustard seed. Second: like yeast. First, in verses 18-19, like a mustard seed. Second, in verses 20-21, like yeast.
We see the inauspicious beginnings of God’s work in our first point: like a mustard seed. By the time he told these parables, Jesus’ work was advancing. The good news that God was doing a new thing was spreading. Jesus had just restored a woman who the devil had been tormenting for eighteen years. When the religious leaders confronted him for doing so on the Sabbath, Jesus confronted them right back. “You hypocrites!” he said. “Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
It’s as if the kingdom was hidden from these leaders—the people seemingly most devoted to watching for it; and so it was. The Pharisees had very different expectations of the kingdom. So did, as we will see, the zealots. Neither they nor the Pharisees could see that the kingdom was already present. It had begun. That’s a wake-up call for us. I don’t have a stellar track record for having a sense of what God is up to. I’d be wise to be quite humble in my estimation of what I would think of Jesus if I were alive then.
Jesus wanted his listeners to grasp their inability to see their blindness to the kingdom and so he asked in verse 18, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden.” A mustard seed was proverbial for “as small as it gets.” We talk about something being as “big as an elephant” or as “small as a mouse” or even “microscopic.” In that culture, if something was tiny, they said it was “as small as a mustard seed.”
Jesus wanted those stuck in their own expectations to learn to see the kingdom already among them—a woman had just been set free from Satan and they missed it. It wasn’t the expulsion of Rome and so it was nothing kingdom-like. They missed it because they had the wrong method for measuring. Your method for measuring matters. For the past month, I’ve thought I’ve been losing weight. The scale continued to show that I was dropping. I assumed that summertime, yardwork, bike riding, water drinking, and walking were finally paying off and apparently paying off handsomely. You get a little swagger in your step and think you’ve cracked the code—“it’s all about keeping busy. Keep moving and this can happen for you too.” The I discovered that there was something fault with the scale and hadn’t a lost one pound. I simply had the wrong method by which I was measuring. That’s the situation into which Jesus’ speaks this parable. We miss reality because we measure wrongly. We judge the Lord by feeble sense.
The kingdom didn’t come as the leaders expected and so they didn’t see it because it was so humble—so small. It would, and will, though exceed their and our expectations; that’s verse 19, “It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.” The tree in question seems to be the black mustard which starts out as a seed about a millimeter in diameter and quickly grows to ten feet. Ten feet might not seem impressive compared with, say, an oak or a cedar, like the ones in Lebanon, but those trees aren’t in Palestine, and the comparison wouldn’t really be enhanced by a tree that was thirty feet tall rather than ten. The point is that you can barely see the seed and you can’t miss the tree—that’s true if it’s a mustard tree or a redwood.
To return to the surprise of last week, the kingdom starts surprisingly small and grows surprisingly large from something so surprisingly small. We are to be open to such surprises rather than, like the Jesus’ audience rigid in our expectations. You see this in the Old Testament. The Jews returned from exile and rebuilt the temple as best they could in what turned out to be a shadow of its former self. The people grew disillusioned with their leader Zerubbabel judging his work as near worthless. The Lord who had exiled them and brought them back confronted them asking, “Who dares despise the day of small things?”
We do. I do. I ought not. We have our own unhelpful expectations as to what makes for spiritual success. The language in church circles used to be “noses and numbers”—people in the pews and money in the bank. For some its momentum—feeling that we are on a winning team, part of an important movement because that would mean that we are important. For others it’s that our church is in line with this or that standard. This parable is a warning that we might not be the savvy connoisseurs of spirituality that we take ourselves to be.
The kingdom will come as God wills it and will be more than enough for all who enter in. That’s the language in verse 19 of “the birds of the air perched in its branches.” This is the imagery used in Daniel 4 to describe Babylon in its heyday. The birds are safe in its branches and remain there because they enjoy eating the seeds the mustard seed drops. The kingdom will provide safety and nourishment for us in a way ever greater than Babylon ever could.
Jesus wanted his original listeners to know that the kingdom they longed for and were promised had already begun—in him. He was the king of the kingdom. That’s why they needed to come to him. That’s still the case. You come into the kingdom by coming to the king. That’s why messages always wind their way back to Jesus.
Jesus’ work, though, didn’t seem all that impressive to the people then. They found fault with him healing a woman who had been suffering for nearly two decades. We all have it in us to find fault with God’s work. The Bible shows us our grumblings, doubtings, and despisings so that we might see that it’s not the kingdom that’s ultimately small; it’s us.
Consider the cross. What could seem smaller than death? If you’ve ever seen someone die, you know how humiliating the process can be. No follower of Jesus watching him die on the cross said, on that day, “well now everything will be alright.” We don’t see clearly in spiritual matters without the Holy Spirit opening our eyes. The disciples understood when the Spirit came at Pentecost. The Spirit recorded parables like this to open my eyes and yours. Without His work, we would see nothing—not even a mustard seed.
The kingdom starts as small as Jesus’ words and it has grown. Thursday night, and this morning, were evidences of that. Now the church isn’t interchangeable with the kingdom; the church is an intentional manifestation of what the kingdom is about. We saw, though, and see the kingdom at work in the church. Lives have been restored by what that little seed has birthed. Joy in Jesus has been enjoyed. That’s happened because the church grew from a small group hiding in a room with the doors locked after Jesus was crucified into a worldwide movement and because it grew from those who started this church into what God has done.
We need to be careful, though, because pride in the size of the worldwide church as if it is the tree is misguided. That’s the sort of thinking that opens the door for great discouragement when the church shrinks numerically. If you read church history, you come to see that the church, for all its apparent success, has always been wobbling on the brink of extinction. We’d be much wiser to delight that there is a mustard seed than to demand the tree today.
We today, as with the Pharisees and the zealots, want to be part of something currently impressive. That has everything to do with flesh and nothing to do with the Spirit. “By these parables Christ encourages his disciples not to be offended and turn back on account of the mean beginnings of the Gospel,” as Calvin puts it. The flesh isn’t even impressed with Jesus. Any so-called kingdom that doesn’t love its king is no kingdom you want to join. Come to the king. Trust that his kingdom is here and will come. That’s our first parable: like a mustard seed. Let’s move to the second: like yeast. That’s our second point.
We’ve combined a few of the parables into couplets because the gospel writers present them as such. They are often joined by the word “again” as we see at the beginning of verse 20. This means of presentation shows that these parables present similar ideas but with their unique twist and so it is here. This parable also begins with smallness; ‘Again he asked, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast…”’
Yeast is often a negative in Scripture. We will see that when we get to the feast of unleavened bread in the Exodus. Throughout Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy the people were told to keep yeast far from anything that had to do with purity. Jesus picks up on this telling his followers to, “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.” In other words, keep their tendencies as far as yeast from your unleavened bread. Paul in writing to both the Corinthians and the Galatians—two exceedingly different sorts of churches—likens both their besetting sins to yeast which has as much place in them as yeast in unleavened bread.
In this parable Jesus uses yeast as a positive because the same properties that make it such a powerful negative—infecting and corrupting—make it a powerful positive—pervasive and enhancing. It can go either way. It’s just that we as fallen people in a fallen world are much more sensitive to negatives infecting than we are to positives enhancing. Negative people are much likely to bring positive people down than positive people are to pull negative people up. The message here is to count on the kingdom, not the world or your own flesh, to make the positive difference; that’s, “It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”
A little yeast can work its way through a whole batch of dough and raise it all. What matters here is thoroughness. The yeast must be worked through all the dough for it to do its surprising work. As in the last parable, the particles of yeast are exceedingly small. Here, though, it’s not that they themselves, like the mustard seed, grow into something large; the point is that they transform something else—the dough. If the last parable was about surprising growth, this one is about surprising transformation.
The kingdom will have a transformative influence on the world—it won’t make the world the kingdom any more than yeast makes dough into yeast but it will have a pervasive and enhancing effect on it all. This has proven to be the case. As the message of the kingdom of God spread throughout the kingdom of Rome, babies that would have been left out to die were cared for and eventually leaving an infant out to die became unthinkable. We today hear about babies being left on doorsteps. We don’t hear about babies being in trunks of cars or parking ramps or out in the backyard to die. It’s become unthinkable. That’s yeast working through the dough. Almost the entirety of the medical sciences were spearheaded by Christians seeking, like Jesus healing that afflicted woman, to alleviate human suffering. The ideals of democracy, which have enhanced life for millions, have their root in Christian assumptions. Practices of capitalism, which has bettered life for billions, springs from Christian understandings about humanity, possessions, and trust. That’s the yeast working its way through the dough.
We live in a rather sick post-Christian culture. Like an adult ungratefully living with and off his parents, our culture denigrates what supports it. Read missionary biographies if you want a wake-up call in this regard. Read about Amy Carmichal in the first half of the last century working in India to save girls from being burned as sacrifices or used as temple prostitutes. Read about John Paton in the middle of the 19th century bringing the good news of the kingdom to people who wanted to eat his wife and child who had just died. Consider the transformation that accompanied people in these cultures turning to Christ as their king. “The kingdom of heaven (and those who represent and proclaim it) has a dramatic effect on human society,” as France argues.
It didn’t seem that way to the zealots. It seemed ineffective to them. It didn’t seem that way to the Pharisees. It seemed an infection. Ask yourself, though, who has had a more lasting and more positive impact—Jesus or the zealots? Well, the zealots tried to establish their kingdom, were crushed by Rome who then destroyed the temple, and no one would listen to the zealots again. The Pharisees, for their part, died out and the rabbinic movement took over, and I have yet to meet anyone who proudly says that they are a Pharisee.
The kingdom as Jesus saw it, though, has spread as Jesus said it would. Something that seemed as small as a flake of yeast has spread through the world and bettered it wherever it went and still does wherever it goes. That’s something to recognize. It’s not something to grow proud in as if we were somehow the change agents, but it’s certainly not something to denigrate as so many today do regarding the history of the church. Look around this world and you will see with Kenneth Bailey that, “Imperceptibly but surely, the influence of the kingdom is there.”
The kingdom might often seem hidden. We looked at Luke’s presentation this evening but Matthew’s presentation of these two parables occurs in the chapter we considered two weeks ago—the chapter of hiddenness. The kingdom was hidden from those who had their rigid expectation as to what God should do and would not be taught by Jesus. It will be hidden from us unless we are willing to be taught by Jesus.
The kingdom is here. Like a seed growing or yeast fermenting, it won’t be stopped now. The kingdom is already here and will come in power. The question is whether you have eyes to see and whether you can believe what it will be. Don’t judge the seeming smallness of the Lord’s work by feeble sense. “If the aspect of Christ’s kingdom be despicable in the eyes of the flesh,” Calvin writes, “let us learn to raise our minds to the boundless and incalculable power of God, which at once created all things out of nothing, and every day raises up things that are not, in a manner which exceeds the capacity of the human sense.”
We don’t have great spiritual sensibilities. Jesus does. Trust him. Trust his process. He’s the king of this kingdom. Amen.