June 17, 2024
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Amen.
I don’t know if any of you are into flower gardening or landscaping. Christine and I aren’t. But we do love walking though other people’s gardens. We took a trip to England about 20 years ago, and went to Hampton Court Palace, where Henry VIII lived. It has 60 acres of formal gardens inside a loop of the River Thames. In the spring a million flowering bulbs come to life, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. With its rainbow of colors and geometrically shaped plots and symmetrical layout, it gives us an ideal for beauty. It tells us – from the human perspective – what splendor is supposed to look like.
Jesus’ society had some clear ideas of what splendor and majesty looked like, too. For them, though, those ideals didn’t come from gardens. They came from trees. We know this because the Old Testament uses images of great trees to depict the kingdoms of the world. Ezekiel uses the mighty cedars of Lebanon – strong, majestic trees that can grow to be 130 feet high – to symbolize the Kingdom of Assyria and the Kingdom of Judah. In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of the Babylonian Empire as a tree. Close your eyes and imagine it as I describe the tree in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.
“High as the sky …
Its leaves are beautiful, its fruit abundant;
It has enough food for everyone.
Wild animals take shade under it;
Birds nest in its branches
All living things live off that tree”
Trees like these don’t just conjure up images of power. They claim that humanity, in its own greatness, is the source of shelter and food for all earth’s life. And if God is greater than this, then imagine the kind of tree God must be….
So Jesus’ comparison of the Kingdom of God to a mustard plant must have seemed even stranger to his listeners than it does to us. Mustard plants aren’t large or majestic at all. They’re not even trees. They’re shrubs. Although the plants Jesus was talking about could grow 10 to 15 feet high, they usually topped out at about 4 feet. So why would Jesus make this comparison? In my prayer and study about this reading this week, two things came to mind.
First, the contradiction between the mustard plant and the great cedars of Lebanon is crucial to Jesus’ teaching that the Kingdom of God – the Community of Jesus-followers – is radically different from human kingdoms. Think of our first reading today, where the LORD said to Samuel: “Don’t look on Eliab’s appearance or his stature, because God doesn’t see as mortals see – God’ looks on the heart.”
Even when fully grown, the Kingdom of God isn’t going to appear unusually large if we compare it to great trees. But as bushes go, the mustard bush is the greatest – with plenty of opportunities for birds of all kinds – for people of every nation, tribe, and language – to shelter in its branches. Jesus’ message here is that the kingdom does not replicate the kind of greatness than human nations attempt to build for themselves.
Back in February I suggested that a hallmark of the Community of God is that we find it in those places where love manifests itself as grace. So if God’s Kingdom doesn’t look like human kingdoms – then we have to ask ourselves what love and grace look like for people who aren’t like us. What does it look like to love the ones that the Kingdoms of the world ignore? What does it look like to love the marginalized? What does the good news of Jesus Christ – that the Community of God has come near – mean to someone who lives paycheck to paycheck? What does it mean to offer grace to those who walk in darkness and the shadow of death? That answer to that question is different for each and every one of us – but this parable calls us to struggle with that question.
The other thing that came to my mind this week is that came out of the realization that the mustard plant is an invasive species. And that tells us something else that’s important about the Kingdom of God. It may not grow to be 130 feet tall or fit our society’s definitions of majestic and important, but its shoots are eventually going to take over. Anyone who’s spent an afternoon pulling buckthorn knows how difficult it is to contain an invasive species. And eventually, there’s no stopping it. It’s there but not there – a reality-in-waiting.
It's the same with the Kingdom of God. It’s an invasion – but a good one. The Kingdom is an eventuality – it’s already here. We can’t always see the seeds. But it’s coming, just as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, that giant, majestic tree is eventually cut down. Because the things that humans build can’t last forever – especially those things that claim to do the work that is rightfully God’s. And so today, we’re called to rejoice. To rejoice that the Kingdom has come – that love is manifesting as grace each and every day – and that the invasion and the victory have already happened.
God’s realm doesn’t always look promising. It’s not a king or queen’s formal garden or a cedar of Lebanon kind of kingdom, with our human ideals of majesty and beauty. The question for us today is – will we recognize that obscure mustard bush when it sprouts? Can we be courageous enough to join others to rest in its shade, secure in the knowledge that it will culminate in glory? Amen.