Mark 4:26-34
France, like all of the developed democracies, is struggling under the weight of mass migration driven by poverty, climate change, and war, both the conventional type and the narco-wars we cause ourselves. The strong showing of Far Right and anti-immigrant parties in the recent election for the European Parliament has even led Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the French Parliament and call a snap election.
A year ago, France was experiencing a crisis of a very different flavor, though one also related to climate change. Specifically, a heat wave in Alberta and Saskatchewan created a catastrophe for French dining. Those two Canadian provinces provide 80% of the mustard seeds used in France, and the French do love their mustard.
As the New York Times reported last summer, so central is mustard to French culture, that the idiomatic equivalent to our expression “my blood is boiling right now” is “the mustard is rising into my nose,” which sounds incredibly unpleasant.
Before you ask, there is no explanation for our own positive American mustard idiom, “to cut the mustard,” which doesn’t make sense as either cut as in slice or cut as in dilute.
Humans have cultivated the mustard plant for around four thousand years, with the earliest evidence found in the Indus Valley. In addition to eating the greens, the Chinese developed a paste from ground mustard seeds, and the Romans added unfermented grape juice to produce what we now know as the condiment “mustard.”
The mustard seed is tiny, the point being made in our parable from the Gospel According to Mark. The parable specifically compares those tiny seeds to the Kingdom of God, though we Christians also sometimes compare them to “faith like a mustard seed,” and sometimes to good deeds. The core idea is that something that starts small can become very big. Like four fishermen following a street preacher in Galilee.
As we’ve established, kingdom imagery is always a bit of a mismatch for us as American Christians. We don’t think in kingdoms, being both democratic and super-focused on the individual, sometimes toxically focused on the individual. We’ll watch the latest period “dramedy” from Netflix, but we don’t expect a monarch to have any real power. England has the Magna Carta, and people have lost their heads, quite literally, including Charles the First, then we had that whole revolution, and France followed suit, the reason Macron is a President.
But Judea in the First Century of the Common Era was not democratic Athens in the Fifth Century before the Common Era, nor confederated Canaan in the Tenth Century before the Common Era. Even the Roman Republic, a recent though imperfect form of shared power, had collapsed.
The context for the entire Mediterranean region and the Near East in the time of Jesus was a monarch. The Israelite innovation had been God as ultimate authority, as we discussed last week, an idea they had rejected when they asked for a human king in their fear of foreigners. And we could ask, flippantly, “How’s that working out for you?” Because we know that they only made it through two kings before the kingdom fell apart, with the two remaining states in slow collapse for several centuries until they were gone.
The teachings of Jesus that were passed down, at first orally and eventually collected in written form, offer two distinct understandings of the Kingdom of God, itself a radical and very political idea when you were under the Kingdom of Caesar.
One understanding, the one found in Mark 13 and the Revelation to John of Patmos, was of a cataclysmic “Day of the Lord.” This picks up from a similar belief in the Book of Daniel, the only text in the Tanakh that was partially written in Aramaic, as it was composed only a century and a half before Jesus. Daniel is the source of the Son of Man trope, rendered in gender-neutral fashion as “the Human One” or maybe “the Archetypal Human.”
This understanding depends on two assumptions: that the world as we experience it is corrupt and that only supernatural action, divine action, can set it right.
The selective literalists disagree, but we mostly understand these apocalyptic texts as works of holy imagination, not a divine action plan. Though try telling that to the wingnuts who want to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque to re-build the Temple in Jerusalem. At least the obscure Christian Preterist movement that believes the Second Coming prophecies have already been fulfilled doesn’t turn its belief into foreign policy and political power!
But the other way of interpreting the Kingdom teachings in the gospels tracks with today’s reading, the idea that the kingdom was already present in the world. It is small but filled with potential, like the mustard seed, or yeast in a loaf, another example Jesus offers, something small that has the power to transform everything.
Instead of being irredeemably corrupt, the world contains holiness, holiness that looks deceptively small.
Equally important, you could opt-in to that Kingdom, again… language, so let’s think of it as opting into a way of seeing the world, of experiencing the world.
To be sure, choosing to live as if the goodness of God is already with us is otherworldly in a way, an alternative reality. I mean, those Jesus followers were still under Roman rule, and there were still centurions everywhere, ready to slaughter whole villages if they failed to generate enough revenue. Forty years after Jesus and Jerusalem was on fire, warring factions in a failed Jewish revolt and Roman legions at the gate.
Still, there is something powerful in believing that divine holiness is already here, that Holy and Serendipitous Creativity really is the secret sauce that orders the universe, that the part of us wired for love, compassion, and creativity is our way of being in the kingdom, for this is not a kingdom of missiles in the night and infantry at dawn, but is a kingdom for dancing with fireflies at dusk, a kingdom of chardonnay on the porch and the laughter of friends, a kingdom of sitting in complex stillness as a loved one slowly fades into a last goodbye.
I am not going to pretend that acts of extraordinary courage and compassion like those of Corrie Ten Boom, Oskar Schindler, or Raoul Wallenberg somehow make up for the horrors of the Holocaust, for surely they do not, but it is the life that springs up after the conflagration that must hold our attention.
Focus not on the ruins of Jerusalem, but on the early Christians gathered at Pella on the east bank, and the Gentile and Jewish Christian communities gathered in Corinth and Thessaloniki, the message that God was neither human king nor vindictive judge, but was a being of grace and love, and that even a brutal and bloody execution could not stop the message that God is with us and for us, that the kingdom is real and here.
Jesus taught about and longed for a rightly ordered human existence, and the seed of that rightly ordered existence has been here all along. It just seems so tiny, a mustard seed tucked into the last three minutes of the nightly newscast. But we do not worship a broken god who created a broken world, nor do we worship a bad god who created a bad world. We do worship a mysterious God, but that God’s work is seen in Their works, and on balance, despite earthquake and flood and tooth and claw and our fear and greed, on balance, those works are good, filled with the sort of beauty that takes your breath away.
What would it look like if Christians chose to worship a God who was actually good, and sought to cultivate the tiny mustard seeds of beauty and creativity and grace? What would it look like if we stopped waiting for God to ride in and save us, and realized that God has already given us everything we need for a pretty long run as a little blue speck filled with jazz and gumbo circling a star?
What would it look like if we lean into joy and hope? And where joy and hope are missing, if we bring the simple gifts of presence and love?
Let us grow the kingdom of love, a little spicy at times, but hopefully not in your nose.
Amen.
These are encouraging words for me. Thank you