The Mustard Seed

     When I was about grade school age, I received a necklace with a pendant of a translucent heart, and inside the heart was a mustard seed. I think it was a gift from one of my godparents, but not sure. From my church-going, I did know at the time that the mustard seed was a symbol of faith, you know, “the smallest of all seeds becomes the largest of plants.”

       Years later, the heart was soldered onto a charm bracelet, and I still have it.

       The summer before Amanda was going to begin kindergarten, May of 1992, I quit my job at the day care to spend those last free days with the girls. Among our goals for the summer was to read together the book The Parables of Jesus by James Montgomery Boice. I thought it would be rewarding to share the Parables with the girls, and it would also be a chance to better understand the Parables myself.

       Well, the first surprise was to read about the mustard seed. “Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds in the air come and perch in its branches.” (p.21) The author says that mustard seeds do not grow into trees, they become shrubs – so the listeners of Jesus when the parable was told would have known immediately that a tree-sized mustard plant was not normal. Birds were symbols in an earlier parable of messengers of evil. So the parable is about a church that grows, yes, but evil grows along with it, and inside it, and the church becomes too big, and the evil will need to be excised. Well, that's what I get out of it.

        If someone today were to say we need faith that grows like a mustard seed, and if I were to correct that person by saying a mustard tree is not what our faith is supposed to become – eyes would roll and I would be told, “You know what I mean.”

        But today a mustard seed as a symbol of what Christianity can grow into makes me a little uncomfortable.

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