The parable of the mustard seed as subversive polemic against Rome

Update on the Asynchronous Book Study: When Christians Were Jews

I opened a poll to all subscribers a few weeks ago to select a book for study together. I’d like to host a study two or three times each year, and I wanted to start with a selection on the historical Jesus in the context of first century Judaism. Future topics include scholarship on Paul, the composition of the Torah, and the development of Judaism as a religion. A text by Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, received the most votes, and this will be our next (first)1 book for study. I am pulling together the plan now, and we’ll get this launched in the coming weeks. Many of you have been reading here for a few months, and if you appreciate my approach, now would be great time to refer the newsletter to a friend who may enjoy studying with us!

The text: Matthew 13

I’m breaking with my own practice to include the assigned reading in the body and instead link out to the text. These essays have been pretty long, and so, I hope that linking out may save space on the page!

The assigned gospel text for this Sunday is Matthew 13:31-33 and 44-52 that includes several parables about the kin-dom of heaven—recall these parables are in the form of mashalim, or comparisons.

These kin-dom comparisons include the mustard seed (vv. 31-32), yeast in bread (v. 33), treasures hidden in a field (v. 44), a merchant in search of pearls (v. 45), and a net cast that gathers fish of every kind (vv. 47-48). The assigned reading concludes with reference to angels sorting the evil and righteous at the end-time “and throw[ing] them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (vv. 49-50). In the closing verses, Matthew’s scribes are praised, and the author repeats a theme to preserve both old and new traditions, continuing, for example, instructions about pouring new wine into new wineskins (Matthew 9.17).

Many Directions for the Parables

We could take this assigned gospel reading in a number of directions. The yeast in verse 33 is mixed with three measures of flour, a measurement consistent with the hyperbolic language of parables, three measures weighing, in our terms, 60 pounds! Or we could discuss the net catching fish of every kind; whereas, fishers in the Galilee in the tradition of Israel would sort kosher from non-kosher fish. We could discuss the pearls as a symbol for Torah study, or the furnace as a symbol of judgment from Daniel 3.1-12. Instead of these, I have decided to spend time with the mustard seed.

Yet before diving in, let’s recall that each comparison, each mashal, generates plenty of commentary for its own essay, and even then, we may not arrive at the definitive interpretation. New Testament scholar, Ruben Zimmermann, writes:2

Even though comprehension is the ultimate goal of the hermeneutical process, this goal cannot be equated with finding the solution to a mathematical problem.

Parables are not equations. There may be different meanings, and they can even contradict each other. The meaning of a parable will differ according to time and context, a reality which is unequivocally demonstrated in the history of parable interpretation. Different readings of one and the same parable may also occur at different points in one individual’s lifetime. It is precisely the many divergent interpretations and the resultant controversy and debate that create an enticement for communication and stimulate a collective search for meaning.

A Reprise: The Eschaton

And so, while the parable hermeneutic that I’d like to develop here is that of the mustard seed (vv. 13.31-32), this is arbitrary and filled with bias. I wonder how our thoughts will align or diverge? From the assigned reading:

³¹ He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; ³² it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

Last week we discussed the “insider knowledge” that a first century audience would possess and through which the audience would interpret these parables. This knowledge would include cultural context, cultic (religious ritual) context, political and economic context, vocational context, and the historical context of the tradition of Israel. I want to caution about how we treat these as distinct streams. It may be natural today to distinguish between religious and political history, but in the first century, these borderlines would not carve up the conceptual space in these same ways. Religious, political, behavioral, and theological were more entangled than we may appreciate.

If we take the scholarly consensus that Jesus was teaching and traveling in the early 30s of the common era, this is a time of continued unrest in Roman-occupied Palestine. It was only four or five centuries earlier that the exilic population returned to Jerusalem and began the Temple rebuilding process. Closer in chronological proximity to the Jesus movement, it was only 200 or so years prior to Jesus that the Maccabean violent resistance expelled the Seleucids from the Temple (signified by Hanukkah, or “re-dedication”), and just before Jesus’s birth, the short-lived autonomous Hasmonean rule established after the Maccabean revolt fell to the Roman-installed Herodian dynasty.

The first gospel, the Markan account, was written shortly following the destruction of the Temple during the Jewish War, and Matthew and Luke borrow significantly from Mark. I rehearse the history once more to remind us that the original first century audience was intimately aware of this recent history and the scriptures of Israel that predicted a coming anointed one specially commissioned by God, the messiah, mashiach, to restore Israel and gather all nations (ta ethne; goyim) to the God of Israel.

This would mark the eschaton, the end-time, and wherever you look in first century Judaism and the Jesus movement, from the Pauline epistles to the “Son of Man” of Daniel, Enoch, Esdras, and the gospels, the divinely authorized messiah would deliver (save) the people of Israel from their plight. Whatever it may mean to say that kin-dom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the interpretation in situ, so to speak, must respect the urgency of the eschaton, the despair and confusion of a post-Temple Judaism, and the rhetorical aims of the gospels to serve, as Paula Fredriksen puts it in the book we are soon to read together, as proclamations, not memories.

John the Baptist spoke of the imminent end-time, Paul wrote to his audiences about the very soon coming of the Christ, the Qumran community, especially the Essenes, abandoned all sense of daily minutiae and gave themselves over to ascetic living and ritual practice to prepare for the end. The Jesus movement, however it manifests in your life today, was an end-times cult that sought first to turn the lost sheep of Israel towards the Torah, then to pursue all nations to prepare for a messianic age. Even here, in this parable, the author has Jesus say, “So it will be at the end of the age” (v. 13.49).

The Mustard Seed

What we’re up to here is similar to the interpretive project prescribed by New Testament scholar, Ernest van Eck, Toronto School of Theology.

Also author of this book defining his approach, van Eck resists an allegorical reading of Jesus’s parables centered in literary analysis, and instead, he works to read the parables, “as Jesus told them in a first-century Jewish Galilean sociopolitical, religious, and economic setting.”3 With the original setting in mind, van Eck observes that this parable appears in several contexts, remarking:

A close reading of the four extant versions [the synoptics and Thomas] indicates that the similarities between the four versions are the kingdom that is compared to a mustard seed (implied in Thomas), and the birds (τὰ πετεινά) that dwell in what the mustard seed turns into. For the rest, the four versions differ on almost every detail.

Very quick aside to note that Zimmermann (cited above) also acknowledges, “The tradition of the parable of the mustard seed is exceptional in that it demonstrates a ‘quadruple tradition.’”

Van Eck continues, eschewing the traditional interpretation of small starts and great becoming that typifies the growth hermeneutic popular to the commentary about the mustard seed parable, writes, “If one, however, takes as point of departure the possibility that Jesus, in his parables, depicted the kingdom as a present reality, the Mustard Seed cannot be about growth or the contrast between ‘beginning’ and ‘end.’”

For example, popular lectionary resource for Christian clergy, Warren Carter, writing for The Working Preacher writes: “The image of the mustard seed highlights initially its smallness and its invisibility when it is sown. Then the image expands to include its inevitable growth and flourishing, its resultant large size that contrasts with its small beginning, and its hospitable environment that sustains nesting birds.”

We see some tension here between Carter and van Eck. Interestingly, Carter does ultimately expand his commentary to reference the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Bible and its significance to this parable:

Stories of trees in the Hebrew Bible often concern power and rule. Jotham tells a story of trees anointing a king against his brother Abimelech who is staging a coup (Judges 9:7-15). Prophets use tree images to announce God’s power and rule over the imperial powers of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon (Ezekiel 17:22-24; 31:1-18; Daniel 4:10-26). The mustard tree then depicts God’s empire that both resists and mimics all other empires to rule over all in a way that promises justice and life rather than oppression.

Carter seemingly leaves behind the growth concept complete when he concludes his discussion, “The parable is a prophetic word both reinscribing and resisting Roman imperial visions.” That is similar to van Eck’s conclusion, “From this perspective, the Mustard Seed is a story of how the kingdom of God subverts the kingdom of Caesar and the kingdom of the Temple.”

Satire and Parody in the Mustard Seed

I suggest we dispense with the growth hermeneutic and spend more time with this point about subversion—especially of the Temple because this is surprising! It’s a concern about anti-Temple rhetoric that we must negotiate without contributing to anti semitism. When Jesus is placed over and against the Temple without caveat and qualification we risk characterizing Christianity as the replacement for Judaism.

The resistance to Rome must be clear by now to readers of this newsletter. We talk about it almost weekly because it is nearly impossible to overstate the significance of the Temple’s destruction. Not only were thousands slaughtered, the Temple was the centerpiece of life in Jerusalem and God’s literal seat on earth. The Lukan birth narrative specifically is filled with politically subversive, anti-Roman rhetoric. But what about the anti-Temple critique of the mustard seed. Is their credibility here?

Van Eck writes:

[T]he Mustard Seed rather leans toward a story that is a clever satire of “religious respectability”, and, added to this, a story that undermines some of the exploitative measures as a result of the Roman occupation of first-century Palestine.

Agreement on the Roman occupation but let’s look at “satire of religious respectability.” The Jewish Annotated New Testament comments that the mustard seed is a “parody.” Irony, sarcasm, satire, parody… these are all forms of mashalim, or parable.

“According to Ernest van Eck,” Zimmermann writes, “the detail as recounted in Luke [Luke 13.18-21] that the mustard seed is planted in a garden could be read as a provocation towards the Jewish temple elite.” (A word about our understanding, van Eck’s paper goes on to contrast the differing accounts in the quadruple tradition.) Zimmermann continues, quoting van Eck:

By planting the mustard seed in the garden, the man thus violates the law of diverse kinds, and pollutes the garden. The garden is unclean, a symbol of chaos…. An ordered kingdom has been replaced by a chaotic and polluted kingdom…As such, the kingdom of God is dangerous and deadly. In time it will take over the ordered and unpolluted garden (ordered society) of the kingdom of the Temple. Order is turned into chaos; the kingdom of God is taking over the kingdom of the Temple.

Zimmermann concludes, “This reading also has plausibility in Mark because the term used for the branches of the mustard shrub is used only one other time in the Gospel of Mark in the parable of the fig tree in the Markan eschatological discourse.”

Shrub or Cedar

I’ve been wrestling with the sense of parody mentioned by the commentary in the JANT. I explored the prophetic tradition in more detail and our favorite prophetic traditions have something to say! Usually it is the mighty cedar that is the imagery associated with trees and the messianic kin-dom. Consider Ezekiel 17:23:

²³ On the mountain height of Israel
    I will transplant it,
and it will produce boughs and bear fruit
    and become a noble cedar.
Under it every kind of bird will live;
    in the shade of its branches will nest
    winged creatures of every kind.

Or later in the same book, Ezekiel 31.5-9, that parallels our commentary here and includes a garden reference:

⁵ So it towered high
    above all the trees of the field;
its boughs grew large
    and its branches long,
    from abundant water in its shoots.
⁶ All the birds of the air
    made their nests in its boughs;
under its branches all the animals of the field
    gave birth to their young,
and in its shade
    all great nations lived,
⁷ It was beautiful in its greatness,
    in the length of its branches,
for its roots went down
    to abundant water.
⁸ The cedars in the garden of God could not rival it
    nor the fir trees equal its boughs;
the plane trees were as nothing
    compared with its branches;
no tree in the garden of God
    was like it in beauty.
⁹ I made it beautiful
    with its mass of branches,
the envy of all the trees of Eden
    that were in the garden of God.

And a favorite of the gospel writers, Isaiah, see 11:1-10:

11 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
    and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
² The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel and might,
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
³ His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see
    or decide by what his ears hear,
⁴ but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor
    and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
    and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
⁵ Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist
    and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

⁶ The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
⁹ They will not hurt or destroy
    on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.

¹⁰ On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

And finally, Jeremiah 23:5-6

⁵ The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. ⁶ In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”

In an expectant community seeking their deliverance (“Hosanna! Save us!”), the people are surprised to receive a nonviolent actor who trades in a cedar for a shrub. As we are often reminded, Jesus is not here to replace Judaism, but to cast a vision of a different kind of Judaism to practice. In the wake of crucifixion and the post-70 destruction, the gospel writers proclaim a messiah that shatters the common expectations. In the following decades, Jewish Christ-followers fall away and the institutional church in Rome is established, and yet, all of this started from a Jewish community in the first half of the first century, a mustard seed and a subversive polemic against Rome and competing Jewish sects.