The Parables of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven

Jesus’ parables discourse in Matthew ‘s Gospel gets off to a rollicking start. Fist he tells the Parable of the Sower, with its public message of an exorbitantly generous God but private message about the variability in reception to his message. Then he tells the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, on the need to withhold judgment until God (and God alone) sees fit to sort out what’s what. In between that parable and its explanation, he tells two quick — and deceptively simple — parables: the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Parable of the Leaven. These will be the focus of today’s post.

(If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, feel free to skip to the summary and conclusions at the end.)

Text

These two parables are found in all three Synoptic Gospels: in Matthew 13.31-33, Mark 4.30-32, and Luke 13.18-21. (They are also found, unpaired, in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas 20 and 86.) But since we’ve been going through Matthew’s parables discourse, for this study I’ll be keeping primarily to Matthew’s version:

[13.31] He spoke to them with another parable, saying: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed, which someone took and sowed in his field: [32] while it is the smallest of all the seeds, when it grows it is the largest of the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that birds of the air come and nest in its branches.’

[33] He told them another parable: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven, which a women took and hid inside three measures of flour until the whole thing was leavened.’

Experience

I’ve always loved these short parables, with their apparent message that God’s kingdom works in unexpected and unassuming ways. But upon this reading, I was struck by the oddity of some of the language: Is a mustard seed really that small compared to other seeds? Is a mustard tree really that big? Why is the woman said to ‘hide’ the leaven in the flour? And how much is three measures of flour anyway?

Encounter

Again we encounter Jesus as he tells these parables. Verse 35 confirms that he was speaking in public here, so we also encounter the mixed crowd that forms his audience. We only have two characters in these parables: an unspecified man who plants a field and an unspecified woman who is making bread.

Explore

The questions I’d like to study further should look pretty familiar by now:

• Is there any thing in the literary context that can inform our interpretation of the parables?
• What do some of the curious details tell us about what Jesus is saying?
• Do these two parables actually have the same message?

Literary Context

To help situate ourselves, let’s take another look at the chiastic structure of this discourse. After the Sower, which acts as an introduction, the discourse is organized around the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat (and its doublet the Parable of the Net):

Weeds and Wheat

Mustard Seed and Leaven

Explanation of Weeds and Wheat

Treasure in a Field and Pearl

Net

So today’s parables form a narrative doublet that is sandwiched between the section’s thematic parable and its interpretation. Therefore we might expect them to comment on it in some way.

Narrative Details in the Parable of the Mustard Seed

Mustard

The plant Jesus refers to here is likely black mustard, but the logic of the parable requires him to talk about it in hyperbolic extremes (Hagner 114; Gale). It is not ‘the smallest of all seeds’, but was among the smallest of seeds cultivated in ancient Judaea (NIV BTS). Nor is mustard really a ‘tree’, as Matthew and Luke call it (Mark has the more realistic ‘bush’); but, it can grow up to about 2.5 m and there are references in ancient literature to its wood being used for minor construction projects, so its growth is remarkable (Walton & Keener; Hagner 114). We might also add that it was a very useful plant for food and medicine (Van Eck 81). Since Jesus’ audience would know the growth is exaggerated, it’s unlikely that growth is the intended focus of the story (but see Gale), but rather the contrast between the “easily overlooked” smallness of the kingdom when it is planted (Hagner 114) and the “the lush, manifest exuberance” of its fruition (Capon).

But this was no easy metaphor. There’s quite a bit that might have shocked Jesus’ audience about it. Mustard may not be the most impressive in size, but it was notorious in the ancient world for its wild, and if left unchecked, weed-like reproduction (Van Eck 81). Moreover, in Jewish Law, it was prohibited to grow mustard in a garden. While this doesn’t mean much for Matthew’s version of the story, since he has the farmer planting it in a field, Luke has the mustard explicitly planted in a garden, in violation of the Law and rendering its harvest unclean (Scott 375; Van Eck 81).

What’s Jesus doing here? For a further discussion of that, we’ll have to wait. But, a hint may lie in the detail about the nesting birds.

Birds

The claim at the end of the story that birds nest in the mustard ‘tree’ is another example of the parable’s hyperbole (Walton & Keener; Wilson 466). But why include it at all? A key may be found in Ezekiel 17.23 & 31.5, and Daniel 4.10-22, in which birds are used as symbols for the nations of the world — that is to say, Gentiles (Gale; Walton & Keener; NIV BTS: Case-Winters; Hagner 114). Now you may remember that last week I downplayed the birds-as-Gentiles interpretation for the Parable of the Sower. But that was because birds on roads were not a common symbol. But, birds nesting in trees, as they are here, absolutely were. Matthew’s wording even strongly alludes to the Septuagint translation of Daniel 4.21, making this biblical reference almost certain (Hagner 114). Crucially, in these passages, the great earthly kingdom being discussed is compared to a cedar, which unlike mustard was the most impressive tree in the region. So, Jesus is likely using the mustard plant to subvert the expectations of his audience: The Kingdom of God is not like a mighty cedar, but a common — useful but weed-like — mustard plant, but it’s still big enough to have room for Gentiles (Lischer 66). In other words, he subverts the part of the image his audience would have liked but keeps the part they wouldn’t.

Narrative Details in the Parable of the Leaven

Woman

The first thing to note here is the female protagonist (Case-Winters; Scott 326). While this excites readers today as a rare example of feminine imagery for God in the Bible, it would have been strange in Jesus’ day. Women were, in Judaism as across Mediterranean cultures, considered to be unclean, impure, and religiously suspect. Their testimony was questionable and men thanked God daily that they were not women (Scott 326). So having a woman’s actions compared to God’s here would have been startling.

Leaven

Leaven (I’m using this wording because ancient practice was to use starter rather than cultivated yeast) seems like an obvious symbol, since it would have been found in most homes (Hagner 115; France 528). And it works perfectly for the parable, since the leaven is an invisible and inseparable part of the dough, yet effectively transforms the whole batch (Wilson 468; Capon), just as the Kingdom is imperceptibly present in the world yet always at work transforming it. But just as with mustard, it’s not that simple. While some references to leaven in the Scriptures are neutral, overall, it carried overwhelmingly negative connotations (Scott 328; Hagner 115). It was to be purged from homes at Passover, under penalty of being “cut off” from the community (Exodus 12.15, 19). In Second Temple Judaism, leavened and unleavened bread took on symbolic meanings for apostate and faithful Israel respectively (Scott 328).

The connotations are, if anything, worse in the New Testament, where Jesus calls the insidious nature of the religious authorities’ teachings “leaven” (Matthew 16.6, 11-12), and Paul uses the proverb “a little leaven leavens the whole lump” to exhort his readers away from bad behaviour (1 Corinthians 5.6).

Why might leaven have taken on these negative meanings when it was such a normal household ingredient? It was not lost on people in the ancient world that leaven was first obtained by allowing bread to rot (Scott 324). And so, this “special character of gradual fermentation made it a particularly suggestive metaphor for describing similar processes in the moral sphere” (Hagner 115).

This sinister sensibility is heightened in the parable by the description of the woman as “hiding” the leaven in the dough. Greek had many different and value-neutral words that could be used to describe this activity, of which ‘hiding’ would have been among the least obvious. This choice adds a sense of secrecy to an already suspect image (Case-Winters; Scott 326; Hagner 115).

Even if, when it comes to symbols, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, we would do well to keep the overwhelmingly negative connotations of leaven in mind. As Scott notes, it “belongs to conventional language, to an established metaphorical network” (Scott 324). Even if the parable is positive, Jesus is using negative imagery. As Scott phrases is: “The kingdom (holy and good) is pictured in terms of an epiphany of corruption” (Scott 328).

Flour

Before moving on, I’ll briefly mention that there is hyperbole too in this parable, in the amount of flour the woman uses. The ‘three measures’ of flour would be the equivalent of a full bushel — 128 cups — of flour, and would be enough to produce bread for over a hundred people! (Walton & Keener; Capon). This again heightens the contrast between the small amount of starter and the vastness of its impact.

One Message or Two?

At this point it’s worth revisiting the question of whether these two parables, so often treated as doublets, do in fact describe the same truth. I think it’s safe to conclude that they do. Both compare the Kingdom of God to seemingly inconsequential things that are hidden to the eyes of this world yet have outsized impacts (France 527; Wilson 468; Blond et al; Hagner 115; NIV BTS; SBL; Capon). These parables are, then, about the mystery of the workings of God’s Kingdom. They also encourage Jesus’ followers not to grow discouraged at what seems to be a lack of progress: the Kingdom may not look like much and its working may not be noticeable, but rest assured it is working (Case-Winters).

Challenge

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

As we’ve seen, these parables are deceptively simple, and to our worldviews, deceptively positive, but they would have been jarring in their original context. First, Jesus compares the God’s Kingdom to a common shrub that was prone to becoming a weed, and which in Luke’s version is planted unlawfully, rendering its fruit ‘unclean’. Moreover, as he does this, he undermines the biblical metaphor comparing a kingdom to a cedar: The mighty empires of Egypt and Persia (and Rome) may have been like cedars, but God’s Kingdom is a legally suspect shrub. And despite this metaphorical downgrade, Jesus keeps the original symbol’s reference to Gentiles: shocking indeed!

Second, and even more disturbingly, he compares God’s reign to a symbol of corruption (strike one), hidden (strike two) by a ‘strong female protagonist’ (strike three)!

Once again, we must remind ourselves of the scandalous nature of so much of Jesus’ ministry. Eating and drinking with ‘outcasts and sinners’, calling the world’s losers ‘blessed’, and declaring the purity culture of the ‘good religious folk’ null and void — we are so used to these things that we forget just how shocking they were. Jesus’ whole way of being in the world was itself ‘an epiphany of corruption’ to the religious leaders of his day (and to many ‘Good Christians’ today!), and they did everything they could to get rid of him.

Contemporary Challenge

While the metaphors Jesus’ used aren’t scandalous for us, understanding just how subversive these stories were should certainly challenge us today. Jesus compares God’s Kingdom to a corrupting influence and to a fairly typical and unimpressive shrub. In a world where so many people of faith are up in arms about so-called ‘corrupting influences’ and champion a theology of glory and victory and greatness by this world’s standards, this remains a challenging message and we cannot lose sight of that.

Expand

How then does the interpretation of these parables that has emerged in this study promote growth in faith and love? The parables highlight the mysterious workings of God’s Kingdom: It may look insignificant compared to the world’s problems, and we may not even see it working, but these stories reassure us that it is working nonetheless. As Robert Farrar Capon put it, “Its progress through history is not a transition from nonkingdom to kingdom; rather, it is a progress from kingdom-in-a-mystery to kingdom-made-manifest” (Capon).

This means that the Kingdom doesn’t look like we think it should. It doesn’t look like a majestic cedar, and it may even come in the guise of something we think of as gross and corrupting. And here the message connects to the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, the discussion of which bookends these parables: Not only are we in no position to judge between what is holy and what is corrupt in the world, but God’s Kingdom is even being revealed in the very things we think of as ‘impure’ and ‘insignificant’. As Bernard Brandon Scott put it:

The parable calls into question ready attempts to predict on the basis of our knowledge of the holy and good where the kingdom is active. Instead it insists on the kingdom’s freedom to appear under its own guise, even if it be the guise of corruption. (Scott 329)

Summary and Conclusions

These are small but mighty parables. In them Jesus teaches that the working of the Kingdom of God may appear small and inconsequential to our eyes, but its impact is big, pervasive, and thorough. But the images he uses were subversive, undermining common conceptions of greatness and goodness alike. So not only must we say that ‘good things come in small packages’, but even that great things come in small, suspicious, and to our eyes, rotting packages — an idea that is fully consistent with the rest of Jesus’ teaching and lifestyle, which was always a scandal to the Law-abiding and ‘righteous’.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.