02.02 The mustard seed
II. THE MUSTARD SEED
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; which indeed is less than all seeds: but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the heaven come and lodge in the branches thereof.” (Mat 13:31, Mat 13:32). “Small as a mustard seed” was a proverbial expression, common in popular speech. But with its smallness, men also noted its qualities of heat, of strength, and of healing. It may be that as Jesus spoke He could point to some mustard tree among whose branches the birds were sitting. It was an illustration of the contrast between first beginnings and final endings, of the powers of growth which lie hid in first beginnings if only they are inherently sound and strong.
(i) Surely this parable must have come back to the minds of the friends of Jesus with encouragement when, as a small body of obscure and despised men, they were bidden to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. And to us too who look back upon the long and chequered history of the Church, the fulfilment of its prophetic truth is always encouraging.
Dr. Lightfoot used to say that the study of history was the best cordial for drooping spirits. But the study which cheers is that which takes a wide view over long periods. When we look round at the position of the Christian Church in our country to-day, and note its divisions, its failures, the vast masses who stand outside it, depression comes over us. But when we look back at the position of the Christian Church, say a hundred years ago, courage returns. We see in the main real advance; we see signs everywhere of that astonishing power of revival of which the Church alone among human institutions seems to possess the secret; we are convinced that a power more than human is necessary to account for this persistent capacity to survive abuses so glaring, failures so overwhelming, sloth so inveterate. The encouragement grows the further back we cast our glance. It reaches the point of buoyant faith when, down the long and confused vista of the centuries, across the bewildering picture of the rise and fall of powerful nations and great ideas, our eyes reach the first century of the Christian era. Then we realize that the institution which seems then to be the very feeblest, the company of fanatical believers in a crucified Jew, ridiculed and persecuted, is the only one which has survived the shocks and convulsions of these nineteen hundred years. The mere survival of the Church proves that there is that within it against which “the gates of hell” cannot prevail an inherent, indestructible vitality which comes from the indwelling Spirit of Him “Who is the Resurrection and the Life.” Thus when the Church is taunted by its critics to-day with its divisions, its loss of numbers or worldly influence, or intellectual strength, its patent inconsistencies, it will note, and if it can will remedy, its defects, but it will also quietly say, “Graviora passi” “I have survived greater calamities than these” and will fare forth upon its way in faith.
(2) The parable interprets to the Church not only its general course in history, but the mode of its successive revivals. They have always, like the mustard tree, grown from small beginnings. The history of the first group in the upper-chamber at Jerusalem has been repeated over and over again; a few devoted men, inspired by the Holy Spirit, have been the seed of great and surprising developments. Think of the little band of monks who landed with Augustine on the shores of Thanet; of S. Columba and his handful of followers who rested their weary oars at lona; of S. Francis and his first few “poor brothers”; of Charles and John Wesley, with their fellow-students following their “method” of life at Oxford; and remember what great developments grew from such small beginnings. They were known to the Providence of God, but scarcely imagined or imaginable by men when the seed was sown. It is this thought which invests the first faint and apparently fruitless efforts of the missionaries of the Kingdom in distant lands and among strange nations with something more than pathos with the light of great hope and clear faith. It may almost be said that no great revival or extension of the Christian Church has arisen except from small and” even obscure beginnings. The conspicuous and dramatic conversion of Constantine, the baptism, intensely moving as it must have been at the time, of whole nations these were the seeds not of progress, but of degeneration.
Movements which have in them the promise of a great future seldom spring into immediate success. A church discloses the possibility of great things to come, when it is, so to say, in a state of germinating rather than when it is in a state of mere outward success and influence. There is a promise of the future in a church where there are bands of men, however small, who are framing great ideals and making ventures for them, where the old men still dream dreams and the young men are not ashamed to see visions; where new enthusiasms are met not by suspicion but by sympathy, by the wisdom which waits to see whether they be of God. On the other hand a church is surely forfeiting its claim upon the future, however impressive its display of mere power or mechanical unity may be for the moment, when it arrests new movements and stamps them out with iron feet. There is therefore warning as well as encouragement in the parable of the mustard seed.
Let us take both to heart.
TAGS: [Parables]