The Smallest Seed in the Garden

He asks the question out loud before he answers it. What can the kingdom of God be compared to, and what picture will do the job. Then he reaches for the least impressive thing in the garden.

It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds sown upon the earth.

Nobody in that field was running a survey of world botany, and neither was he. It works the way a drop in the ocean works for us. These were people who had held that seed between a finger and a thumb and pushed it into the ground themselves.

But after it is planted, it grows to be the largest of all garden plants and puts forth great branches, so that the birds of the air nest in its shade.

The birds are what change the size of this parable. Ezekiel has God promising to plant a sprig on the mountain heights of Israel, where it becomes a great tree with birds of every kind nesting under it and sheltering in the shade of its branches. Daniel describes an enormous tree with the birds of the air lodging in its branches and every creature fed from it, and in that vision the tree is a kingdom. A tree full of nesting birds was not a pleasant detail about gardening. It was a standing picture for an empire large enough to shelter the nations.

So he has taken the image of a kingdom that covers the world and started it with a seed you could lose between two fingers. The parable is not saying that small things are nice. It says the thing God is starting looks negligible right now and will end up sheltering everybody.

Mark closes the run of parables with a note about method. Jesus spoke to the crowds in many parables of this kind, as much of it as they could understand, and he did not speak to them without one. Privately, to his own disciples, he explained everything. It is the same arrangement the chapter opened with. The crowd got the story and the ones who stayed got the meaning.