Trevor Malkinson
New Testament 601
Paper 1- The Theology of Paul
March 2013
For All of You Are One in Jesus Christ
“While they disagree on much, Boyarin and Fiorenza agree on one thing- the importance
of Galatians 3:28 as a key text for understanding Paul”. – Calvin J. Roetzel, The Letters
of Paul1
~~~~~~
Text
The text I have chosen for this paper is Galatians 3:28. This is the version in the
NRSV- “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no
longer male and female; for all you are one in Jesus Christ”. Although one could make a
case for including the passages that immediately precede and follow this pericope (as
there are interlocking themes), I’ve chosen to isolate 3:28 for two reasons. The first is
that there are two other pericopae in Paul’s letters (1 Cor 12:13, Col 3:11) where a similar
“baptismal formula” is used, thus indicating that this particular saying might have been
used in a stand alone way in the early church. Secondly, this passage has been the subject
of much recent discussion by a trio of European philosophers (Zizek, Badiou and
Agamben) who have used it as a jumping off point for their own political projects. Their
writings have generated much response from theologians and biblical scholars, and I was
interested in trying to understand why this specific fragment was thought to be of such
significance.
As the paper will attempt to outline in much more depth, this pericope is central to
Paul’s overall theology and mission. The Messiah Jesus Christ, sent by God to fulfill his
promise to “all the nations”, is for the Paul the pivot around which all else revolves, and
it is our coming to be “in Christ” through faith that is the source of our salvation. And as
the passage indicates, this new identity in Christ cuts across all former distinctions,
creating a “transubstantiation of the chosen people”2 into a new universalism that
includes all who believe in the One God and his Son, Jesus the Christ.
1
Roetzel, Calvin J. The Letters of Paul- Conversations in Context. USA: Westminster John Know Press,
1998. p.185.
2
Zizek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf- The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 2003. p.130.
Historical Criticism
Part 1- The Larger Backdrop
There are four major themes in Paul’s theology and mission that I see overlapping
with the wider Greco-Roman and Jewish environment within which he was situated. The
first is his belief in the figure of the Messiah. According to John J. Collins, “[The]
concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of
Israel and institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish
messianism around the turn of the era”.3 For Paul Jesus was the ‘anointed’ one, and
“anointed in Hebrew produces the word ‘Messiah’, while the Greek translation results in
the word ‘Christ’”.4 So Paul is working within this major current of culture and thought,
although Jesus- the one “who became a slave”, and was crucified- as the figure of the
Messiah upends the dominant tradition as described by Collins.
Paul also overlaps with the apocalyptic tradition, a form of religious literature
that believes God will intervene in the world in some way to overturn the present evil age
and usher in a “coming good one”.5 There was plenty of this kind of writing in Paul’s
century and in the one before,6 and it can be found in the reported teachings of Jesus too
(Mark 8:38-9:1). Paul believed that the resurrected Christ was a sign that the coming age
had begun, and he taught that the “present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor
7:31).
Although Paul ridiculed magical thinking at times, such as in Gal 4:1-11 where he
mocks the Gentiles pre-Christian enslavement to “elements spirits” etc., or in Colossians
where he speaks about the Gentile fixation with “principalities and powers” (2:10) as
well as angels and astrology, he also partakes in it in Galatians when he curses his
3
Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient
Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1995. p.68.
4
Sanders, E.P. Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. p.44.
5
White, L. Michael. From Jesus to Christianity. USA: HarperCollins, 2004. p.73.
6
“From about 225 BCE to 200 CE, more than twenty new works of this genre were written by Jews and
Christians, although this count does not include the numerous other works among the Pseudepigraha, the
Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament that are apocalyptic in tone but not formally part of the genre”.
Ibid, p.70.
opponents (Gal 1:8-9).7 Despite this and the many accounts of exorcisms and miracles in
the Gospels (which are staple acts of the magical worldview), Paul was often trying to
steer his new Gentile converts away from these beliefs and towards sole salvation in
Christ.
A mythological worldview- one where heaven and earth are intimately connected,
and where actions on this plane engender responses from the one above (ie. from God or
the gods)- was also central to the ancient world of Paul’s time, and to Paul’s own
theology.8 For Paul God and man were in intimate relation, and he thought that the
redemption of humanity and all of creation had begun in the resurrection of Christ (an act
of God), and that Jews and Gentiles alike needed to have faith in Christ (our act in return)
so that they could take part in the renewed humanity that would be the fulfillment of
God’s covenantal promise. Paul definitely experienced the world and cosmos in the mode
typical of the mythological outlook, one that is very different from that of the
post/modern eras (although which persists in many ways).
Part 2- Paul’s Mission, the Community He Was Addressing and Echoes in Other Letters
Paul understood himself as being divinely appointed (Gal 1:15) to carry the
message of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles (Gal 2:8-9), and in doing so to be fulfilling the
biblical prophecy of God’s promise to be a light to all nations. Paul preached “the death,
resurrection and lordship of Jesus Christ, and he proclaimed that faith in him guaranteed
a share in his life”;9 furthermore, as mentioned, Paul thought the resurrection of Jesus
was an eschatological event signaling that a turning of the age had begun, and that Jesus’
immanent return to earth would consummate this process.10 Thus Paul’s mission was
7
“[Magical thinking] sees a numinous world with supernatural forces all around, and the ability to exercise
some control over these forces was a major goal of one’s personal religious devotion. For this reason, the
magical arts were extremely popular in Greco-Roman world, and we continue to find them in Jewish, and
later, Christian practice as well”. White, L. Michael. From Jesus to Christianity. USA: HarperCollins,
2004. p.73.
8
cf. Roetzel, Calvin J. The Letters of Paul- Conversations in Context. USA: Westminster John Know Press,
1998. Ch.5.
9
Sanders, E.P. Paul. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. p.21.
10
“In the New Testament, in particular for Paul, all apocalyptic reflection and hope comes to this, that God
has acted critically, decisively, and finally for Israel, all the peoples of the earth, and the entire cosmos, in
the life, death, resurrection, and coming again of Jesus, in such a way that God’s purpose for Israel, all
charged with a deep urgency, as it was his view that faith in Christ (by Jews and Gentiles
alike) would assure that they were part of God’s salvific plan, and so this repentant
baptism in the Spirit needed to take place now.
All this is the backdrop for Paul’s letter to the Galatians. At some point Paul had
set up churches in the Galatia region of Asia Minor. He thought things were going fine
but he learned that certain people in the congregation (or perhaps outside missionaries,
scholars are divided) had re-introduced various Jewish practices including circumcision,
all of which Paul thought was unnecessary and a backwards step. For Paul these additions
were “no minor change but a fundamental repudiation of the gospel of salvation by
grace…Since the Galatians came to enjoy life in the Spirit through “hearing with faith”
free from “works of the law”, Paul would have them continue in the way of responsible
freedom”.11 Paul thought that the Christ event had changed everything. Now human
beings could be justified not by upholding the law of the Mosaic covenant, but by simply
having faith in Christ. To do this transforms one into a “descendent of Abraham” (Gal
3:7). In this act of faith all distinctions are “obliterated in Christ, [and] the law is
unnecessary” (Gal 3:28).12 For Paul, Christ is the “primal human that healed all the
world’s divisions”.13
Paul had a double urgency in responding to the situation in Galatia. First, it was a
congregation of mostly Gentile converts who were new to the faith, and he refers to them
as minors (4:1) and children (4:19). Paul thus “considers the Galatians to be on the border
between faith and unfaith and are tempted to cross back over”.14 Also, as a newly
forming congregation of converts it was still in the process of developing a group or
social identity. The introduction of elements of the Jewish law could fray that cohesion
and possibly create fatal strife and divisions. Paul is concerned to combat this, and
“throughout this letter Paul seeks to maintain group integrity and reaffirm the social
humanity, and all creation is critically, decisively, and finally disclosed and effected in the history of Jesus
Christ”. Harink, Douglas. Paul Among the Postliberals. USA: Brazos Press, 2003. p.68.
11
Roetzel, Calvin J. The Letters of Paul- Conversations in Context. USA: Westminster John Know Press,
1998. p.102.
12
Pregeant, Russell. Engaging the New Testament- An Interdisciplinary Introduction. USA: Fortress Press,
1995. p.350.
13
Chilton, Paul. Rabbi Paul- An Intellectual Biography. New York: Doubleday, 2004. p.90.
14
Sampley, Paul J. ‘Reasoning From the Horizons of Paul’s Thought World: A Comparison of Galatians
and Philippians’. Theology & Ethics in Paul and His Interpreters. USA: Abingdon Press, 1996. p.118.
identity of the Galatians among whom he proclaimed his gospel of God”.15 The second
point of urgency was Paul’s belief in the imminent second coming of Christ and the end
of the present world order. Thus the letter to the Galatians is a fiery and terse one, with
Paul employing all his rhetorical powers of persuasion to convince the congregation that
they must immediately reject the introduction of circumcision and other practices and
remain faithful to the gospel that he had preached. In Galatians 5:6 Paul proclaims, “For
in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only
thing that counts is faith working through love”. For Paul a new age had begun.
Galatians 3:28 directly echoes two other passages in the uncontested letters of
Paul, namely Colossians 3:11 and 1 Corinthians 12:13. According to the scholar Ernst
Kasemann, “In all these passages we are dealing unmistakably with a familiar theme of
the Pauline tradition in which the differences and oppositions between various conditions
of humanity are contrasted with the unity of the body of Christ which overlaps and
combines them”.16 It is through the ritual of baptism that we come to know the Christ that
is within all of us, and thus unites us all, many parts of “one body”. There are other core
themes in Galatians that are also taken up elsewhere. Paul touches on the notion of
righteousness (or justification) through faith and not the law in Philippians 3:8-10, and
then takes up the theme at length in the core middle sections of Galatians (3-4). The same
themes are also worked out in the middle of Romans. It is in Romans 8:18-27 that Paul
“finally shows how what God has done in Jesus the Messiah, in fulfillment of the
covenant with Abraham, has addressed and in principle solved the problem of the whole
world. God’s covenant faithfulness has put the world to rights”.17
Social Analysis
As Wayne Meeks outlines in his book The First Urban Christians, until recently
the dominant viewpoint in biblical scholarship (as well as outside of it) was that the early
15
Bruce J. Malina and John J. Pilch. Social Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul. USA: Fortress
Press, 2006. p.179.
16
Kasemann, Ernst. Essays On New Testament Themes. London: SCM Press Ltd., 1964. p.70.
17
Wright, N.T. ‘Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire’. Paul and Politics- Ekklesia, Israel, Imperium,
Interpretation. ed. Richard A. Horsely. USA: Trinity Press International, 2000. p.182-183.
church was mostly made up of the “poor and disposed of the Roman provinces”.18
However, this picture has shifted considerably, and today it is recognized that the early
church was much more “stratified”, it was made up of a “cross section” of the wider
society. Furthermore, modern sociologists have come to understand the category of social
status as being a multidimensional one, greatly complexifying any simplistic assertions of
what groups made up the church, and what the relations between them were.
What do we know about the specific social situation in Galatia? In Grace and
Galatia, Ben Witherington argues that, “In comparison to epistles like 1 and 2
Corinthians, not a great deal has been done to analyze Galatians in terms of its social and
cultural dimensions”.19 However, we can do a quick sketch of a few possibly important
social contexts for our reading of Galatians. Firstly, in a new book called Galatians ReImagined, author Brigitte Kahl argues that the Romans viewed the Gallic peoples of
Galatia as conquered, lawless barbarians who were rightfully under Roman rule.20 So we
can ascertain from Kahl’s work that there was a general atmosphere of dominance and
oppression in the Galatian region.
The Romans also persecuted those who did not worship the cult of the Emperor,21
and this seemed to be the cause of some concern in the Galatian community. Paul makes
reference to “those that want to make a good impression outwardly” in Gal 6:13, and
some scholars have speculated that the impetus to introduce circumcision and other
Jewish practices into the congregation was to avoid persecution by the local authorities.
Paul, of course, is having none of it, what counts to him is being a living testimony to “a
new creation” (Gal 6:15). This, however, must not have been easy given the broader
circumstances. Another social context that seems to be at play in Galatians is the question
of authority, in particular Paul’s. The letter begins with Paul vigorously defending his
apostolic status from what we can surmise were challenges by his opponents. There were
18
Meeks, Wayne. The First Urban Christians- The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983. p.52.
19
Witherington, Ben. Grace in Galatia- A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. USA: Erdmans
Publishing, 1998. p.41.
20
Kahl, Brigitte. Galatians Re-Imagined- Reading With the Eyes of the Vanquished. USA: Fortress Press,
2010. p.31,51.
21
Witherington, Ben. Grace in Galatia- A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. USA: Erdmans
Publishing, 1998. p.44.
obviously tensions between Paul and other leaders of the early church (particularly the
Jerusalem leaders), and this conflict was also at play in the Galatian situation.
So how does Galatians 3:28 play into all this, or how would have it had an impact
on all this strife? Roetzel argues that, “Paul used this fragment of a baptismal confession
to subvert the attempt by Judaizing opponents to supplement his gospel with law
observance for Gentile believers”.22 Meeks takes this a step further and says, “The
structural antinomies that establish one’s social place, one’s identity, are dissolved and
replaced by a paradisical unity: “All are one”.23 He also writes that Christian groups
experienced a “high level of cohesion”, and also that they were aware of being a part of a
much wider movement and network of churches. So we can tentatively conclude that
despite all the very deep tensions in the wider (and inner) social setting of the Galatians,
that the identity and unity found in Paul’s gospel and ultimately “in Christ”, was a
significant attractor for converts and for the success of the church.
Literary Analysis
Galatians 3:28 is almost at the dead center of the letter, and in many ways is a
pivot point that links the first and second halves. In the first sections of the letter (1-2)
Paul defends his honor and the authority of his apostleship, and he does so with scorn and
sarcasm and a generally combative posture. In section 3 he defends his gospel, where his
“law of Christ” takes the place of the law of Moses. Faith in Christ is now all that is
necessary to be the recipient of salvation and God’s grace; all are now equal before God.
To cement this teaching Paul does some exegetical acrobatics, going back to the story of
Abraham to shore up his teaching regarding the primacy of faith. God made a covenant
with Abraham before the Mosaic law was given, promising Abraham that “All gentiles
shall be blessed in you” (Gal 3:8) if he had faith, which he did. In turn, God was now
fulfilling that promise through his “offspring” (singular!) Jesus, and all that one had to do
22
Roetzel, Calvin J. The Letters of Paul- Conversations in Context. USA: Westminster John Know Press,
1998. p.185.
23
Meeks, Wayne. The First Urban Christians- The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983. p.88.
to be included in God’s salvific plan was to have faith “in Christ”. And this was now
open to everyone, it was now a universal covenant, with all former distinctions being
erased in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28). The true believer is no longer one who keeps the law
(which Paul saw as a temporary form of discipline), but one who has faith in God’s
promises and believes in Christ. Paul spends the last sections of the letter making sure the
Galatians do not abuse their freedom, exhorting them to “serve one another in love”
(5:13), giving them a list of vices and virtues (5:19-23), and in the end proclaiming that
all this is the source and sign of “a new creation!” (6:15).
In the background to all this is Paul’s wider theology and worldview, in particular
his eschatological belief that a cosmic drama was playing out, that he was a central actor,
and that “Christ would free us from the present evil age” (Gal 1:4). Paul understands
Jesus’ Messiahship “no longer in the traditional Jewish sense of political reign over
nations but in a transformed sense of the reign of redemption from the powers of sin and
death”.24 For Paul the church was central to this unfolding story, it was a “proleptic
realization of the Kingdom of God in the present (Rom 14:17): a society of holiness and
righteousness in which the inequalities of race, gender, and social status were done away
with (Gal 3:28; 1 Cor 12:13)”.25 For Paul the church was the rule of the raised Jesus in
people’s lives, it was an event, it was a radical community in which all distinctions were
swept away.
Theological Interpretation
So what if anything does Galatians 3:28- and its wider theology- have to offer us
today? I think it offers a lot. We live in an increasingly globalized world that is beset by
divisions such as ‘north vs. south’, the 1% versus the 99%, and we are beholden to an
ethos of individualized consumption and private acquisition. As a result our time is rife
with endemic problems, such as inequality, rampant environmental degradation,
widespread depression and addiction, to name a few. I would argue we are in a time of
generalized exile. But Paul exhorts believers “to form an alternative society by doing the
24
Kim, Seyoon. Christ and Caesar- The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke.
USA: Erdman’s Publishing, 2008. p.17.
25
Ibid p.51.
duty of the citizens of God”,26 to serve one another in love (Gal 5:13), to embody a life
beyond hierarchy and difference (but which does not subsume difference). The
philosopher Alain Badiou believes that Paul is calling us forth to become “a new
creature”.27 And it is by putting on the mind of Christ, by being baptized into the One that
is all and within all, that we can be transformed and thus begin the exodus to a new
future. “As men swear off patriarchy, slave masters swear off gain from slaveholding,
and dominant ethnicities loosen their grip, new collaborations become possible”.28 I think
it is precisely now that we kick off the dust of our tradition and resurrect these powerful
teachings of Paul upon which the church was born, and a new world awaits.
26
Kim, Seyoon. Christ and Caesar- The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke.
USA: Erdman’s Publishing, 2008. p.17
27
Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul- The Foundations of Universalism. Stanford: Stanford Univeersity Press, 2003.
p.72.
28
Jeorg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan. Occupy Religion- Theology of the Multitude. UK: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2012. p.78.
New Testament 500
Term Paper
Trevor Malkinson
December 2012
Thy Kingdom Come:
An Analysis of the Parable of the Mustard Seed
“The way of Jesus was both personal and political. It was about personal transformation.
And it was political, a path of resistance to the domination system and advocacy of an
alternative vision for life under God. His counteradvocacy, his passion for God’s passion,
led to his execution. The way of the cross was both political and personal”. - Marcus
Borg, Jesus- Uncover the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary
~~~~
Text
For this paper I have chosen to examine the parable of the Mustard Seed as it
found in the gospel of Mark. This is the text as it is translated in the NRSV edition of the
Bible,1 Mark 4:30-32.
(30) “He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will
be we use for it? (31) It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the
smallest of all seeds on the earth; (32) yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the
greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that birds of the air can make nests
in the shade”.
I have identified this as the beginning and end of the pericope because there are
clear breaks before and after it. Immediately preceding it is another self-standing parable
that runs from Mark 4:26-29. Immediately after the parable of the Mustard Seed is the
sentence, “With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear
it”, and this shift in the narrative indicates that the parable is now over. Thus Mark 4:3032 can be seen to be a self-contained unit with obvious borders on either side.
Source Criticism and Redaction Criticism
The parables of Jesus were delivered orally and were only written down much
later. This can make it difficult to know if the texts we have today are accurate
representations of Jesus’ actual teachings or not. However, as Norman Perrin points out,
“The parables of Jesus were so distinctive that in broad structural outline they survived
the subsequent process of transmission very well, while, at the same time, the process of
reinterpretation was so obvious, and so much at variance with the original thrust of the
1
Ed. Michael Coogan. The New Oxford Annotated Bible- New Revised Standard Version. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010.
parables themselves, that the original form and thrust of the parables have not proven
difficult to reconstruct”.2 Perrin concludes, “There is a broad measure of general
agreement as to the text of the parables as parables of Jesus”.3 Scholar Amos Wilder
believes that the ‘parables of Kingdom’, which includes the parable of the Mustard Seed,
are to be considered authentic parables of Jesus. He writes, “The characteristic design, the
tight form of these utterances helped guarantee them against change and supplementation.
A coherent image-story is resistant to change…The parables of Jesus have an organic
unity and coherence”.4 So we can be fairly confident that the periocpe I’m working with
is among the authentic teachings of Jesus.
The parable of the Mustard Seed is part of ‘the triple tradition’, as it can also be
found in the gospels of Matthew (13:31-32) and Luke (13:18-19). It also appears in the
gospel of Thomas (20). Its general outline is the same in all four gospels, with some small
yet important changes in Matthew and Luke, which scholars believe can be explained
using the Two Source Hypothesis, with the changes in Matthew and Luke being the key.
Mark says the seed will grow into “the greatest of all shrubs”, and Thomas says it grows
into “a large plant”, which is in line with the actual reality of the mustard plant, which is
a shrub that grows between 6-9 ft. tall. However, Matthew says that this “greatest of
shrubs” becomes “a tree”, and Luke also says the seed “became a tree”. According to CH
Dodd, this indicates that Matthew and Luke had access to the parable as it was found in
Mark, but they must have also had another source, ie. ‘Q’, from which they both drew in
their mutual insertion of the tree motif. Dodd writes, “The “Q” version can be best
recovered from Luke, since Matthew, in accordance with his general custom, has
conflated his two sources”.5
What has Matthew retained and conflated into his version of the parable from the
Markan source that Luke did not? The statement that the mustard seed is “the smallest of
seeds”, a phrase found exactly the same in both. Dodd argues that because this emphasis
on the smallness of the seed is only in the gospel of Mark (and not Q), that it is “probably
intrusive”, meaning that Mark has inserted this description into the text himself. From
2
Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. US: Fortress Press, 1976. p.3.
Ibid, p.4.
4 Wilder, Amos. Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
p. 82.
5 Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co., 1935. p.189.
3
this Dodd concludes, “If we neglect it [or reject it as inauthentic], then the main point of
the parable is not the contrast between small beginnings and great results”.6 However,
Dodd was not working with the gospel of Thomas in his time, which also contains this
exact phrase “the smallest of all the seeds”. I think this is important to note, because
while I do not think that the movement from “small beginnings to great results” is the
sole message of the parable, I do think it is a significant theme, as I’ll discuss in later
sections of the paper. The addition of the gospel of Thomas gives us reason to believe
that this was indeed a part of the original parable and thus the message of Jesus.
We might pause for a brief moment and ask why the tree motif was redacted into
the gospel tradition- via Q and retained in Luke and Matthew- seeing as how it is
impossible in terms of the actual biology of the mustard plant, thus contorting the
intrinsic possibilities of the metaphor. I’ll touch more on this in subsequent sections of
the paper, but there was a long standing and passionately held belief/myth in the ancient
Israel of Jesus’ period that a messiah king would come and restore the people and their
land to its former glory and independence.7 One of the symbols of this cultural myth was
the great cedars of Lebanon, which grew hundreds of feet tall, and the great nation of the
restored Israel would be like these mighty and glorious trees. Thus, Jesus’ description of
the kingdom of God as a mustard plant, a shrub that grew under ten feet tall, was a much
more modest metaphor that subverted this self-aggrandizing image that was so widely
held. However, these types of triumphant myths do not die easily, and scholars believe
that the great tree motif was inappropriately redacted back into the parable, domesticating
the original and startling metaphor used by Jesus.8
Lastly for this section, we can look at how the parable of the Mustard Seed is
operating in the gospel of Mark. Where is it located in Mark’s narrative and why? Mark’s
gospel begins quickly, announcing Jesus Christ as the Son of God before moving rapidly
into the story of John the Baptist, the tests in the wilderness, the gaining of the disciples,
a series of healings stories and so on. There is a powerful current of immediacy that runs
6
Ibid, p.190.
“This concept of the Davidic messiah as the warrior king who would destroy the enemies of Israel and
institute an era of unending peace constitutes the common core of Jewish messianism around the turn of the
era”. Collins, John J. The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient
Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1995. p.68.
8 Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row,
1973. p.265-302.
7
throughout Mark’s gospel, and one of the themes that is announced right away is that the
kingdom of God- Jesus’ central message9- is at hand, its time has now come. (Mark 1:15“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the
good news”). By chapter 4 Jesus is beginning to teach his disciples (and others) about
what the kingdom of God is like, and he does so using parables. A particular type of
parable he uses at this stage, which includes that of the Mustard Seed, is what CH Dodd
calls a “parable of growth”.10 These parables indicate that the kingdom is like a germ that
grows, and moreover, that it is now nearing harvest time. John Dominic Crossan has
alternatively termed these the “parables of advent”, which teach of a “coming new world
and unforeseen possibilities”.11 So in terms of Mark’s gospel, the parable of the Mustard
Seed helps feed the building mood of immediacy, and it extends the theme that the time
of the kingdom of God is at hand, its arrival being immanent and its harvest being near.
These parables of growth/advent also do one other important thing- they teach that for
Thy kingdom to truly come, we must participate. As Dodd puts it, “Having come,
however, the kingdom does call for human effort. The harvest waits for reapers, and it is
in this light that Jesus set His own work and that to which He calls His disciples”.12 I will
pick up on this participatory theme during the concluding section of the paper, but this
important message has been announced very early in Mark’s gospel, and the parable of
the Mustard Seeds helps to do so.13
Form Criticism Pt. 1- What is a Parable?
As I’ve already stated in the paper many times, the type or form of the pericope I
have chosen is a parable. But what is a parable? That question has been answered in
9
“Most exegetes and historians agree that the notion of the kingdom of God lies at the heart of the message
of Jesus. One can take it as a centering point which radiates influence on all of the teachings of Jesus”.
Haight, Roger. Jesus Symbol of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999. p.97
10 Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co., 1935. Ch.6.
11 Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. US: Fortress Press, 1976. p.160.
12 Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co., 1935. p.194.
13 “Jesus himself is so convinced that the power of the God is at work in the present that he “dares, by
means of the parable of the Mustard Seed, to gather men together, to summon them for the Kingdom, so
that those who are summoned for the Kingdom then belong themselves to the beginning of that wonderful
end””. Eberhard Jungel (Paulus and Jesus) quoted in: Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the
Kingdom. US: Fortress Press, 1976. p.119.
various different ways during the course of church history up and into modern biblical
scholarship, but I don’t have the space to recapitulate that whole history in this paper.
However, the key moment in the modern understanding of the parables came when the
scholar Adolf Julicher (1857-1938) made the assertion that the parables were not
allegories (a predominant view up until then), but something quite different. According to
Norman Perrin, it was with this distinction that “the modern interpretation of the parables
began”.14 An allegory is “a narrative in which the various elements presented represent
something other than themselves; essential to its interpretation is the key to the
identification of the various elements, and once this key has been supplied the message of
the allegory can be presented in non allegorical language”.15 The key point here is the
final one, that the allegory can be cashed out, or translated, into more or less
propositional language (to use modern terms). We can say exactly what it means if
identify the key referents. A parable resists this.
Modern scholarship on parables, led by John Dominic Crossan among others16,
now recognizes the parables to be metaphorical stories.17 To understand what this means
we must define what a metaphor is. In her book Metaphor and Wisdom, the Canadian
philosopher Jan Zwicky describes metaphor as, “A species of understanding, a form of
seeing-as…In a metaphor we experience a gestalt shift from one distinct intellectual and
emotional complex to another “in an instant of time”…What is important for
understanding the ontology of metaphor is not that the ‘is-not’ be fully implicit, nor that it
be strictly implied, but that it be there”.18 A metaphor compares one thing to another, A is
like B; the point of the comparison is to illuminate the contours of A by way of reference
14
“The distinction between allegory and parable, and a grasp of the fundamental nature of both, is essential
to the interpretation of the parables. It was Julicher who first made the distinction, and who, further,
demonstrated that the parables of Jesus were parables and not allegories. In the moment that he did the
modern interpretation of the parables began, and, what is more, the whole modern interpretation of the
parables has continued to wrestle with this distinction, as it has continued to seek to understand the actual
nature of a parable as a literary entity”. Ibid. p.92.
15 Ibid, p.5.
16 “I regard Via and Crossan as the leading contemporary interpreters of the parables, and as particularly
important because of their use of the insights and methods of literary criticism in their interpretation”. Ibid,
p.119
17 “A parable- whether it is short, medium-length, or long- is a metaphor expanded into a story, or, more
simply, a parable is a metaphorical story “. Crossan, John Dominic. The Power of the Parable: How
Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. US: HarperOne, 2012. p. 8.
18 Zwicky, Jan. Wisdom and Metaphor. Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2003. p.4.
to B. This is what Zwicky refers to as the “seeing-as”. In this way the two referents share
some features, B and A are indeed alike in some way, which is why a good metaphor can
work. However, the key additional point that Zwicky makes is that there is also always an
“is-not”. That is to say, A is never finally reducible to B. It might be like B in ways, but
never fully so. Working with this same view of metaphor Crossan writes, “A parable, that
is, a metaphorical story, always points externally beyond itself, points to some different
and much wider referent. Whatever its content is, a parable is never about that content.
Whatever its internal subject, a parable always points you toward and wants you to go to
some external referent”.19 So to work effectively with a parable as metaphor we must
attempt to see-as. What is the “external, wider referent” that is being gestured towards?
And we must also be careful to never finally settle on a single definitive explanation that
we think can be cashed out in language. We must always to some degree, to quote
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s final line in the Tractatus, “remain silent”.20 One of the core
universal features of deep spiritual truth is a resistance to definitive linguistic expression
(the realm of the “is not”).21 Hence the need for metaphors as a literary intermediary for
the transmission of theological wisdom, and the parables of Jesus are exemplary in their
use of this power.
In his new book The Power of the Parable, John Crossan offers a classification of
parables into three different types, and I want to quickly introduce those here, as I think
the final distinction Crossan makes is an important one. The first type of parable is a
riddle parable. This is basically what it sounds like, it is a riddle that must be decoded by
the hearer, and often there are negative consequences (like death) if the meaning is
guessed wrong. The second type of parable is an example parable. These are moral
models or ethical stories. They are examples for how we should or should not act in the
world. (Crossan gives examples of riddle and example parables that were in use before
Jesus’ time, both within the Jewish lineage as well as in other cultures). Many of Jesus’
19
“A metaphor means “carrying something over” from one thing to another and thereby “seeing something
as another” or “speaking of something as another””. Crossan, John Dominic. The Power of the Parable:
How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. US: HarperOne, 2012. p. 9.
20 “6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are
what is mystical. 7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. USA: Barnes and Noble, 2003.
21 James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Double Day, 1978. Lectures 16 and
17.
parables have been interpreted as example parables, but Crossan argues that this is not
what they are in the final analysis. The parables of Jesus are to be best understood as
challenge parables, which he defines as parables that “Challenge us to think, to discuss,
to argue, and to decide about [its] meaning as present application…A challenge parable
reverses the expectations and judgments, the presuppositions and prejudices of society”.22
Several scholars have commented on the particular potency of Jesus’ parables, and the
affect their challenge can have on the hearer. CH Dodd writes, “Parables leave the mind
in sufficient doubt about [their] precise application to tease it into active thought”.23
Amos Wilder asserts that, “Jesus’ speech had the character not of instruction and ideas
but of compelling the imagination, of spell, of mythical shock and transformation”, all of
which enables him to “unveil mysteries”.24 The parables of Jesus challenged old worlds
and calling forth new ones.
To conclude this first part of the form critical section, we can turn to Norman
Perrin’s excellent summary of John Dominic Crossan’s view circa 1975- “Parable
expresses what cannot be expressed in any other way, demands a “right instinct” for
understanding, partakes of the reality it renders intelligible, and invites participation in its
referent. Parable, like myth, reveals what is not reducible to a clear language”.25
Form Criticism Pt. 2- Sitz im Leben
I want to turn now to a brief discussion of the original “setting in life” within
which Jesus was using his parables. This, along with the historical background presented
in the next section, will have much to offer my final analysis in the concluding section of
the paper. The parables of Jesus were delivered orally in interaction with an audience.
Norman Perrin tells us that, “They were immediate texts, by which I mean they were
created for the context in which they were delivered; for example, they constantly allude
to matters of knowledge or experience or expectation common to both Jesus and his
22
Crossan, John Dominic. The Power of the Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.
US: HarperOne, 2012. p. 47, 56.
23 Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co., 1935. p.5.
24 Wilder, Amos. Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
p. 84, 72.
25 Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. US: Fortress Press, 1976. p.157.
immediate contemporaries”.26 Jesus was often speaking to the peasant class of his day
(although not only), and he frequently used agricultural and other metaphors that drew
from the common life-world of his listeners. Crossan says that the parables were meant to
be interactive and to provoke discussion, and that challenge parables were especially
suited to sparking this mutual engagement. He writes that, “Their purpose is to make you
think about the fundamental presuppositions of your world, and the parabler must trust
that the audience will respond creatively…It is the definition of challenge parables to be
delicately provocative and gently subversive”.27 So this is setting in which they were used
(orally, with others, etc.), but what was the socio-economic background within which this
provocative back and forth was taking place? For that we need to turn to the findings of
historical criticism.
Historical Criticism
The world surrounding Jesus was one filled with much suffering, exploitation and
political oppression. As Marcus Borg notes, “Wealth in premodern societies was the
product of being in a small elite class in a massively exploitative system”.28 The Jewish
people and homeland were being ruled by Rome, one of the most powerful and brutal
empires that world had ever seen.29 There was much unrest and dissatisfaction among the
Jewish people, and one outlet through which this expressed itself was a deep messianic
expectation, the belief that a Davidic king would come and restore the kingdom of Israel.
The Jewish people had made a covenant with a God that was just and righteous, but their
experience under empire after dominant empire was straining their faith in this God and
what had been promised to them. According to Crossan, “Israel reconciled its faith and its
experience by insisting that God would some day- “in days to come”- make an “end” to
26
Ibid, p.7.
Crossan, John Dominic. The Power of the Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.
US: HarperOne, 2012. p.133-35.
28 Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. USA:
Harper Collins, 2006. p.244.
29 “Think of that first century CE in the Jewish homeland. Those four and a bit empires of Daniel [who
predicted the coming Son of Man] were all gone, and in their place was the Roman Empire, the greatest
empire the world had ever known. Imperial domination was getting stronger, not weaker”. Crossan, John
Dominic. The Power of the Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. US: HarperOne,
2012. p.119.
27
the evil, injustice, oppression, war and violence here below upon a transformed earth”.30
So Jesus’ immediate context was one of intense imperialism, injustice, and eschatological
expectation.
Jesus’ use of the phrase the kingdom of God- his central message and metaphor31had direct political connotations and implications. It was a challenge to the empire of
Rome and to systems of domination in general, contrasting it with a vision of what the
world would be like under divine rule. As Marcus Borg writes, “Jesus could have spoken
about the community of God, or the people of God. But he didn’t. Instead, he spoke about
the kingdom. The usage had to be deliberate, intended to contrast the kingdom of God
with the kingdoms of this world”.32 Crossan asserts that Jesus’ metaphor of the kingdom
of God was “100 percent religious and 100 percent political”.33 This overt and central
political dimension of Jesus’ life and teachings is important to keep in mind when trying
to interpret the parables. William Herzog, author of Parables as Subversive Speech,
argues that the literary turn in the interpretation of the gospels often had the result of
detaching the parables from the life-world they were initially embedded in. He writes,
“The notion that language, even the language of Jesus, once lived as part of a social,
political, economic system, which gave it birth and provided its resonance, was foreign to
the enterprise of interpreting the parables”.34 While this statement might be a little too
strong, I agree that the socio-political dimension of Jesus’ context and teachings is
essential to understanding the parables.
Narrative Criticism
The parable of the Mustard Seed is not a narrative involving human characters, so
there is less to say about it from the view of narrative criticism then there is for other
30
Ibid, p.118.
“Every New Testament scholar would agree that the central theme of Jesus’ ministry was the “Kingdom
of God”.” Senior, Donald. Jesus: A Gospel Portrait. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum Press, 1975, p. 52.
32 Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary. USA:
Harper Collins, 2006. p.252.
33 Crossan, John Dominic. God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now. New York, HarperOne,
2007. p.117.
34 Herzog, William R. Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed. USA: John
Know Press, 1994. p.13.
31
pericopes. However, there are some important points to be made. The setting of the
parable is an agricultural one. This would speak to, and work with, the immediate setting
of many of Jesus’ peasant listeners that he was engaging with. We could say that the
character of the parable is the kingdom of God. It is characterized as something that
begins small, but grows into something great. It is also a nuisance, as we will see in a
moment. I spoke to the role of this parable in the overall gospel of Mark in the section on
Source and Redaction Criticism. There is was noted that the parable functioned as a way
of invoking and stoking the theme that the kingdom of God was at hand, that it had
grown to a point of being ready for harvest. According to scholar Mark Allan Powell, “In
the theological context of Mark’s gospel, this [1:15] means that the time has finally come
for God’s will to be accomplished. What God wants to happen is about to take place;
indeed it is already beginning to happen…Furthermore, it is both possible and imperative
for people to “enter it” (9:47; 10:15, 23-24)”.35 John Crossan argues that parables
“express the temporality of Jesus’ experience of God; they proclaim and they establish
the historicity of Jesus’ response to the Kingdom”.36 I think this point about temporality
is an important one. There is a temporality in terms of the imminence of the kingdom of
God; it is to some degree here now. And the parable of the Mustard Seed indicates that
the kingdom of God grows, that is, there is a dimension of process or development that is
central to the metaphor. This is not the Buddhist notion of nirvana and samsara, where
the world is seen as illusion and we are instructed to get off the wheel of becoming to
find heaven. Rather distinctly, Jesus is teaching that the kingdom of God is something
that can be cultivated in the here and now on this earth, and that in the right soil it ripens
expands and sprouts over time.
The first time that many of Jesus’ listeners heard the parable of the Mustard Seed
they likely would have been shocked. As many of them would have been involved in
agricultural production, or have been close to that world, Jesus’ choice of the mustard
plant as his metaphor for the kingdom of God would have not only been startling but
possibly abhorrent. John Crossan does a nice job of opening up this dimension of the
35
Powell, Mark Allan. Fortress Introduction to the Gospels. USA: Fortress Press, 1998. p.51.
Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row,
1973. p.32-33.
36
parable. After citing the Roman author Pliny the Elder’s description of the mustard plant
in his book Natural Histories (“Once the seed has been sown it is scarcely possible to get
the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once”), Crossan writes, “Even
when one cultivates the [domesticated version] for medicinal or culinary properties, there
is an ever present danger that it will destroy the garden. The mustard plant is dangerous
even when domesticated in the garden, and is deadly when growing in the grain fields”.37
What is more, adding insult to injury, the nesting birds Jesus mentions “represented to
ancient farmers a permanent danger to the seed and grain”.38 If we add to this the
aforementioned subversion of the triumphant cultural image of the mighty cedars of
Lebanon, then this parable would have almost certainly had people scratching their heads,
if not downright incredulous. But it would also, in the words of CH Dodd, “arrest the
hearer by its vividness and strangeness” and “tease the mind into active thought”.39 After
many times hearing the parable and with time spent pondering it, a different more
positive, although no less astonished view might have started to grow instead.
Exegesis
I have already begun some parts of the exegesis in previous sections, as there is
some inevitable overlap between the content explored by the different methods.
However, there is more to say and we can turn to that now. The parable of the Mustard
Seed is a short one, and there are not a lot of significant variations in the different
translations of the Markan passage, but there are a couple of subtle differences worth
noting. The NRSV version says “With what can we compare” the kingdom of God, while
the Revised English Bible says “How shall we picture” the kingdom of God. This might
be too subtle a point, and thus insignificant, but in light of the discussion surrounding
metaphor, I wondered if “compare” was more true to the process of seeing-as, while
“picturing” might be somewhat obstructive to sensing into what parable is alluding to.
Finding a mental image, or ‘picture’, might not be helpful for the process of
understanding, so I’m going to opt for compare. Another difference in the various
37
Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. New York: HarperOne, 1994. p.73.
Ibid, p.73.
39 Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co., 1935. p.5-7.
38
translations surrounds the word “grows”. The NRSV says, “Yet when it is sown it grows
up to become the greatest of all shrubs”, while the New American Bible and the Revised
English Bible says it “springs” up. I’m not sure how to assess this difference without
stepping into the hermeneutic circle, but the choice of “spring” seems a little too fast or
jarring as a word choice for what the parable seems to be pointing to. There is something
much more organic and steady about the word “grows”, which I think is more indicative
of what the parable is trying to communicate.
There are two other places in the bible where mustard is also mentioned, and this
might shed some light on how it is being used in the parable of the Mustard Seed. In
Matthew 17:20, after the disciples are wondering why they could not cast out a demon,
Jesus says to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the
size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’, and it
will move; and nothing will be impossible for you”. We can note two things, first that the
faith of the disciples was so small that it couldn’t even be compared to a mustard seed.
And secondly, it takes only the tiniest morsel of faith to move mountains in this world. In
Luke 17:5-6, the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, and he responds by saying “If
you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be
uprooted and planted in the sea’, and it would obey you”. Once again the mustard seed is
compared to faith, and again it is stressed that only a small quantity of faith is able to
achieve great things. I think it is worth pausing for a moment to look at this word faith,
because as Marcus Borg points out, “most people today, in the church and outside of it,
take it for granted that Christian faith means believing a set of Christian beliefs to be
true”.40 Most people view faith as either a matter of agreeing with a set of mental
propositions (a view influenced by secular modernity), or see it as simply a big dose of
wishful thinking, believing in something with our eyes shut and our fingers crossed. But
Borg helps us to see faith differently by retrieving its multiple meanings with the JudeoChristian tradition. There is faith as assensus, which does mean to believe via the mind.
But there is also faith as fiducia, which is faith as trust, a radical trust in God as our rock
and fortress. “Faith is trusting in the sea of being in which we live and move and have our
40
Borg, Marcus. The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering A Life of Faith. USA: HarperCollins, 2004.
p.25.
being. Faith as radical trust has transforming power”.41 There is also faith as fidelitas,
which means faith as fidelity, where there is a “loyalty, allegiance, a commitment of the
self at its deepest level, the commitment of the heart…Fidelitas refers to a radical
centering in God”. And lastly, there is faith as visio, which refers to a way of seeing “the
whole”, of seeing God behind and within the whole of reality. God is generous, God is
just, and God is gracious. This way of seeing-the-whole leads to trust, and it “generates a
“willingness to spend and be spent” for the sake of a vision that goes beyond
ourselves”.42
As Martin Luther famously said, “Faith is the yes of the heart...a confidence on
which we stake our lives”. I think this much broader and multifaceted understanding of
faith outlined above is important, for if we are to be the reapers of the harvest, we need to
understand the type of lived orientation to the world that is being referred to when Jesus
calls for faith. It is out of this trusting, loyal, God-centered way of being that the mustard
seed can become “the greatest of all shrubs”. The version of the Mustard Seed parable in
the gospel of Thomas is unique in saying that it’s when the mustard seed falls on
“prepared soil” that it grows into a large plant. This is a theme found elsewhere in the
bible, that we are the soil that is to be prepared. Hosea 10:12 says, “Sow for yourselves
righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it
is time to seek the Lord”. So to live a life of faith is to be constantly preparing our soil for
the seed of the kingdom of God to grow within us, and thus also within the world.
Earlier in the paper I mentioned that the parable of the Mustard Seed was found in
all three synoptic gospels as well as the gospel of Thomas. I noted that Matthew and
Luke had inappropriately redacted into the parable that the mustard seed becomes “a
great tree”, acquiescing to the cultural image of a restored Israel being like the mighty
cedars of Lebanon. What makes this worse is that it appears that Jesus was intentionally
making reference to this myth in the final line of the parable, with a desire to draw off it
but ultimately subvert it with his own image of the mustard plant. The footnotes to NSRV
say that the mention of birds- “[the mustard seed] becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and
puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in it”- is a reference
41
42
Ibid, p.31.
Ibid, p.35.
to passages in Daniel 4 and Ezekiel 17. (The theme of the birds making nests, or “taking
shelter” in Thomas, is in all four gospels). In Daniel we have the vision of a mighty tree
that stretches all the way to heaven, and “The animals of the field found shade under it,
and birds of the air nested in its branches” (Dan. 4:12). The tree is supposed to represent
King Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, which also gets chopped down in the same vision.
In Ezekiel 17 there is a fable of a restored Davidic monarchy that “becomes like a noble
cedar. Under it every kind of bird will live; in the shade of its branches will nest winged
creatures of every kind” (Ezek 17:23). According to the footnotes in the NSRV, the noble
cedar represents “the archetypical “cosmic tree” in Near Eastern mythology. Planted at
the center of the world, it connects heaven and earth and offers shelter to all people”.43 So
clearly Jesus is evoking these images as he announces that the kingdom of God will
provide shelter for people. But what is giving shelter is not a mighty tree, but a shrub.
Furthermore, as John Crossan has pointed out, the mustard plant was considered a
noxious weed in the land of Israel at the time; it was invasive and dangerous to sow in the
fields or in a private garden.44 The kingdom of God is thus said to be like a subtle
contagion that when grown in the right soil takes over the whole garden. Scholar Ben
Witherington argues that there is something “subversive and scandalous” about this
image of the kingdom of God as a “malignant weed”.45 It would seem that part of Jesus’
message is that there is going to be some people who don’t want the kingdom of God to
grow, who will find it a nuisance and want to tear it out. But if we recall Pliny the Elder’s
description of the mustard plant, “when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to
get the place free of it”, then we can hear both a high level of hope in the parable as well
as a political message- once the kingdom of God begins to grow, the empires of this
world will not be able to stop it.
43
Ed. Michael Coogan. The New Oxford Annotated Bible- New Revised Standard Version. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010. p.1183.
44 Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row,
1973. p.265-302.
45 Witherington, Ben. The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. US: Eerdmans, 2001. p. 171172.
Theological and Contemporary Interpretation
I think the parable of the Mustard Seed has much to teach us today, or to put it
differently, can be a key source of guidance for our era. As we have seen, Jesus’
immediate context was one beset by imperialism, exploitation and general systemic
injustice. His metaphor of the kingdom of God, his central teaching, was a direct
challenge to that political reality, invoking an alternative world where the values of love,
justice, equality and nonviolence would be the guiding principles. As Marcus Borg puts
it, “God’s passion is for a world very different from the domination systems, large and
small, ancient and modern, systems so common that they can be called the normalcy of
civilization”.46 And Walter Brueggemann writes, “As with Moses, so Jesus’ ministry and
death opposed the politics of oppression with the politics of justice and
compassion…Implicit in the announcement [of the coming kingdom, Mark 1:15] is the
counterpart that present kingdoms will end and be displaced. He announces that a new
age was beginning, but that announcement carries with it a harsh criticism of all those
powers and agents of the present order”.47
Today we are also living in times of great inequality and injustice, with a highly
exploitative economic system that now has global reach and power. As Jeorg Rieger
sums up the general situation in his book Globalization and Theology, “Top down
globalization, in its various manifestations, creates concentrations of power and wealth in
the hands of a few, to the detriment of the majority of people”.48 The particular form of
capitalism that has been globally dominant since the 1970s- often called neoliberalism,
with its core policies of deregulation, privitization, reduced social spending, free markets
and so on- has resulted in a massive reallocation of wealth into the hands of a small
46
Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary.
USA: Harper Collins, 2006. p.225. Also: “The inner reality of the clash between Jesus Christ and Pontius
Pilate becomes accessible to us when we compare two sets of values- those of the kingdom of God, as
Jesus proclaimed it, and those of every domination system in history”. Steindl-Rast, Brother David. Deeper
Than Words- Living the Apostles Creed. New York: Image Books, 2010. p.80.
47 Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, p.99, 85.
48 Rieger, Joerg. Globilization and Theology. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010. p.6. Also: “One of most
distinctive problems of the postcolonial situation is that official colonialism and its more direct forms of
domination and control over other people have been replaced by less visible forms of power. Moreover,
those less visible forms of power are often more far reaching”. Rieger, Joerg. Christ & Empire: From Paul
to Postcolonial Times. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. p.275.
percentage of the population (ie. the 1%) over the last several decades. As Sasha Lilley
writes in the introduction to Capital and Its Discontents, “Neoliberalism has meant a
gloves-off form of class war, borne out by the assault on militant unions, relentless
restructuring of employment, wage slashing, and intentional unemployment as a means of
disciplining workers and breaking organized labor”. It has also meant “the continued and
accelerated plunder of nature”.49 The past few years have been a remarkable period in
human history, with mass popular protests springing up all around the world. From the
Arab Spring and the Indignados of Spain, to riots in Greece and the Occupy movement in
the United States (plus much more), we are now witnessing a huge surge of pushback
against a corrupt and exploitative system that is creating financial havoc, ignoring crises
such as climate change, and forcing ‘austerity’ measures on populations to pay for the
messes it continues to create. So we share a similar context to the one Jesus lived in,
challenged, and ultimately offered his life in protest against.
So how are we to respond to this? One of the key things we can take away from
the parable of the Mustard Seed, and Jesus’ teachings more broadly, is that in some way
the kingdom of God, that alternative to the kingdoms of domination, is already here on
the earth. As Jesus says in Luke 17:21 “the kingdom of God is among you”. In the gospel
of Thomas 113 Jesus says, “the kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and
people do not see it”. In Thomas 3 he says, “The Kingdom is inside you, and outside you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will see that it is
you who are the children of the living Father”. Biblical scholar Thomas Sheehan writes
that, “The presence of God among men which Jesus preached was not something new,
not a gift that God had saved up for the end of time. Jesus merely proclaimed what had
always been the case. He invited people to awaken to what God had already done from
the very beginning of time. The eschaton that Jesus proclaimed was not a new coming of
God but a realization on man’s part that ever since creation God had been there among
his people”.50 So the kingdom of God is already here, but the key is that we must, as John
49
Ed. Lilley Sasha. Capital and Its Discontents- Conversations With Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult.
Oakland: PM Press, 2011. p.11,7.
50 Sheehan, Thomas. The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. New York:
Vintage Books, 1986, p. 68.
Crossan writes, “accept it, enter it, live it, and thereby establish it”.51 It is up to us to reap
the harvest of God’s imminent and ever present bounty. We can do this by having faith,
as Jesus taught, that deeper kind of faith- radical trust, fidelity, vision of God in the
world- that is to be the source and center of how we orient to the world and act in it. It is
out of this way of life that our tiny mustard seed of faith can become “the greatest of all
shrubs”, can grow in this world and slowly but surely transform it. As Paul writes in
Romans 8:14, “All who are led by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God”. We
must increasingly learn to do Thy will so that the kingdom will come on earth, as it is in
heaven.
It is worth noting that Jesus’ protests against the domination system of his time
were nonviolent ones.52 I think this is important to highlight because we will not be able
to defeat and replace our current global empire if we try and do so with the same actions
and behaviors that are central to it. We can only usher in the new earth via the practices
of the kingdom of God. Moving in this direction, one slogan of the recent global protests
is “the revolution is love”. Talking about this, the contemporary author Charles
Eisenstein writes, “Love is the expansion of the self to include the other. And that's a
different kind of revolution. There's no one to fight—there's no evil to fight. There's no
'other' in this revolution”.53 In The Prophetic Imagination Walter Brueggemann writes,
“The formation of an alternative community with an alternative consciousness is so that
the dominant community may be criticized and finally dismantled. But more than
dismantling, the purpose of alternative community is to enable a new human beginning to
be made”.54 A new beginning can be made by us ‘entering the kingdom’, and slowly
planting our seeds within the culture around us. Discussing the parable of the Mustard
Seed, the Reverend Bruce Sanguin writes, “As a movement the church is a kin-dom of
“nuisances and nobodies” infiltrating the dominant culture with an alternative ethic. Take
51
Crossan, John Dominic. The Power of the Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus.
US: HarperOne, 2012. p.127.
52 “Jesus was among those advocating and practicing active nonviolent resistance to the domination system.
Public criticism, then and now, was a form of resistance. Like some of the prophets of the Jewish Bible, he
performed symbolic acts that challenged the symbols of power. He seems to have taught specific strategies
of nonviolent resistance”. Borg, Marcus. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a
Religious Revolutionary. USA: Harper Collins, 2006. p.251.
53 http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/the-revolution-is-love
54 Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, p.101.
the seeds of kinship, the ethic of earth’s unity and mutuality, and cast them upon the
carefully cultivated fields of the dominators. Be a nuisance weed; plant your ideals
alongside the ideals of Caeser”.55 If we do this we can trust, says Jesus, that a new culture
will spread like a subtle contagion, like that mustard plant with its “dangerous takeover
qualities”.56 If we participate in enacting God’s kingdom, if we ourselves are the vehicles
through which the seeds of God’s reign is sown, the domination systems of our
contemporary world will not be able to stop its growth, and will be slowly taken over
until they fade into history.
55
Sanguin, Bruce. Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity. Canada:
Woodlake Publishing, 2007. p.173.
56 “And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not
quite like a common weed, like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities. Something you would
want only in small and carefully controlled doses -- if you could control it”. Crossan, John Dominic. In
Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. p.265-302.
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Trevor Malkinson