The Kingdom is Like a Mustard Seed

I was talking to a friend about the nature of God's Kingdom; decided to give a bit of thought to Jesus' parable of the mustard seed (found in Mark 4, Matthew 13, and Luke 13:18-19). Luke's rendition (from the ESV):

18 He said therefore, “What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? 19 It is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches.”

Search the web and you'll find a number of interpretations, each of which seems to assume that the significance 0f the mustard seed is self-evident. Many seem to see this as a promise that the church will grow large, others go so far as to apply it to individuals - "what kind of seed are you?" - which strikes me as missing the point entirely.

Here are a few of the thoughts I came across in my reading on it:

• G.E. Ladd is emphatic that the Kingdom is not the same thing as the church, and the parable can therefore not be about the church. We should avoid interpretations that see some specific movement or ministry growing into something huge.
• Ladd also points out that the point is not about it becoming huge - otherwise a different metaphor (such as oak tree) would be used. The point is about the tiny size of the seed.
• I think we can easily miss the centrality of Jesus in this - it speaks firstly to explain Jesus' own ministry. Luke says "He said therefore...", connecting the parable with the context of the healing of a woman in the Synagogue on the Sabbath and the subsequent shaming of Jesus' opposition.
• It must speak to false expectations of how the Kingdom would come - Jesus was proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom - and this raised lots of questions to those who would follow him. Could the Kingdom really come in an itinerant Nazarene who was opposed by most of Israel's leaders?
• Herman Ridderbos sees in all of the "kingdom parables" a sense of present reality as well as future expectation, in contrast with various scholars who see either a fully-present Kingdom or a reality that is completely yet-to-come.
• Joel Green, in typical style, gives some really useful commentary on Luke 13:
  

  In the healing account, some are caught off-balance by the nature of Jesus' restorative activity: out of place, out of time, and directed at the wrong sort of person. Jesus' commentary on this healing episode comes in the form of parables that also set conflicting images - royal rule and peasant existence - side by side. In this way, Jesus seeks to legitimate his work in the synagogue as kingdom activity.

• Green goes further, and I think he's making a super-important point:
  

  God's kingdom is established through means other than the coercive power and intrigue usually associated with the establishment of a new order, and his dominion purposefully seeks out persons who do not represent the socially powerful and privileged.

• Ben Witherington, in his Mark commentary, draws out some more of the specific significance of mustard seeds. Apparently mustard had a reputation of being fast growing and impossible to eradicate once your field was full of it. Witherington sees this as significant in Jesus' ministry; the Kingdom comes as a mustard seed - some people view it as a weed and oppose it!
• The idea of birds perching in its branches seems to be drawn from O.T. imagery, and likely signifies the blessings that the Kingdom brings to people. This makes a lot of sense in light of the woman who was healed.

I've been thinking a lot of this over during my day today, and one of the primary points of application I've found is to keep the mustard seed in view. What I mean is, we can too easily assume that this thing kicked off with a mustard seed but now it's a big tree. I think the challenge is to really grasp the nature of the Kingdom as a mustard seed - as still being like a mustard seed! The Kingdom still comes counter-culturally, it still attracts opposition, it still brings blessings to the "wrong" people.