Seaside With Jesus: Mustard Seed and Yeast Matthew 13:31-33

You ever read a book, hear a story, or maybe even watch a movie, in which you get to the end of it and scratch your head and wonder, so what was that all about?  I know there are some things I had to read in school when I was in high school, and even at Methodist College.  However, there’s a movie that stands out in my mind above everything else.  It was 1999, and while everyone else was getting worked up about Y2K, Anita and I were celebrating our sixth anniversary.  We both were fans, and still are to a degree, of Nicholas Cage.  Two days before our anniversary, his new movie came out, and without reading anything about it, we decided to go see it.  Let me just tell you that after 2 hours, Anita and I came out wondering just what we had seen, the only thing we knew for certain was that Brining Out The Dead is about the worst date movie ever.  I think by the time it was all said and done, the producers were scratching their heads wondering just why they made the movie, because it only brought $16 million of the $55 million production cost.

We continue today to encounter Seaside Stories with Jesus—listening, along with those who stood on the bank, to the stories that Jesus shared.  While there are some stories that left the disciples and others scratching their heads and questioning what Jesus was talking about, causing Him to have to explain, there are many other parables that those of Jesus’ day would have easily understood.  However they still leave us wondering just what we’ve heard—wondering just what point Jesus was trying to make.  Today’s parables may be among those.  Mustard seeds…yeast and flour.  How many of y’all have ever planted a mustard seed or seen a mustard plant in person?  How many of you know the equivalent of three measures of flour, and just how much bread that would make?  How many of us understand the significance of Jesus’ inclusion of yeast in that parable?  And if we don’t understand these things, we hear Jesus comparing God’s Kingdom to that mustard seed or to that woman making bread, and we’re left scratching our heads, wondering just what Jesus is talking about.  So, let’s explore just what Jesus is talking about…

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…Jesus, in case the folks weren’t remembering, reminds them that the mustard seed is the smallest of all the seeds that they knew of.  This isn’t the only time Jesus references the mustard seed—later as Jesus questions the faith of the disciples when they are unable to cast out a demon in His Name, He tells them that anyone with faith the size of a mustard seed could command a mountain to move and it would.  So, Jesus says that Kingdom of Heaven is like that small mustard seed, that when planted, will grow, become first a shrub, then a tree.  It will become something so large that birds will be able to build nests in it.  Think of it, this tiny seed becomes something that, not a single bird, but multiple birds are able to come and build nests and live within.

Then there’s the woman with the three measures of flour.  Three measures of flour is not three tablespoons of flour, or even three cups of flour, it is the equivalent of ten gallons of flour.  Those of you who make bread—just how much bread could you make with ten gallons of flour?  This woman is working with enough flour to feed 100 to 150 people (unless I’m there and she has made light rolls, then cut that number in half).  However, the amount of flour is not the only surprising detail of this parable…there is also the yeast.  Some of us may be thinking, “but yeast is needed for making bread, what is so surprising about that?”  The issue is that yeast is not usually lifted in such a positive manner among the Hebrew people…just as in chapter 16 where Jesus talks about the yeast of the Pharisees, warning people to beware the corrupt teaching of the Pharisees.  It was common to use yeast as an illustration of something that corrupts by a people who celebrated their most holy of meals, the Passover, with unleavened bread.  Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is like the woman using ten gallons of flour and some yeast to make a bunch of bread.

So how many of us know now exactly what Jesus was getting at when he compared the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed and to the woman making enough loaves of bread to feed a multitude?  How many of us are still scratching our head, wondering just whether the preacher has told us anything in the last five to ten minutes?

One of the things we have to remember, and you will hear me say this over and over again over the next 20 years, we have to read God’s Word in context.  We can never safely pull a verse or two out of God’s Word by themselves and safely say that we know exactly what those verses are saying…just as we cannot safely claim to know the point of a passage of Scripture without knowing the culture in which it (such as knowing that the Hebrew people did not often have yeast on hand when making bread).  So, what happens when we place these two parables back within their larger context of the stories Jesus was telling there by the sea?  How does placing them back alongside the parable of the sower and the soil, where, considering a great harvest from a field of wheat was fifteen-fold, Jesus talks about the harvest from good soil being thirty, sixty, and even a hundred-fold?  Or how is our understanding enhanced by Jesus telling the disciples to leave the weeds growing amongst the wheat?

When we put them all together we find several things about the Kingdom of Heaven!

First, the Kingdom of Heaven is a Kingdom of Surprises.

God’s Kingdom is revealed in ways that aren’t expected.  The Jewish people were expecting their Messiah to come riding into town on the back of a white stallion to lead them over Rome and any other enemy that would encroach upon them…and yet, the Messiah came riding in on a donkey, most likely twice.  The first time He came riding into the city of Bethlehem in the womb of a single pregnant teenage girl, and was later born, not in a palace, but among the livestock and laid in a feeding trough.  The second time, He entered Jerusalem on the back of a donkey to the praises of the crowd at the beginning of the week, only to have the crowds clamor for His crucifixion at the hands of the Romans they had expected the Messiah to overcome.  And just when everyone had given up hope that this man was the Messiah, another surprise was found as the power of the Kingdom of Heaven was revealed when the stone was rolled away and an empty tomb revealed.  Praise God!

The Kingdom of God is also surprising in the fact that God doesn’t limit the revealing of His Kingdom through the channels that we would expect.  As I alluded to earlier, those hearing this story would have been shocked to hear Jesus refer to a woman leavening her bread with yeast.  Yeast was not a substance desired in anyone’s home within the Jewish culture.  Yet Jesus compares the breaking in of the Kingdom to that which most folks would try to avoid.  Yet God regularly works in those ways.  God is not limited in who or what He uses to bring about His Kingdom.

Consider King Cyrus of Persia.  He was not a Jew. He did not have a relationship with God.  He was not among the chosen.  In fact, He was a foreigner who just happened to lead the group that conquered the Babylonians.  Yet it was through this gentile king and his ruling that God began restoring His people.

Before Cyrus, there was Jael the Kenite who God used to deliver His people from Sisera and the Canaanites.

Later, It was through the rulings of a non-believing Roman prefect that God first offered a second chance for His people to embrace His Son, offering them the chance to choose Jesus over Barabbas, but when they didn’t, God then brought salvation to the whole world through Pilate’s decree to have Jesus crucified.

Even today we watch God reveal His Kingdom through those we would not normally associate with the Kingdom of God.

I can’t tell you the number of congregation members that I have watched experience God’s healing touch through the work of doctors who are Hindu, Buddhist, or have no faith whatsoever.

Earlier this year I watched the Kingdom of God made visible when a group of Islamic Americans committed to funding the restoration of a Jewish cemetery that had been desecrated.

Let me be clear, I firmly believe that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes into a relationship with the Father and receives the gift of Eternal Life except through Jesus.  However, I think Scripture repeatedly testifies to the fact God’s working is not limited to even those He calls His people…He can reveal and bring about that Kingdom through anyone and anything…consider the yeast.

Secondly, we also learn that the Kingdom of Heaven is a Kingdom of Abundance.

All too often we live and operate out of a sense of scarcity.  We act as if we might never have all the resources we need to accomplish the Kingdom work that God sets before us.  Why is that?  I think it because some of us have experienced what it is to struggle.  Some of us here lived through the Great Depression.  Others of us may have lost all our investments in 2008.  Some of us here have experienced homelessness.  Others of us may have experienced being downsized from a business or even had a business close out from under us.  Even others of us may have lost our homes and livelihood as a result of a disaster wiping them away.  And so, having experienced what it is to have nothing, we try to hold tightly to everything, refusing to release our grasp, even for God’s use.  Sadly, this means we are holding tighter to the memories of loss and having nothing, that holding on to the memory that if you and I are standing here today, no matter how terrible things got, God provided a way, or maybe even, God is providing a way.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a place in which there is no need, there is no want for anything, for it will be a land flowing with milk and honey…it is a land filled with all we will ever need or ever desire.  The Kingdom of Heaven is revealed in crops of wheat that produce a hundred-fold from a single grain; it is revealed in a mustard seed providing places for many birds to feast and refuel; it is revealed in a single woman working out enough bread to feed 150 people; the Kingdom is revealed, as we will see in a few weeks, in a little boy, operating not out of a sense of scarcity, worried that he will have nothing to eat, but out of a sense of generosity, trusting all that He had to God, and God fed in excess of 5000 people when that little boy decided to trust all He had to Jesus.  The Kingdom of Heaven is revealed when we truly realize we have everything we need, everything we truly need, and that God has provided it, so we freely release it back to Him…only to watch Him multiply it like grain multiplying 30, 60, even 100-fold or like watching that grain being baked into loaves enough to feed 150 people.

In that light, we realize that the Kingdom of Heaven is also a Kingdom that brings Sustenance and Refuge.  It is being fed by the bread formed from the woman’s extravagant baking.  It is finding our home amongst the trees grown from a tiny seed.  It is realizing that the Lord is Our Shepherd and we shall not want…because He has provided more than we may ever need.  It is realizing that we can find rest and refuge with our God for His Word promises that there is nothing, nothing, in all of Creation that can come between us and God.

Thanks be to God for a Kingdom that grows like a mustard seed and feeds like a woman baking with ten gallons of flour!  May we never wonder what the Kingdom is all about!  May we leave here today not scratching our heads over the parables of Jesus, but proclaiming the faithfulness of God and His Kingdom!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!  Amen.