Mustard is not an expensive condiment so its harvest yield must be quite plentiful.
When I turned 12, a school friend gave me a little necklace – a glass heart with a single mustard seed in it . I loved it and wore it so much the glass got so scratched you could barely make out the seed inside anymore. (See Goft shop/store) If I’d never had that necklace, I don’t suppose I’d have wondered on the verses about mustard seeds as much as I have – but I have always really just honed in on the size of the seed.
Now it’s an established fact that I get bogged down in details. Sometimes that’s a pain in the rear but sometimes I’m sure, because I have lots of questions, when a small slice of understanding or revelation flies in my window, I do get rather excited.
So, with our little seed growing experiment, we also planted mustard seeds in CD cases.
Mustard seeds are about 1mm in diameter. The ones we planted shot roots in 2 days (visible through the CD case though not in the pic) and then green shoots in another day or so. They are delicate little things but for the first time I was prompted to wonder, other than the shoots, what a mustard seed harvest looks like – so off I went to google.
The point of the verses is that mustard seeds are tiny. And according to google there are lots of types of mustard but the type Jesus spoke of grows into a tree that birds will come and nest in – well beyond the happy little green shoots in our photo.
There are still elements in the mustard verses that puzzle me – even disturb me – BUT for the first time yesterday I stopped only thinking on the puzzles and saw a slice of new perspective in seeing NOT just the size of the seed, and not even JUST the bigness of the tree that grows, but the HARVEST of a single tree, season by season – let alone over its life time in proportion TO that tiny seed.
And I am like – WOW.
Matthew 13: 31 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. 32 It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
Matthew 17: 19 Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?” 20 He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
I do love living illustrations. We planted some red beans in an empty Coke Bottle with a string in the water base to teach about capillary action. And every single time I look at this little bean growing in a CD case in the window of our school room I ‘hear’ Jesus words… “Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies, it cannot bring forth life”. I never could fully grasp that verse… but looking at the cast off casing, I ‘get’ it just a little bit more. ‘mazing.