I suspect that just about all of us have found ourselves staring at difficult days ahead and prayed something like “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” We’ve needed to trust that things really are in the good and loving hands of a faithful God. The diagnosis came. There’s been an accident. There’s been a death. Times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control and as people of faith we need some assurance.
Well, that’s not quite what’s going on here with the disciples and their outright command to Jesus to increase their faith. What’s happened is that Jesus had led them to the realization that being his disciples and leading his people was not going to be easy. Faith and being faithful is a difficult matter. In Luke’s Gospel in the few chapters prior to this moment, Jesus has been doing an innuendoed compare and contrast between the demands of true faithfulness in his Kingdom and the false faithfulness demanded by those Pharisees.
To give you a brief recap, within the hearing of the most powerful vein of the religious authorities of the Jewish people, the Pharisees, Jesus has told his disciples that they cannot be slaves to both God and money. The Pharisees were “money-lovers” and they ridiculed Jesus for saying this. They were religious authorities who loved the wealth, power, and prestige that they had garnered over God’s people by being the brokers of the people’s relationship to God, the brokers of a “populist religion”. Being populist meant that they had the power to define and enforce for the nation what good morals and good values were, what it was to be a good citizen. They were the religious undergirding of the nation.
Jesus himself was subversive. He "called" disciples. He invited people to be students of him and learn his way of life. He roamed about proclaiming "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Live accordingly and be faithful to this God-given Good News." His message of the immediacy of the kingdom backed up by the works of power that he was doing was quite threatening to the powers that be. The Pharisees, on the other hand, were quite aggressive about making converts to their way of being a faithful Jew. They also proclaimed a powerful message, a gospel of fear that made converts. It went: “The Messiah is coming to establish the Kingdom of God and if you want to be a part of his Kingdom and not have happen to you what he’s going to do to the Romans, the tax collectors, and the sinners, then you had better fall in with us. Obey our interpretation of the Law of Moses to the jot and tittle like we do. Give handsomely to us because we are the experts and without our judgements and expertise you are lost sheep doomed to damnation.”
Ask any TV preacher or any big-church or mega-church preacher, there’s money in “populist religion”, which is religious beliefs that strike a chord with the cultural roots of a people and becomes popular. It is quite lucrative to tell fearful, anxious people how to get and keep an almighty God on their good side. It’s also easy to be seduced by the power and prestige that comes along with being a broker of “populist religion”. The problem is that it causes leaders to mislead people into a religion based in magic and superstition rather than faithfulness.
This is the topic around which we find Jesus in conversation with his disciples in todays’ reading. Jesus tells his disciples that people will stumble, but woe to those who cause people to stumble as the Pharisees were doing. The way in Jesus’ Kingdom would not be that of the strict Law observance the Pharisees were demanding. But rather, in Jesus’ Kingdom it is holding one another accountable to God’s demands of justice, fairness, and above all, unconditional love. Theirs would be the way of forgiving, which is bearing with and walking with one another in our sins, rather than judging and abandoning one another because of sins.
In “populist religion” it is very easy to scapegoat and crucify those who challenge your power over people. But in Jesus’ Kingdom, we have to accept people as persons, as “little ones”, as children of God and in humility serve them (not rule over them) by exercising accountability that leads to repentance and being forgiving, even to those who sin against us personally. Dress codes and food rules are easy. Judging and ostracising are easy. But Jesus’ way is difficult and necessitates faith which is a relationship of profound loyalty to him.
Jesus’ demands that like slaves we serve others and we do this by bearing with one another in mutual and unconditional love; that we keep one another accountable to a cross-formed way of life, to sacrificial generosity, and unbounded compassion. We strive to be wealthy in the ways of the Kingdom of Heaven rather than wealthy with money. The Lord of all creation demands we be forgiving…and need I say it again…forgiving. These demands are difficult and it is in realization of the enormity of Jesus’ difficult demands of faithfulness rooted in his kind of love that the disciples’ outright order (they’re not asking, they’re ordering) Jesus, “Increase our faith.”
Jesus answered them with a very unusual answer: “If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you.” Jesus is not telling them that if they could tap into some sort of power called faith, they could do miraculous things or pray it and really believe you already have what you asked for and God will do it for you. This is the sort of thing that you hear from the preachers and teachers of “populist religion”. This passage says nothing like that. It is a very cryptic allegory telling the disciples that they already have the faith that they need to avoid the traps of the “populist religion” of the Pharisees. Let me run you through this.
First, here is this mornings’ Greek lesson. This is a conditional sentence meaning should the conditions of the “if” be true, the “then” is true. In Greek there are several different kinds of conditional sentences to clue us in on meanings that don’t easily come across in a simple literal translation. The way Jesus words the “if” part here in the Greek language clues us in that the “if” part is indeed true which means that his disciples are indeed able to do what he says in the “then” part. It should read: “if you had faith like a mustard seed (and it is true that you do), it is a fact that you are right now able to say to this mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it will indeed obey you.” Translators leave ambiguity in the sentence for the obvious reasons that mulberry trees don’t do what we command them to because we have some magic power called faith.
Like I said, this statement is an allegory and this means that the mustard seed and the mulberry tree represent something and we need to know what that something is in order to understand what Jesus is saying. A mustard seed is very small, about the size of a celery seed. It grows into a very robust plant that can grow just about anywhere. You can plant fields of it and grow it like a crop or you can let one plant grow and it will grow to the size of a large ornamental tree. Either way, one tiny mustard seed in the end yields a bazillion more mustard seeds. The mustard seed is representative of Jesus and the Kingdom of God. Their faith, their loyalty to Jesus, is part of how that mustard seed grows and becomes the plant.
With respect to the mulberry tree, there is some debate as to whether it is a mulberry tree or a sycamore fig tree that has leaves that look like mulberry leaves. If it is a true mulberry tree, it is a poor analogy. If you’ve had a Mulberry tree you know they are messy. They are quite prolific in the berry department and the berries are quite messy. In Jesus day they made a black dye out of the juice because it stains so well. Birds love the berries also and will flock to a mulberry and gorge themselves and poop black poo everywhere. It’s just a messy tree.
I think it is more likely to be the sycamore fig tree that Luke is referring to here. Fig trees were very important in Jesus’ day as a food staple and were everywhere. Jesus often used the fig tree as a metaphor for Israel as the fruitful people of God. But the sycamore fig is a different kind of fig. Its looks are impressive. It is much larger than the ornamental size fig tree and has a stronger trunk and branches. They actually grew this tree for its wood rather than its figs because the figs it produced were of less quality. They referred to its fruit as moria from which we get our word moron which means foolish. This tree represents the Pharisees and the foolish fruit of their “populist religion”. It looks like a big sturdy tree but the fruit it produces is inferior.
The meaning of this little allegory that Jesus gives to his disciples is that they have mustard seed faith. They have Jesus with them in the power of the Holy Spirit and so they are able to keep the demands of the faith. Yet, they have to be careful and ever mindful of the temptation to the foolish fruit of the “populist religion” that the Pharisees had succumbed to. If the disciples do as he commands, if they are faithful, if they love and serve as he has loved and served them, if they practise accountability and forgiveness, then the foolishly fruited tree of “populist religion” will indeed be uprooted from among them and planted in the sea. The disciples do not need their faith increased. They just need to live according to the faith they have already been given and the kingdom will grow. Jesus, the mustard seed, in the power of the Holy Spirit will grow in them and through them albeit slowly and according to season.
So it is with us and our small congregations of disciples of Jesus out here in rural Ontario in these days of maybe post-pandemic. We do not need a magical zap of faith from which some magical gimmick will bring forth miraculous church growth. We just need to live according to the loyalty that Jesus has given us towards himself, the mustard seed of himself that Jesus has given us, and by the power of Holy Spirit a crop of people who live cross-formed, love of God filled lives that look like Jesus will arise that is distinctly different from that moronic fruit you find in “populist religion”.
And PS, back to the very beginning of the sermon, when those times come when it becomes brutally clear that our lives are not our own, not in our control, and as people of faith we need some assurance that God has not abdicated and that things are in God’s hands, have no doubt that Jesus, the Giver of the mustard seed, is with you. Through the valley of the shadow of death he is with you and nothing can separate you from the love of God in him. He loves you very much and will see you through and in those times, it is okay if you doubt or are angry with him and have all those other feelings like anxiety and fear. He’s with you when the feathers hit the fan and he will let you know that. Seek him and hold on. Amen.
