![]() Jesus doesn't say "If you had faith like a tiny grain of sand", or "The kingdom of heaven is like something really small". Yes, mustard seeds are small, but that isn't their only important property. Even if an alternate reading is semantically possible, there is nothing from the context to recommend one. His constrast is to the "faithless and twisted generation" in verse 17, suggesting, again, that his point is that faith is a matter of presence rather than size. Matthew 17:20 is so similar to the rest, it would be hard to believe that Jesus has anything in mind other than the size of the seed. The conversation essentially becomes the apostles saying, "Increase our faith." and Jesus replying "Yeah, faith is great." It makes much more sense as a rebuke: the apostles asking for an increase in faith, and Jesus explaining that the amount of one's faith is not the locus of power. An exchange in which he replies, "If your faith was spicy like a mustard seed." or, "If your faith was robust like a mustard seed." makes little sense. The disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith. The passage in Luke 17:6 makes by far the most sense if the analogy is to the seed's size. In both of these passages the size of the seed is important, but probably the fact that it is a seed is not. That leaves Matthew 17:20 and Luke 17:6, which are saying very similar to one another. While Jesus doesn't explicitly mention the smallness of the seed, the same idea is no doubt in view: what starts as a very tiny seed becomes something large. Luke 13:19 is a parallel saying to the ones in Matthew and Mark. The seed becomes something: a kingdom represented by the tree. In both cases, the germination of the seed is also obviously in view. In Matthew 13:31-32 and Mark 4:31, Jesus explicitly makes a comparison to the smallness of the seed. Jesus refers to the mustard seed in the following passages: Matthew 13:31-32, Matthew 17:20, Mark 4:31, Luke 13:19, and Luke 17:6. There is no record of Jesus using any other of the mustard seed's unique properties, like its spiciness, as a metaphor. it germinates), but that part of the metaphor is not unique to being a mustard seed. 1 Of course, it also has the property of being a seed (i.e. The mustard seed was popularly known to be the smallest of all seeds. Jesus always uses the mustard seed to represent something small.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |