Matthew 13 neatly collects many of the Lord’s kingdom parables in a single chapter, which is appropriate since Jesus taught seven of these on the same day, some by the sea to a large crowd, and others indoors to his disciples only. Among the parables he shared with the crowds (but did not explain to them) were two that were obviously intended to go together: the first compared the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed that grew into a great tree, the second compared it to leaven that contaminated three measures of flour.
That must have left more than a few Jews scratching their heads. More than a few Christians are still scratching theirs over them.
Luke vs. Matthew
Luke doesn’t do what Matthew does. It appears the Lord repeated many of the same lessons in different contexts, and this is the case with at least a few of his kingdom parables. In Luke, we find the parable of the sower all on its own in chapter 8. He leaves out the parables of the wheat and weeds, the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price and the net entirely. The parables of the mustard seed and the leaven appear together in chapter 13, taken from a discourse in a synagogue on a Sabbath day.
Why Luke elects to order his subject matter in this fashion rather than in the more linear way Matthew does, and how he organized it, are subjects big enough for an entire book, and fortunately the right man has already written it. I heartily recommend David Gooding’s According to Luke to any readers interested in such things, but I won’t attempt to tackle them here.
What is abundantly evident is that Luke ordered his gospel thematically rather than strictly chronologically. This means we ought to pay even more attention to context when reading Luke than we might do in, say, Mark. In Luke’s gospel, context has been very carefully thought through, a feature of his writing Gooding’s book brings out repeatedly.
What the Parables Teach About the Kingdom
The Lord Jesus graciously explained the parables of the sower and the wheat and weeds to his disciples. He did not explain the others. Presumably he intended his inner circle to give the matter some serious consideration, taking into account the way the Lord had interpreted the first two parables for them.
What do those first two parables, both addressed to Jews in public places, teach us about the kingdom? The first tells us at least three-quarters of the good news sown concerning the kingdom is wasted — or at very least does not produce a crop. The second tells us that the sons of the kingdom and “law-breakers” are sprinkled throughout the world in such a way as to be almost indistinguishable even to angelic eyes. Neither of these truths is exactly marinated in unmitigated optimism. Neither, if correctly understood, would prompt listening Jews to feel their own prospects particularly rosy.
I don’t know about you, but that gives me reason to consider the possibility that the other two parables the Lord spoke to the crowd — the parables of mustard seed and leaven — may well give us an equally unflinching picture of the state of the kingdom.
A More Optimistic Take
That is not, of course, how many of our amillennial and post-millennial brothers and sisters in Christ choose to interpret them. A few examples follow.
From the Pulpit Commentary:
“The first of these two little parables of the kingdom, ‘the mustard seed,’ portrayed its strangely rapid growth. The second, ‘the leaven,’ treats of the mighty inward transformation which the kingdom of God will effect in the hearts of men and women. Chemically speaking, leaven is a lump of sour dough in which putrefaction has begun, and, on being introduced into a far greater mass of fresh dough, produces by contagion a similar condition into the greater bulk with which it comes in contact. The result of the contact, however, is that the mass of dough, acted upon by the little lump of leaven, becomes a wholesome, agreeable food for men.”
From the Benson Commentary:
“He delivered a second time the parables of the grain of mustard-seed, and of the leaven, to show the efficacious operation of the gospel upon the minds of men, and its speedy propagation through the world in spite of all opposition.”
From the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary:
“It yields more real satisfaction to see in this brief parable just the all-penetrating and assimilating quality of the Gospel, by virtue of which it will yet mould all institutions and tribes of men, and exhibit over the whole earth one ‘Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.’ ”
Note that in every case the aspect of the kingdom these writers have in their headlights is the church, and the outlook they anticipate is in every instance a positive one.
Something Rotten in Denmark … er, the Kingdom
Tonally, this is somewhat jarring in view of the Lord’s interpretations of the first two parables. We will get to that problem in a moment. But there are at least two other even more obvious indications in the parables that all is not right with this version of the kingdom that we should probably consider first.
Where the mustard seed parable is concerned, we will leave aside arguments about the size of the tree from evidence external to scripture. However, we cannot reasonably consider the birds of the air nesting in the tree’s branches a positive sign, but rather an indication of thoroughgoing corruption in the kingdom. In the Old Testament, the expression “birds of the air” refers to unclean carrion birds. In Matthew, the Lord interprets the “birds” who devour the seed as “the evil one” snatching away the word that has been sown. In Luke he is even more explicit: “The devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved.” In Mark, it is “Satan immediately comes and takes away the word.” None of these interpretations would lead us to think the birds of the air nesting in the branches of the mustard tree is a good thing. The fact that they feel free to make their home within the kingdom strongly suggests that the particular aspect of the kingdom in view in this parable has reached the end of its spiritual usefulness.
The leaven is even less encouraging. Symbolically, the Lord Jesus always associated leaven with contamination or wickedness in some form. In Matthew, he equates it with the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees, which he strongly opposed. In Luke, he equates it with hypocrisy. The apostles agree. Paul tells the Corinthians, “Cleanse out the old leaven”, equating leaven with malice and wickedness, and warns the Galatians, “A little leaven [legalism] leavens the whole lump.” Nowhere in the New Testament is leaven construed as a symbol of healthy growth, let alone “the efficacious operation of the gospel upon the minds of men”. If we are to pay any attention at all to the symbolism employed by the Lord and the New Testament writers, we must conclude that leaven speaks of the contamination of the kingdom, not its healthy development. This too is consistent with the plain teaching concerning the Lord’s first two parables about the kingdom.
Symbolism and Context
What can we do with the consistent symbolism of scripture concerning birds and leaven? Well, what the amillennial and postmillennial writers generally do is ignore it, as in the three quotations above. Effectively, they conclude both leaven and birds have an intended meaning in these two parables that is directly opposite to their meaning everywhere else. More rarely, they acknowledge a negative influence on the kingdom that stops short of being fatal to its intended purpose.
We need to look for a better and more biblically-consistent interpretation than any of these. As I have suggested, context in Luke is hugely important to our interpretation of any given narrative element. Even if we did not normally agree that this is the case with Luke, internal evidence would compel us to concede it in this instance. Why? Because the word “therefore” or “then” [δὲ] at the beginning of the parables ties them unambiguously to the previous part of the chapter. The parables follow directly from what had just gone before. That is the force of the conjunctive adverb in Greek. These parables are a commentary on what precedes them; they give our Lord’s reaction to it.
What Has Gone Before and What Comes After
So what has
gone on before? Well, everything about Luke 13 is both
national and Jewish. The stories of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled
with their sacrifices and the eighteen Jews on whom the Tower of Siloam fell
are followed with a call to national repentance: “Unless you repent, you will
all likewise perish.” Here, I believe, the Lord is not talking about Jews perishing
in the lake of fire for lack of personal salvation (which is hardly the subject at hand), but rather perishing in large numbers when the Romans sacked Jerusalem in
AD70, having failed to heed his predictions of coming destruction. He follows this warning with the parable of the barren fig tree in
verses 6-9, universally understood to refer to the nation of Israel. The
anecdote about the woman with the disabling spirit in
Immediately afterward, the narrow door analogy of verses 22-30 makes specific reference to “Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out”. The “you yourselves” here is unarguably and intentionally Jewish, as it is distinguished in the very next line from “people from east and west, north and south”. Finally, verses 31-35 are an eloquent lament over a Jerusalem that “kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it”. Nothing in this chapter looks any further forward than AD70, and nothing in it has anything to do with the church aspect of the kingdom of heaven. The Lord is not mourning for a lost world in the climax of Luke 13, but specifically for his lost covenant people, institutionally corrupt and in crying need of corporate repentance.
Jewish Trees, Jewish Leaven
Seen in this context, the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in verses 18-20 are as accurate and damning a picture of the kingdom of God in its then-current Jewish form — bloated, infiltrated and thoroughly contaminated — as they are of any later iteration of the church. Those who think they do speak of the church should tell us why they think the Lord would suddenly change courses to rhapsodize about the prospects of his next project for three verses right in the middle of a chapter about the pressing need for Jewish corporate repentance.
Let me suggest that, at least in this context, the Lord is not hinting at the coming expansion of the kingdom in the church age at all, let alone suggesting that expansion is desirable. Rather, Luke includes the mustard seed and the leaven parables because they apply all too well to the kingdom in its then-current Jewish aspect. There is no need to wrest their symbolism and recast them in a positive light so we can apply them to ourselves and to the rosy prospects of transforming our world with the gospel.
No internal evidence in the passage supports such an outlook. None.
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