Purity, Disruption and Growth 

20th October
Does God really want racial and religious Purity in the UK? - What God teaches us about purity, disruption and growth. Matthew 13:31-34.
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

I’m sure you’ve heard many very well-intended sermons in which the preacher has told you that the mustard seed produces a very tall tree.

Preachers who don’t pay close attention to the Biblical text plant that image so firmly in our minds that, when we read the text ourselves, we imagine a big, tall tree, but if you read the versions of the parable in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, you will notice that none of them mentions tall trees.

The mustard seeds Jesus would have been talking about grew into ground-covering plants, shrubs, or bushes that birds could nest in, but never trees.

What is even more interesting is that the mustard seeds had been declared by the Pharisees to be unclean.

They were declared unclean because they spread like wildfire and were almost impossible to get rid of. But they spread quickly as ground covering bushes.
Why would Jesus choose to use a ritually unclean plant as a picture of Godly growth?

I think there are four reasons.

1 He wanted to show that whilst ritual purity laws once had their place, religion was moving on from its early stages, where ritual purity anticipated the purity of the heart that had always been God’s primary goal.

2 He wanted to signal that God often uses people and things who are regarded by religious people as beyond acceptance.

3 He wanted to paint a picture of something untidy and unstoppable. The Pharisees had created a very orderly religious system with everything neatly in its place: with tidy religious life designated as clean and incurring God’s approval, with everyone outside the boundaries of respectable religion condemned.
Jesus was saying, “You want a tidy garden, but God is working with the wild plants and flowers and shrubs to create something wonderful that people can’t control.”

Today, we have our neat, structured religion as well, but maybe God wants to do something unpredictable, unprecedented, and unstoppable that might look a bit wild and uncultivated.

4  He wanted us to see that when we try to control God and narrowly define God’s activity, he simply bypasses the usual channels and does something different.

Today the parable teaches us that purity of the heart that builds bridges across differences matters more than maintaining a segregated purity of any kind. It shows us that when God disrupts the existing norms to do a new thing, things can look chaotic and messy, but that is the uncomfortable, disruptive process that leads to a more Christlike new normal. Things tend to start small, but freed from the toxicity of a segregated old order, they can grow vigorously in places and situations they once were forbidden to go. If that’s what God’s kingdom or rule looks like, then Christ as King in the UK definitely won’t look like a purely white holy Nation.