The mustard bush is quite common in Palestine – now and when Jesus spoke the words of today’s parable. It is always worth noting in the parables how Jesus uses the language of everyday life to express principles for coming to understand who he is and the reign of God he is inviting us to live in. The brilliance of this parable is that the throughline to this parable is rather obvious to the listener or reader: we must have patience and faith that the smallest of actions, deeds, the most seemingly insignificant people, the marginalized, the oppressed, will grow from the soil without any of our  doing. We must simply sow seeds. In the words of Jesus, “It [the reign of God] is like a mustard seed that people plant in the soil: it is the smallest of all the earth’s seeds, yet once it is sown, it springs up to become the largest of shrubs, with branches big enough for the birds of the sky to build nests in its shade.” In other words, the reign of God is provided by the wisdom of God in God’s creation. The reign of God, in which the captives are set free, the oppressed liberated, the lost saved, and the unwhole made complete, is simply following the wisdom of God made evident in Creation, and aligning ourselves as the sower who allow’s God wisdom to take root in our lives and liberate us all. 

In the history of salvation and liberation, our human vocation is to be sowers and gardeners. While it is important for pedagogical purposes that Jesus is connecting with his peasant and agrarian audience with the image of a worker like themselves, there is also a lot more going on here. Beyond the direct connections Jesus is making to the prophets before him, in particular our reading from Ezekial, Jesus is also harkening back to the symbolic world and interpretive pattern of Genesis when he evokes the image of the sower and their relationship to soil. In An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology, Daniel P. Castillo establishes Genesis as a key for a political, ecological, and eco-liberationist biblical interpretation. For Castillo, to be created in God’s image, is to be created as a gardener who cares for, serves the needs of, and allows Creation to come into being. As all Creation, including humanity, is brought forth from the soil, humanity’s vocation is to help facilitate and participate in the process of Creation (71). This vocation is intrinsic to God’s intention for humanity – an intention made apparent in the naming of the first human “Adam,” or adamah (אדמה) in Hebrew meaning soil (74). Castillo writes:  

“The intimacy of the relationship between the human and the soil is reinforced etymologically: God creates the human, ‘Adam’ (ādām), out of the earth (‘adāmâ). Here, then, both love of the earth and love of neighbor are constitutive of the vocation of the gardener. Moreover, since the love of the earth and neighbor are understood as the proper response to God’s call to the human, the love of God is also intrinsic to the vocation of gardener. The human person responds positively to God (thereby exhibiting a love of God) by cultivating and caring for the soil and all that comes from the soil… the love of God is expressed through the interrelated loves of neighbor and earth” (74). 

Thus, for Castillo, the reign of God, expressed and embodied in Christ in the Gospels in the person of Jesus, is also expressed as the call to inhabit the image of God “through properly responding to God’s call to love the soil and all that comes from the soil, thereby enfleshing God’s wisdom in the world” (76). 

In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus, in the pattern of Genesis so readily echoed throughout the Bible, is calling us back into a relationship with the soil in our vocation as gardeners. While there is no doubt that Christ himself is the sower planting seeds that will grow and become the Kingdom of God, and speaking in a note that will communicate spiritual truth to his audience, Jesus’s words should also be taken to be pointing toward a literal renewal of relationship with Creation that realizes the reign of God. In its salvific and liberatory reality, the reign of God not only includes humanity but all of Creation: the trees, plants, animals, the birds of the air, rivers, and oceans. Our vocation is not just to tend the garden, but to learn from and to co-articulate with Creation a liberation that includes every person and all created beings. As the sower plants seeds and patiently waits, as the mustard bush provides nests and shade for the birds, so too will our love of neighbor and earth free us all. 

In our current polycrisis of climate change, ascendant eco-fascist tendencies, and genocide, how should we orient ourselves as sowers of the reign of God? The ongoing genocide and ecocide in Palestine and Gaza is one of the most urgent and glaring examples in our own time of interrelated natures of colonialism, imperial domination, political domination, Christian nationalism, and the devastation of both Palestinian communities and their homeland. Professor of Human Ecology Andreas Malm in “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth” details the long, interlinked history of Western imperialism, the extractive fossil fuel economy, Zionism, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. 

We should and must understand the liberation of Palestine from the Zionist and U.S. imperialist entity as a necessary step in the history of salvation and the future of the liberation and freedom of all peoples and created beings. At stake is the very notion of what it means to be created in the image of God and the continued distortion of our relationship with the earth. According to Daniel P. Castillo, inherent in the Imago Dei, is an undercutting of any singular declaration that any one human organization is the right one. Castillo writes, “Just as no single ruler can define the right ordering of the world, no one culture or political regime can dictate, in a totalizing manner, the proper ways of relating to the earth” (71). Our vocation then is to sow the seeds of God’s freedom – whether they be mustard seeds or poppy seeds, to let those closest to the land teach us what it means to be responsive to God’s wisdom, and let the freedom and liberation of all Creation dictate the standards of how we show up in the world as Christians seeking the reign of God.