The Mustard Seed

There is a parable in the Bible in which Jesus takes a mustard seed, and tells his disciples, "If you had the faith of this mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, 'be ye removed from here to there' and it would be so." (Matt 17:20)

Too often I've seen this particular scripture used to justify belief in magic. That is, if I have some nebulous thing called "faith," even a very little bit of it, than I can command God, and can do magic.

Even worse, this is used to get power by those in power by interpreting faith to mean what is called unquestioned faith. That is, you do what I say, and you will have faith, perhaps even enough that you might be able to perform magic. Therefore, you have to do what I say, and (more importantly) think what I say you should think.

Yet I question whether this is the lesson that was intended. That is, it may be that even the disciples thought that was what was intended, but now I have my doubts.

Looking at the whole of Jesus ministry, I see the gospel he taught as a practical gospel. That is, most of the lessons he taught don't even require a belief in God, let alone Jesus. They are lessons that anyone can see if they are willing to observe the world around them.

Therefore, one can ask what this means, what is the lesson. The lesson is this: If a person sees a mountain, and decides that mountain, which is at point A should be at point B, then that person can pick up a rock, and move it from point A to point B. Then he can go back and pick up another rock, and do likewise. After a time, the mountain will be moved from point A to point B.

I see evidence of this very often. Almost every time I travel any distance on the interstate highway system, in fact. That is, someone at some time has said to a hill, "I don't want you here, I want you there so the highway will be level." That being said, a crew literally picks up the mountain a piece at a time, and deposits it where it is needed, with so much of an eye toward making the road flat that they forget they are moving a mountain.

This is exactly what Jesus was talking about.

I saw a documentary once on television (I've forgotten which one) which pointed out that even at or before the time of Jesus, the Romans decided to build an amphitheater. The problem was that the place of the amphitheater was overlapped by a mountain. Therefore, the mountain was removed, and the amphitheater built.

Again, exactly as Jesus said.

The net result of the magic interpretation of this scripture is that power is centralized in some authority, probably the priests. This is not what Jesus intended, but rather this was intended to empower the people. That is, we have many mountains in our lives, and Jesus intended that we should be able to move those mountains, we should not be intimidated. All we have to do is move one rock.