There’s a recipe I love to make in the slow cooker at home, and often I seem to miss out one of the vital ingredients.  The recipe is for beef cooked slowly in beer and then served with a crust of French bread slices on the top. 

Each of the bread slices is coated on one side with mustard and then placed mustard-side down on top of the beef for browning.  The thing is, it is not just any mustard for which the recipe calls – it is wholegrain mustard.  Those little mustard seeds are a nuisance.  They often get forgotten, they get stuck in your teeth and the recipe doesn’t work without them.  Properly used, they are like tiny bomblets of flavour which release their power from that crunchy bread when you eat them.  In short, they are quite a nuisance but they are surely worth it.

Faith in Jesus

The same could be said of the “mustard seed” to which Jesus refers as a descriptor of our faith. It is small and distinctive; its presence brings a piquancy to all we do and its absence turns it all into a rather bland diet. Of course, he used it as a description of the size of our faith: if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain ‘move from here to there' (Matthew 17 v.20).

I tend to measure my faith by length rather than size. Sometimes it is like a hefty chain with an anchor, but the chain doesn’t quite reach all the way down to the bottom of the sea on which my little boat is pitching and tossing. Sometimes it is like a nylon rope with a grappling iron on the end. If the rope is too short I may have to content myself with only being able to climb so high.  Alternatively, I could climb and scramble a little way under my own steam before starting to use the rope, but that doesn’t seem quite the point!

More on faith

And yet Jesus says “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed”. In context he was addressing a crowd of disgruntled people who had missed out on all the excitement.  Whilst Jesus had taken Peter, James and John up the mountain to see the transfiguration, the others had been stuck down at the bottom with a desperate father and his son whom they could not heal. 

Jesus picks the smallest and most ‘manageable’ measure of faith he can think of, and says that with it even the impossible will be in their grasp.  These days we would probably mix our culinary metaphors and say “if you had just a pinch of faith…” Like the spoonful of wholegrain mustard or the pinch of seasoning, though, you don’t know what it tastes like until you try it.

Down the mountain

Some years ago I wrote a narrative called “down the mountain” about the whole transfiguration and un-healed boy episode. This is how it concluded:

‘Have more faith’, he said.  ‘Scratch around and find faith…even as small as a mustard seed.’  For some even that seemed too much at the end of this particular day.  ‘Find it’, he said ‘And you can even tell these mountains’ – he swept his arm in an arc around him ‘to jump to it.’  That picture brought a smile to weary faces.  Most of them could still remember old people in their villages who talked of mountains as the pillars which held up the sky. Moving mountains?  Fleeing devils?  Mustard seeds?  It all seemed a bit crazy, really. As they shook their heads, nobody but Jesus saw the foothills of the mount twitch, just a little – as if someone had stamped on the earth far, far away.

What do you think Jesus was getting at with this saying?

How do you measure your faith?