Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B: Kings and Trees, Seeds and Weeds
Laurel Dykstra
This week the lectionary focus is kings and kingdoms mediated through the language of plants. The semi-continuous track speaks explicitly of kings with the anointing of the shepherd-king David while the thematic track gives us cedars and palm trees. In addition to wisdom about human leadership and politics derived from the plant (ahem) kingdom, there are warnings about wealth extracted from the more than human world.
Commentary
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Several contextual notes help to frame an ecojustice reading of the passage where Samuel anoints David as king.
Kingship, divine sovereignty, and the Davidic covenant are the major themes of Samuel 1 and 2; hope for the good that kingship might bring, appears alongside knowledge of the abuses of kings. In last week’s lection, 1 Sam 8:4-20, God instructs Samuel to warn the people what kings do: extract wealth from people for war and excess/luxury. Two songs of deliverance frame Samuel 1 and 2: Hannah’s song of social reversal is the model for the Magnificat (1 Samuel 2:1-10), and David’s song of thanksgiving (2 Sam 22, Psalm 18) compares divine deliverance to powerful natural elements: rock, earthquake, fire, wind, clouds, water. Both songs end by proclaiming what God does for the king, the anointed, and they share metaphors from the natural world: God speaking with/in thunder and the paired horn and rock representing strength from the animal world and steadfastness from the geological.
1 Sam 13:19-22 describes the relationship between resource extraction and political power. Philistines along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine controlled the use of iron, which gave them a military and economic advantage.
Verses 15:34 and 16:30, today’s lection is bracketed geographically by the words “Samuel went to Ramah”
15: 35 God is grieved or regrets having made Saul king. What in our current age of economic stratification, climate crisis, mass extinction might God regret?
16:2 When Samuel resists anointing a new king, “if Saul hears of it he will kill me,” God tells Samuel to bring with him a heifer to sacrifice. In addition to the ritual function, in a very concrete way sacrificing the animal protects Samuel from being killed by Saul, there is an exchange of one life for another.
16:7, 12 While Samuel is cautioned not to be swayed by stature and appearance because God looks at the heart, the narrator still details David’s physical beauty.
16:11 Jesse’s youngest, at this point unnamed son, is keeping the sheep. King as shepherd is a pervasive trope in scripture but what qualities of shepherd-craft, of keeping company with flocks make a shepherd king-worthy. The folks at Queer Nature have done some excellent work on what humans can learn from sheep. “We project our fear of conformity onto sheep. But in fact they teach us about the intelligence of the collective, about trust, and community. They also really teach about the gifts of fear and vigilance.”
16:1,13 Samuel anoints David with a horn of oil. While the horn is a practical container there is also an inter-species, inter-being cooperation at work here: animal, vegetal and geological. The horn resonates textually with the songs of David’s and Hannah. Oil is a vegetal contribution with the olive tree signifying peace, abundance, and the flourishing of Israel. When we remember that scripturally the first anointing was a stone (Genesis 28:18) and the horn and rock pairing mentioned above, the geological is present.
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This Royal Psalm was chosen for resonances with the 1 Samuel reading: sacrifice (Psalm 20:3), the anointed (20:6), king (20:9). It is a prayer for military victory, proclaiming (somewhat unconvincingly) that it is God, and not military technology that ensures that victory.
Verses 20:7-8 Chariots, frequently condemned and satirized most obviously in Exodus 14 and 15. Likewise horses represent war and wealth. Remembering the 1 Samuel 8:11-12 warning that a king will take your children and land to fuel his war machine, we see in this and other references to earthly chariots, a condemnation not just of the war-making of kings but of the exploitation of land, animals, and humans it entails.
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There are many parables in the Hebrew Bible where trees and their different qualities, stand for models of political sovereignty. Cedars, and more specifically the Cedars of Lebanon, appear throughout scripture with a variety of meanings but most can be grouped into two categories: cedar wood conveys wealth and luxury, cedar trees convey greatness, to put it another way, cedar is the tree of kings and the king of trees.
Among the references to living trees one of the recurring tropes is a portrait of the cedar as complex part of a living ecosystem. Drawing up water, putting out branches. Various creatures are described as sheltering or nesting in and under Lebanon cedars: birds (Psalm 104:16-17), a wild animal (2 Chron 25:17-19/2 Kings 14:8-10), an eagle (Ezekiel 17), every kind of bird, winged creatures of every kind (Ezekiel 23:17), all the birds of the air, and all the animals of the field (Ezekiel 31).This is ecosystem description particularly powerful when we note that in Hebrew cedar e’rez is a near homonym for earth eretz, and that the Lebanon cedars were subject to a massive deforestation campaign (Myers).
Today’s passage is one of two tree parables in Ezekiel. The second in Ezekiel 31 satirizes imperial Egypt reminding Pharoah of the fate of the Assyrian empire -a once mighty tree offering shelter to birds now fallen.
In the verses that precede today’s passage, the prophet urges Israel’s rulers to remain faithful to God even though they dwell in the shadow of the “tall cedars” of the surrounding empires, and to resist the temptation to forge security through military alliances (Ezekiel 17:11-21).
Verse 17:22 Ched Myers points out that the “sheltering branch” can be a metaphor for political sovereignty and sometimes hegemony as in Daniel 4:20-22.
Verse 17:23 makes use of the recurring image of a mighty tree, bearing fruit and sheltering birds as a promise from God to Israel.
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The superscription for Psalm 92 describes it as “a song for the Sabbath day.” Mari Joerstad talks about Sabbath law applying principally to the land, and that it is the work of humans not to impede that cultic responsibility. So it is interesting to consider self-proclaimed righteous humans describing themselves as flourishing trees.
Verse 2 Notice how the natural time markers morning and night are times of praise
In Verse 7 which is omitted from the assigned lection “the wicked sprout like grass” -numerous, fast growing and when contrasted with the trees of 12-14 ephemeral.
Also missing from the lectionary is Verse 10 “But you have exalted my horn like that of the wild ox; you have poured over me fresh oil.” The horn of the wild ox is a recurring scriptural motif conveying victory or strength. Note the parallel exaltation from animal and plant kingdoms.
Verses 12-14 demonstrate a frequent biblical form of speech, paired trees used to convey difference and diversity but also binary, the palm representing lush abundance and the cedar enormous size. The righteous are compared to a tree still producing fruit in old age, always green and full of sap. Notice that the thriving flora is connected with temple imagery. Shauf points out that the picture of paradise as a magnificent garden, filled with the divine presence, seen in both Genesis 1-3 and in Revelation 21-22 (Ezekiel 47:1-12 also presents a wonderful picture of this, specifically in connection with the Jerusalem temple).
Reading in a time of climate crisis, it is worth being cautious about the equation of flourishing with proximity to the religious center and status quo even if “green” language is used.
Verse 15 again we see the geological image for the divine God as rock conveying endurance and steadfastness of stone which is true in both natural and a built environment. It is interesting to note the textual resonance with the 1 Samuel reading in the semi-continuous lectionary track where horn, rock and oil all appear as well.
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While this passage can and has been understood in a way that is alienated from our bodies and by extension the earth there are alternate readings.
Verse 5:16 The assertion that we know no one, including Christ, from “a human point of view” is intended to imply a divine or cosmic point of view. But what if we could also glimpse Christ, ourselves, one another from points of view in the more than human world? From an animal or plant point of view, from the point of view of water or stone?
The verse resonates with the assertion in 1 Sam 16:7 the LORD does not see as mortals see.
Verse 5:17 Pauline theology focuses on the world-transforming act of God in Christ, an act with cosmic dimensions and implications. How might we, in a time of massive harm to the old or current creation, understand a new creation in Christ?
NT Wright writing about 1 Corinthians says that the resurrection means “we are called to bring forth real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation even in the midst of the present age.” In other words, “Jesus is coming—Plant a Tree!”
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Today’s Gospel reading is the final third of Jesus’ parables sermon in Mark. What Ched Myers calls a lake-front time of strategic debriefing (Mk 4:1-34) on Jesus’ first direct action campaign (Mk 1:21-3:35).
The assigned verses exclude Verse 4:25 “For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Myers says that the two mini-parables of abundance which follow counter to this assertion that the gulf between the haves and have nots will grow.
Verse 4:27-28 In the parable of the growing seed, growth is mysterious, the sower does not know how it sprouts or grows. “The earth produces of itself” Growth is a gift of the earth itself.
Verse 4:31 Ched Myers that the contrast between tiny seed and mature plant is intended to “instill courage and hope in the small and fragile discipleship community for its struggle against the entrenched powers.”
Jim Perkinson notes that while there is a sower in the parable of the growing seed and in the Lukan and Matthean versions of this parable (Lk 13: 19: Mt 13: 31), the mustard in Mark can be read as dispersing its own seed.
The gospel parable draws upon the Hebrew bible sovereignty parables of the mighty cedar as ecosystem, but turns it on its head by substituting mustard shrub for the tree. This conveys Mark’s firm apocalyptic conviction that Yahweh would “bring low the high tree and make high the low tree” (Ez 17:24). (Myers)
Oakman, Crossan and others have noted the qualities of mustard -that highlight the contrast with the big tree parable. Mustard is small, pungent, firey, and aggressively invasive, especially to grain fields. Promising a very different kind of kingdom.
Verse 4:32 The mustard plant attracts birds to its shade, a seemingly harmonious model of community until we remember the birds of Mark 4:4 eating the seed that fell upon the path. The wonder that birds are fed by divine grace is a recurring motif (Job, 38:41, Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12:22-32). For many plants a reproductive strategy of abundance, of producing many more seeds than will grow, is needed so that the next generation will grow despite the realities of stony ground, hungry birds, competing plants, burning sun and shallow soil. So it is worth noting that the model for profligate sower that begins this chapter (Mark 4:3-8) is the plants themselves.
Teaching and Preaching Ideas
Kings and Kingdoms
The idea of kings and kingdoms is a thread that runs through the readings but the ideas are most fully developed in the Hebrew Bible readings and the Gospel. In each case the idea of kingship is engaged with imagery drawn from the more than human world: sheep/shepherd in 1 Samuel, the sheltering cedar in Ezekiel, and the plant parables in Mark. These interspecies relationships and comparisons range from outright exploitation to mutual aid and benefit.
If you are following the semi-continuous track there are several places to explore justice questions in interspecies relationships. In last week’s lection, 1 Sam 8:4-20, God instructs Samuel to warn the people against the “ways” of a king. Almost all of these the king takes from or disrupts an existing relationship between people and land, plants and animals (fields, vineyards, orchards, cattle, donkeys, flocks) for warfare and accumulated wealth. Certainly there are many parallels in recent history.
In today’s reading from Samuel the last-born unlikely king is a shepherd (in many cultures a job for the least regarded). What lessons might our forebears have learned from sheep? So Synopoulos-Lloyd says, “We project our fear of conformity onto sheep. But in fact they teach us about the intelligence of the collective, about trust, and community. They also really teach about the gifts of fear and vigilance.” How might these and other ovine lessons equip someone for kingship, for leadership?
A preacher might digress a bit on chariots and their repeated condemnation/correlation with empires of extraction and then consider the contrast between a chariot king and a shepherd king. -And the speed with which David’s kingship becomes Solomon’s.
Another “fruitful” detour might be to explore anointing: scripturally the first anointing was of a stone (Genesis 28:18), fruit of the olive tree -sign of peace and abundance is used to mark the king. My faith community Salal + Cedar wildcrafts the oils that the churches in our diocese use throughout the year. We gather poplar buds, cedar boughs and wild rose hips and infuse them in Palestinian olive oil. Due to the settler destruction of Palestinian olive groves this may be the last year we are able to do this.
Even if you don’t follow the thematic lectionary track if you plan to preach on the mustard seed kingdom parable a review of the Hebrew bible trope of trees as models of sovereignty is in order. As Jim Perkinson puts it:
Prophetic scripts of towering trees and their demise. Arboreal parables in both Ezekiel and Daniel use the loft and heft of mountain cypress—whose shady cover and leafy branches give safe harbor to all manner of birds and beasts—as code for large-scale political hegemony (Ezek 17:1-24; Dan 4:1-37). And far from celebrating the “supersized” cedars—on prophetic lips, these timber allegories caution imperial powers (like Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian order) about the real source of their own lofty dominance (Dan 4:1-37). Or promise (for the power structure of someone like the pharaoh in Egypt) downfall (wherein the rotting trunk, supine on the soil, becomes the woody dance-floor for cavorting crows doing the two-step hustle on its toppled backside) (Ezek 31:1-18).
With this background Jesus’ subversion of the parable becomes evident. The pungent, self-seeding, fast-growing, bird attracting qualities of mustard give plenty of opportunity to explore what kind of kingdom Jesus might be talking about.
Ask how many gardeners there are in the congregation? Ask how many are glad when what they plant attracts birds?
What are local parallels to mustard: dandelions? Himalayan blackberry? Kudzu?
If this kingdom is small, scrappy, fiery, fast-growing, showing up where you don’t want it to, threatening the ordered garden in short, a Weed Kingdom -does that look much like the churches we attend?
If we heard that description and applied it to people who are the people that we think of that way, that we give those labels to? Are they part of our worshipping communities?
Bring the parable(s) to your bioregion
I read about a study that said that on average a North American middle schooler can recognize 1000 corporate logos and fewer than 10 local plants.
Scientists have coined the phrase plant blindness to describe that same phenomenon in the rest of us: most of the time we don’t see and distinguish the plants around us. But today’s readings are filled with plant species and plant wisdom.
In the semi-continuous track grain and mustard are mentioned explicitly, olive is implied and the parable of the mustard seed is a retelling of the parable of the cedar.
In the thematic track we hear: cedar, all the trees of the field, high tree, low tree, green tree, dry tree, palm tree, fruit tree, tree full of sap, grain and mustard.
Cedars of Lebanon, appear throughout scripture with a variety of meanings but most can be grouped into two categories: cedar wood conveys wealth and luxury, cedar trees convey greatness, to put it another way, cedar is the tree of kings and the king of trees.
Among the references to living trees one of the recurring tropes is a portrait of the cedar as complex part of a living ecosystem. Drawing up water, putting out branches. Various creatures are described as sheltering or nesting in and under Lebanon cedars: birds (Psalm 104:16-17), a wild animal (2 Chron 25:17-19/2 Kings 14:8-10), an eagle (Ezekiel 17), every kind of bird, winged creatures of every kind (Ezekiel 23:17), all the birds of the air, and all the animals of the field (Ezekiel 31).
This is ecosystem description particularly powerful when we note that in Hebrew cedar e’rez is a near homonym for earth eretz, and that the Lebanon cedars were subject to a massive deforestation campaign (Myers).
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) wrote:
‘Mustard ... with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once’ (Natural History: 19.170-171).
Jesus says that God’s kingdom is like this fiery, fast-growing, invasive weed.
One of the ways we come to know the watersheds where we live is by learning to identify our more than human neighbours who live there.
If Ezekiel or Jesus told a parable where you live what tall and mighty tree, what weedy invader would they tell about? I have heard the mustard seed parable retold using dandelions, Himalayan blackberry, kudzu.
What are the biggest trees in your bio-region? Cedar, Sequoia, Cypress, Spruce, Fir, Eucalyptus? Can you recognize them? What do their leaves look like? Their bark?
If you don’t live where big trees grow -as would have been true for the people who heard Jesus’ parable. When people talk about big trees which ones do you think of? Were they cut down or did they never grow there?
In 2015, a research study on Urban Tree Canopy examined the distribution of urban trees in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. The researchers concluded that, “Money may not grow on trees, but this study suggests that in a way, trees grow on money. Our findings show that high-income neighborhoods in our selected cities are more likely than low-income neighborhoods to have high [number of trees].” In a time of global climate change when the 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred since 2014 lack of shade of tree cover means an increase in deaths in low-income neighbourhoods during “heat emergencies.”
We need our tree neighbours more than ever before.
Remember that we started this sermon with the idea of plant blindness?
As we consider the lilies of the field -or learning the plants and trees our own bioregions and (changing) climatic zones alongside the teachings of Jesus, it is good to remember the words of Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum
'In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.'
Heirloom Seeds and the Wisdom of Weeds
Scripture is our (fraught) heritage it has been used for harm and in ways that have contributed to deforestation, industrial food monoculture and current situation of climate change and mass extinction. But in the gospel passage today, in the surrounding Markan complex of parables and the tree-stories they are rooted in, are the seeds of something different. We might even call them heirloom seeds in the sense that they are something precious, tended, grown and passed down through generations offering what Dong Hyeon Jeong calls vegetal wisdom.
I think that plants can be teachers and mentors but I also believe it is important when we take from any being or entity whether for food or for learning that we are in reciprocal relationships, practicing what Robin Wall Kimmerer and other Indigenous carries of plant knowledge call the honorable harvest.
There are a number of observations from the seed parables of Mark chapter 4 worth highlighting.
While chapter 4 begins with the parable, and there is a sower in the parable of the growing seed (4:26-29) and in the Lukan and Matthean versions of this parable (Lk 13: 19: Mt 13: 31), the mustard in Mark 4:30-32 can be read as dispersing its own seed. The plant, indeed the ecosystem is the actor in this story.
While Jesus subverts the Ezekiel parable of the lofty noble cedar, a reading focused on ecosystem succession subverts the subversion. Mustard is an invasive weed, particularly of wheat fields. It is an exploiter and edge-grower but (Jim Perkinson observes,) these edge-zones result in ecologies that blend native and invasive species. In time the new species develop natural enemies and encounter unwelcome environments that keep it in check. When the edge zone stabilizes into an equilibrium with the interior, the much larger cycle of the ecosystem resumes progress towards its own maturity; in most cases old growth forests. Or to put it another way, in ecological time, a mustard seed really does become (as Matthew 13:31-32 and Luke 13:18–19 have it, a tree!
Plants do what the profligate sower does.
There has been a trend recently in preaching on the parable of the sower (not in this week’s lection but fair game nevertheless) to focus on the shocking profligacy of the sower and thus God’s extravagant love. To enumerate unlikely places, alley ways and parking lots, that the sower sows and to ask in wonder “who does that?”
But for many, indeed most plants a reproductive strategy of abundance, of producing many more seeds than will grow, is needed so that the next generation will grow despite the realities of stony ground, hungry birds, competing plants, burning sun and shallow soil. There is I think something very satisfactory in imagining the love of God and the workings of God’s kingdom not as a not very smart gardener but as beautifully adapted plant.
Bring on the wisdom of weed.
Sources and Resources
Anderson, All the Trees and Woody Plants of the Bible, 1979.
Ariel Bloch “The Cedar and the Palm Tree: A Paired Male/Female Symbol in Hebrew and Aramaic” 13-17. Solving Riddles and Untying Knots: Biblical, Epigraphic, and Semitic Studies in Honor of Jonas C. Greenfield. Eds Ziony Aevit, Seymour Gitin, Michael Sokoloff. Winona Lake Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 1995.
Anne Ellis “Where the Mustard Seed Grows” Radical Discipleship https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2018/06/14/wild-lectionary-where-the-mustard-seed-grows/
Dykstra, Laurel “Tree of Kings or King of Trees?” unpublished paper, 2018
Claudia Goodine and Shannon Dooling, “Ancient forests in BC” September 2011, Canadian Geographic http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/blog/posting.asp?ID=475
Dong Hyeon Jeong, Commentary on John 12:20-33 https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-1220-33-6
Mari Joerstad, Toward a Biblical Theology of Land, Mission Conference, Anglican Diocese of New Westminster, May 11, 2024
Discipleship https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2018/06/17/like-a-mustard-seed/
Liphschitz, Nili, “Cedars of Lebanon: Exploring the Roots” Biblical Archaeology Review, 2013 49-56
Marvin W. Mikesell. "The Deforestation of Mount Lebanon," The Geographical Review. Volume LIX, Number 1 (January, 1969)
Ched Myers “Sowing Hope” Radical Discipleship https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2015/06/11/sowing-hope/
Ched Myers, “Like a Mustard Seed, Excerpts from Binding the Strong Man” Radical
Myers, Ched Earth and the Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet, edited by David Rhoads, Continuum, 2007.
Nelson, John David. A Vanishing Heritage: The Loss of Red Cedar from Canada’s Forests.
Vancouver: Western Canada Wilderness Committee, 2004.
James Perkinson “Wild Weeds and Imperial Trees” Radical Discipleship, https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2017/07/27/wild-lectionary-kingdom-like-a-seed/
Scott Shauf, “Commentary on Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15” Working Preacher https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-11-2/commentary-on-psalm-921-4-12-15-3
So Synopoulos-Lloyd “Toward a Multispecies Apocalyptic Shepherdcraft” Queer Nature
https://www.queernature.org/criticalnaturalistblog/shepherdcraft
NT Wright “Jesus is Coming—Plant a Tree!” The Plough, March 2015 https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/jesus-is-coming-plant-a-tree
Contributor Bio
Laurel Dykstra is the founding priest of Salal + Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community, a church that worships outdoors and seeks to help Christians in the lower Fraser watershed grow their skills for Climate Justice. Laurel’s latest book on interspecies loneliness, Wildlife Congregations is newly out from Hancock House.