Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Luke · About this commentary
A Seed and a Measure of Meal
Luke 13:18-21
18 He said, “What is God’s Kingdom like? To what shall I compare it? · WEB
Two small things, one growing where everyone can see it and one working where nobody can.
"What is God's Kingdom like? To what shall I compare it?" Luke 13:18.
The two parables are treated in Matthew's account Matthew 13:31–35 — the smallest seed becoming a tree with birds in its branches, and the leaven hidden in three measures of meal until the whole batch is changed.
What is worth noticing is where this Gospel puts them. They come immediately after a bent woman is straightened in a synagogue and the officials are humiliated by it, and the question is asked in that room. So the comparison is being drawn from what has just happened: one woman, on one Sabbath, in one provincial synagogue.
That is the mustard seed. Nothing about the incident would have been reported outside the village, and it is offered as a sample of what the kingdom is.
The pair also divides the ways it advances. The seed grows upward and outward and ends as something visible enough for birds to nest in; the leaven disappears into the dough and works where no one is watching. A movement can be counted from outside. The other kind cannot be counted at all, which is why it is so often assumed to have stopped.
And the two figures are a man in a garden and a woman in a kitchen — this Gospel's habit of pairing the sexes, as it has done with Zechariah and Mary, Simeon and Anna, and will do again with a shepherd's lost sheep and a woman's lost coin Luke 15:4–10.
"Until it was all leavened" Luke 13:21. The last clause is the promise in both. Neither picture ends in the middle.
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