Matthew 17:20
“He said to them, “Because of your unbelief. For most certainly I tell you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Where this sits
Said privately to the disciples after they failed to heal a boy. They had asked why they could not do it.
Reflection
The disciples ask a practical question — why could we not cast it out — and the answer is about size, but not in the direction they expect.
A mustard seed is the smallest thing in the illustration, and a mountain is the largest. Jesus puts them in the same sentence deliberately. The point is not that a little faith achieves a little and more achieves more. The point is that the quantity is not the operative variable at all.
Which means the disciples' failure was not a shortfall in volume. Something else was wrong, and Mark's account of the same incident supplies it: this kind comes out only by prayer.
The seed image does other work too. Seeds are not measured for their present size but for what they contain. Nobody weighs a seed to determine what it will do. Its value is entirely in what it is connected to and where it is planted.
And the mountain is worth a note. In Jewish idiom of the period, moving mountains was a stock phrase for solving impossible problems, applied to particularly capable teachers. Jesus takes a figure of speech about human skill and reassigns it.
Nothing will be impossible for you is the last clause, and it has troubled readers for centuries. It is spoken to men who had just discovered that plenty was impossible for them.
- Theme:
- Faith
- Book:
- Matthew