The Time Jesus Spoke about Birds and the Tree
A woman hobbles into a synagogue bent double. Eighteen years folded forward, unable to lift her head to look anyone in the face.
And everyone in that room stands back.
She is not merely ill. She is under something. Suffering like hers was read as a verdict, and a verdict is a thing you keep your distance from. She has spent eighteen years as a walking question about what she or her people did to deserve it. No one goes near a woman like that.
Except Jesus.
He calls her over, tells her she is free of it and puts His hands on her. She straightens up for the first time in eighteen years (Luke 13:11–13).
A miracle.
But the ruler of the synagogue fumes. Blind to the miracle, he’s mad about the day. There are six days for work, he tells the crowd, so come and be healed on one of those (Luke 13:14).
Jesus calls him out. You untie your ox on the Sabbath and walk it out to water. This woman, a daughter of Abraham, has been tied up for eighteen years—and you begrudge her being untied on the wrong day? His opponents are silenced. And the crowd is delighted (Luke 13:15–17).
With that woman standing upright in front of them, and the rule-keepers stewing, the room is wound tight. What comes next is a parable.
A Parable in a Sentence
As any reader of the Gospels knows well, Jesus taught in parables, and no subject drew more of them than the Kingdom of God.
Of the 40 parables He taught, 19 are devoted to directly addressing the Kingdom—and many of the others indirectly teach Kingdom dynamics. Some are long, like the Parable of the Soils (Matthew 13:3–9, 18–23) and the Parable of the Father’s Love (Luke 15:11–32). Others are over in a sentence, and those are the ones we skim. Like the one He gave in that synagogue:
Then He said, ‘What is the kingdom of God like? And to what shall I compare it? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden; and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.’”
(Luke 13:18–19)
A mustard seed. The birds of the air.
In a parable expressly devoted to explaining the Kingdom of God, Jesus does not pluck “birds of the air” from thin air. He reaches for something every person in His audience knew, and knew in numbers we would struggle to picture.
Israel was home to around 70 bird species of its own. But it sits on the main migration route between Europe and Asia, and every year some 500 million birds from 550 species pass through on their way south. From late August to December they come down to feed, the last stop before a five-day crossing of the Sahara. Five hundred million birds, funnelled through a country you can drive across in 90 minutes at its widest and 20 minutes at its narrowest.
Every Kind That Flies
Birds carry all sorts of meanings in the Scriptures. Sometimes they are the good guys—a dove for the Spirit, an eagle for the righteous. Sometimes they are the villains, snatching the seed off the path. And a long list of them the Law calls unclean: the vulture, the pelican, the raven, the owl, the stork. Jesus takes in the lot. “Birds of the air.” Every kind that flies.
And with millions of foreign birds pouring through the country every year, His hearers knew exactly what was overhead. Storks. Eagles. Pelicans. Unclean, every one of them, and every one of them welcome in the tree.
That is the point He is making. Every hearer in that room had a list of who did not belong in the branches. The Gentile outside the covenant. The neighbour inside it who had been written off. The woman they had stood back from for eighteen years, as Jewish as any of them and just as excluded. Jesus puts them all in the tree.
And His audience had heard this before. Ezekiel saw it centuries earlier:
In the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches.”
(Ezekiel 17:23)
Birds of every kind. Not some kinds. Not the approved kinds. Every kind.
In Ezekiel 17, the prophet saw the day the Messiah would put the Father’s welcome where everyone could see it.
The Kingdom is not just for “my kind” of people—people who act, speak or think like me. Or interpret the Bible as I do. The Kingdom is for all kinds of birds. The Kingdom allows all kinds of people to “nest under its shade”, as Mark records it (Mark 4:30–32).
And nobody enjoyed the migration. A sky full of foreign birds meant mess and noise and something unwelcome arriving uninvited. Jesus took the thing they put up with every year and told them it was what God was building.
The Kingdom of God offers shelter and refuge to all kinds of people. As the Body of King Jesus, it’s our privilege to be His heart and hands to all people—without judgement and without partiality.
A Weed, Not a Cedar
And the mustard seed? A weed.
Yes, black mustard is a weed. Wild, hardy, quick, and once it takes hold you have lost the paddock. It grows to nearly three metres from a seed you could lose in the palm of your hand.
Pliny the Elder knew the problem. Writing around AD 78, he noted that mustard, while “extremely beneficial for the health”, “grows entirely wild”, and that “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.”
That is the plant Jesus reached for. Not the cedar of Lebanon. A humble weed planted for its goodness, then impossible to stop.
And that is the Kingdom. A weed that starts smaller than anything in the garden, takes over the ground, and ends up big enough to shelter every bird that lands in it.
Every bird.
Because the woman is still standing there.
An hour ago nobody would go near her. Bent, shunned, kept at a distance by people who read her body as a verdict from God.
Now she is restored, standing straight in the middle of the room, as the Messiah describes a Kingdom with room in it for everything they had shut out.
Not welcome because she is straight. Welcome, bent or straight.
The Father’s heart has room for all.
