The Mustard Seed & The Sycamine Tree
What has the sycamine tree got to do with the mustard seed, and what has the mustard seed to do with faith? The Mustard Seed & the Sycamine Tree I want to discuss verses 5 and 6 of the 17th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Which says, "And the apostles said unto the Lord, increase our faith. And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you." Here you can see how the Eastern people think and speak. The disciples ask the Lord to increase their faith; he answers by bringing in two apparently unrelated things, the mustard seed and the sycamine tree! The mustard seed of the East is the smallest of all seeds, it's black, and if put into an eye, the person would hardly be aware that the seed is in his eye. But the mustard seed of the East does grow into a tree, as big as the apple trees in America. That is why Jesus said, in Luke 13:19, "It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it." "If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree ... " What has the sycamine tree got to do with the mustard seed, and what has the mustard seed to do with faith? The sycamine tree of the East is the wild fig tree, and produces fruit six times a year. But the people of the East despise this fruit, and won't eat it. Why this is, I do not know, but even if a man has had nothing to eat for two weeks, he wouldn't want to be seen under the sycamine tree, for fear people would think that he was gathering the fruit. If a man climbed a sycamine tree, the people would insult him more. They would say among themselves, "Poor old Smith must have gone bankrupt overnight. His poverty is so great that he has lost all self-respect and dignity, to be climbing up in a sycamine tree to gather the fruit." So we read in the
From this work
Topic: Zacchaeus - wild fig - sycomore Format: Verified Digitized Pages: 3 As a convert to Christianity from Hinduism, Bishop K.C. Pillai came to the Western world on a singular mission: to teach the Eastern culture of the Bible. Although Christianity is generally considered a western religion, the Bible itself was written and set in the Orient, and it must be viewed through the light of that eastern window. The Bible is filled with passages that perplex the Western mind, and yet they were readily understood by the Easterner. When the reader becomes knowledgeable of the oriental idioms, customs, and traditions of the Biblical setting, these Scriptures become clear. God called Bishop K.C. Pillai to reveal these Biblical truths he called Orientalisms. At the time of the Bishop’s early life, his native India had remained an isolated country for thousands of years. Therefore, the customs and