May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.
Do any of you cook with saffron? What is saffron? By weight, saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. But what is it?
How about a crocus? We have at least a couple varieties of crocus that grow here. Saffron comes from a special variety of crocus. It is the bits of the flower that hold the pollen, the stigmas.I have a small box of saffron here. Before it was opened, it held one gram of saffron. Any guesses about how many flowers it took to fill this box?
There are three stigmas per flower. One ounce is about 450 stigmas, or around 150 flowers. To produce 1 kilogram of saffron takes around 150,000 flowers: a farm the size of two football fields.Can anyone tell me what a gram of saffron is worth? Any guesses?
One gram in Canada is currently worth about $18. That’s a little more than $550 per ounce. Right now, the price of gold is very high, but through most of recorded history, the price per ounce of saffron has been fairly close to the price of gold.By weight, saffron is the most expensive spice in the world. But saffron is not very expensive to use. When this box was fresh one stigma would flavour two cups of rice. It would change the rice to a bright golden colour, give it a rich flavour and a spicy aroma. So if you could use this whole box, 450 uses, while it was still fresh, about 3 years, each use would cost about 4 cents. Suddenly saffron is not so expensive.
He told them another parable: The kingdom of heaven is like saffron.
Have you understood all this? They answered …?How do these parables of Jesus’ tell us anything about the kingdom of heaven? How does mine about saffron?
The kingdom of heaven is very much like saffron. It is incredibly valuable. It is worth more than anything else you can compare it to. At the same time, a tiny piece of the kingdom of heaven can completely change your life and the lives of those around you. It spreads and brings flavour to the world.
So what does all of this mean for our lives?
I think that Jesus is trying to tell us to stop looking for the big things. It is not there that we will make a difference.
What we need to do is to look for small things we can change, small places where we can make the world a better place, little glimpses of the kingdom of heaven that we can bring to light. When we do this, when we make some small thing just a little bit better, we help to create a place for the kingdom of heaven to take root. We plant a mustard seed that can grow into a small tree. We add one tiny stigma of saffron to a dish and it spreads to flavour the entire meal.
Saffron is like the kingdom of heaven.
