Mustard seeds aren’t very big. You can see them, and pick them up; you can plant them and watch them grow; you can grind them up and add them on your food.
They may not be the smallest seed known to science (for that, consider a dust-like orchid seed), but they were a proverbially small thing in Jesus’ time and the smallest seed a first century Israelite would encounter.
In Luke 13, Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed – something small that grows, becoming something so much more than the seed from which it grew.
In Luke 17, Jesus says that faith as small as a mustard seed is all you need. It was his response to his disciples asking him to increase their faith. If you to feel your faith is weak, the fix isn’t being ‘zapped’ by God but by exercising the faith you have.
Christians talk about faith because Jesus did – it’s a theme that runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Faith. It defined the godly people of the past (see Hebrews 11), and continues to define the people of God today. So Jesus’ question in Lk18:8 could be the most important question of all: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Raymond