About that Sycamore Tree
17th Sunday after Pentecost (10/5/25): Lk 17:5-10
This week’s blog will be brief, as the next two Sundays call on texts in Lk 17 which I don’t really exposit in HARP. However, the RCL gospel for this week has a key connection to Luke’s narrative of Sabbath Economics. The famous “mustard seed faith” saying promises that small kernels of trust in the Great Economy can uproot tall sycamore trees of injustice.
This saying literally plants the seed for a key moment in the Zacchaeus story in 19:4-5: Jesus calling the rich man down from such a sycamore, who obeys his call to redistribution.
I call attention to Ted Lyddon Hatten’s amazing pyrographic rendering of a sycamore tree on a sycamore slab that graces the cover of HARP (right), and I recommend his artist’s statement in the book.
But note that a few verses earlier in Luke 17:2, Jesus anticipates the other part of this sycamore metaphor in an apocalyptic image of judgement on the powerful who exploit the vulnerable: drowning-by-millstone.
In fact, this very image appears in John the
Revelator’s vision of the collapse of imperial Rome’s oppressive economy: “Babylon the great city be thrown down into the sea’” (Rev 18:21).
As we’ve come to expect in Luke, the interweaving of symbols and metaphors build a larger case: Jesus’ promise that those who practice faith under the shadow of the great trees of empire can overthrow them.
As difficult as that may be to believe, especially in our own historical moment. But that’s why we do scripture study: to animate our political imagination as we struggle to resist our own American Babylon!
Note: These blogs try to popularize and summarize my more detailed study of Luke’s texts in HARP. Let me know if this is helpful to you (chedmyers@bcm-net.org). We hope you will buy and engage the book—and we need your partnership in getting word about it into “seminaries, sanctuaries and streets.” In the publishing industry now, corporate profits take precedence over promoting books. So it is up to authors and their readers to spread the word about volumes that matter. None of us are professional vendors, but together we can build capacity to heal Affluenza and resist Plutocracy. Thanks, Ched
