By a delicate symmetry, the parable of the mustard seed takes up just two verses of the Scriptures (Matthew 13: 31-32). In the 18th century "the smallest of all the seeds" was! such a convenient metaphor for next-to-no-thingness that land was sometimes rented for the symbolic fee of one peppercorn, its minuteness a sign of royal largesse.

The Lord of Creation knew, and knows, more about the intricacies of His creation than any modern microbiologist or geneticist. His earthly contemporaries would have been confounded by the system that encodes in the first inkling of a life all that the organism will become. In modern bioethics, it is easy to lapse into a primitivism by claiming that a thing becomes alive only when it looks alive, but that contradicts genetic fact. A stem cell has as much claim on reverence for its life as a pope or president or Nobel laureate. A seed is alive, even if it looks like little more than lint, and the first cell of human life is alive, though a clinician chooses to call it a blastocyst. The mustard bush is implanted with its mustardness and bushness even when it is a negligible seed, prey to rapacious birds, as the first cells of human life are prey to genetic engineers.