Göttinger Predigten
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Pentecost 7, 07/27/2014
Sermon on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, by Luke Bouman
Matthew 13:31 He put before them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32 it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." 33 He told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."...
44 "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. 47 "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; 48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 51 "Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." 52 And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."
The Kingdom of Heaven is Like...
Today's Gospel text brings us more stories of the kingdom. Unlike the ones we've looked at the last couple of weeks, these do not come with allegorical explanations from Jesus. People are left to their own devices in trying to figure out what they mean. Even "scribes who are trained for the kingdom of heaven" have trouble figuring them out, and as such there are more than a few interpretations out there. I think people who look at these parables have a difficult problem, similar to the problem uncovered by Albert Schweitzer in regard to any scholarly research about Jesus. We tend not only to find that Jesus is a "lot like us only a little bit better." So with our understanding of the kingdom of heaven, we tend to find that these parables tell us it is a lot like our imaginary ideal worlds, "only a little bit better."
Especially parables in which we find that there are "good and bad" (in today's case fish) which will eventually be sorted at the "end of the age", we have a propensity to find ourselves (and anyone like us) in the "good" category and others (especially people we don't like very much) in the "bad" category. We use stories of the kingdom, in other words, to justify ourselves, our lives, our choices, our kind of people rather than seeing them for what they are, stories which challenge and change our perceptions of what God is up to in the world, especially what God is up to in Jesus.
In the first century, of course, and for the people who were Jesus' audience for the sayings recorded in today's Gospel, there was an assumption that everyone knew what God was up to, and what the kingdom of heaven was going to be like. Most of this common knowledge, in the first century, was linked to Israel's self-understanding of national identity, and the long suffering endurance of occupation by one foreign power after another since their exile to Babylon in 587 B.C. So when someone said words like "the kingdom of heaven" people might naturally gravitate to thinking about that time in the past when God's chosen anointed , David or one of his descendants, ruled in Jerusalem, and hoping for a return of such a thing in the very near future. For God's people in the first century, Jesus represented the latest in a long line of those hopes. Images of military conquest and political revolution would likely have been part of the dreams inspired by the phrase "kingdom of heaven" alone.
It would be easy to see how people, hoping for such a future might, at the same time be excited and really confused by Jesus' teaching. Of course they knew what the "kingdom of heaven" would bring, and so when Jesus asks his disciples, not a few of whom might have bought into these kinds of political aspirations, if they understood what he was teaching through his parables, their instant answer, without even thinking about it would have been "Yes." They were wrong of course, but they wouldn't know how wrong until their entire dream came crashing down about the same time that Jesus was arrested , tried, convicted, and hung out on a cross to die, as most revolutionary challengers to Rome at that time eventually had their lives and movements cut short. It was only then that it occurred to them that Jesus was talking about something completely radically different than what they expected.
Today, most people that you ask think of something completely different when you ask them what the "kingdom of heaven" is about. A friend of mine asked this question recently on social media. She's on internship, one of the last steps of the seminary process before becoming a pastor, and she asked people what she thought as she was preparing to preach on Jesus' parables. What few responses she received almost all seemed to deal with what life would be like after death. This was not at all surprising to me. I think that the phrase "kingdom of heaven" probably means "life after death" for many people and folks certainly do create it in their own image. People think, "What do I most enjoy here on earth?" or perhaps, "What do I most crave that I cannot have here on earth?" These pleasures or cravings (even peace and harmony are unsatisfied cravings in this blood thirsty existence) become the basis for what people imagine heaven might be like.
Lest people wonder, I think today's parables challenge both the ancient and modern attempts to turn "what God is up to" into something that we desire, at best, and want to control, at worst. Rather than letting God be God and trying to discover, know, and be known by God, we insist that we can manage things better. While I do not pretend to know exactly what the kingdom of heaven will be like, today's images, in addition to what we have heard the last couple of weeks of our lectionary, offer us clear suggestions and clues as to what it is like and what we might discover if we are truly listening.
First of all, it is not something alien, distant future. All of these stories are stories of something in our very midst. But at the same time it is paradoxically not always easy to see or notice or understand.
It is something that grows, sometimes in crazy ways, like how the mustard plant develops into a huge wild bush from a very tiny seed (and by some reports becomes rather a nuisance where it does grow) or like how yeast leavens dough so well that even when it is cut, separated, and mixed in with fresh, unleavened, dough it multiplies until everything is leavened again. Like the field and pearl, it is of such great value that it is worth investing our whole lives in it, even though not everyone would immediately notice or discover this value. Yet for those who do, it surpasses or encompasses all of life itself. Like the sea, which is full of fish, the "kingdom of heaven" represents life in abundance, even though we often abuse the gift of this abundance by failing to see it or else hoarding it as if it belongs to us.
What does it all add up to? Jesus is pointing us to what God is doing in his own person. Jesus is the present "kingdom of heaven" in the world. He was, is, and will be the kingdom. But not like we imagine. He who was crucified, whom God raised, is the leaven in the world's loaf, is the mustard seed that begins great growth. Jesus, himself, is the treasure in the field, the pearl of great worth. He is the net that is cast to catch all under God's grace and love, even if we don't always receive or share that love. Jesus is God's living word, spoken to us through his own life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the good seed, sewn among the weeds of our lives, so that in us is both sinner and saint. Jesus is the promise that God will sort us out in the end, and bring us to that place where we might be wheat, ourselves bread of life, rather than a mixed field of wheat and weeds. Jesus is God's alternative to the world's imagination, always too small, always inadequate. Jesus is not simply the victory of one people over another. Jesus is God's victory over Sin and Death. Jesus is not simply a promise of goodness and life for those people lucky enough to receive it after death. Jesus is the promise of a new life that starts in the here and now, is already present if not already realized, to be brought to completion in God's time and God's future. Jesus is that future breaking into the present and transforming our world, even if we can't always see how or when, even if we despair that it may never happen. Jesus is... in the same way that the "kingdom of heaven" is...
Jesus tells these stories so that we might see. Jesus tells these stories to us so that we might now also become leaven for the dough, grow like wild mustard, be for the world hidden treasures and pearls. Jesus tells these stories so that our lives might be caught up in something greater than us, and we, who are both good and bad fish, might none-the-less bear witness to God in Christ and his radical love for the good, the bad, and even the ugly in each one of us. This is God's love as old as the world, and yet made new each day as Christ comes again in and through each of us and all of us together. We are reborn from the waters of baptism each new day, loved and forgiven, fed at God's table and trained as scribes for this new way of thinking. God's old love, made new in Christ, now made known in and through Christ's body: you and me, the body of Christ.