St. Peter's By The Sea

July 27, 2008 - Parables of the Kingdom

Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

Good morning. Last week I shared some thoughts with you about the meaning of Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching to heaven with angels ascending and descending and I talked about the spiritual reality of the “angels of our being,” about each of us having a Guardian Angel to protect, care for, and look after us.

In last week’s Gospel lesson from the Gospel of Matthew a very different image of angels was presented. We are told that at the end of the age, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and evil doers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:42)

And in this morning’s Gospel we hear a number of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God and again it concludes with the warning, “So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:50)

Contemporary New Testament scholars believe that this teaching about the end of the age and the angels separating the good from the bad comes from Matthew and one segment of the early church and not from Jesus. They say it “reflects the concerns of a young Christian community attempting to define itself over against an evil world, a concern not characteristic of Jesus.”1

However, that doesn’t mean there is no such thing as judgment, or that there won’t be a time of weeping and gnashing of teeth. The saints and the mystics tell us that when we come into the presence of the divine light, all of who we are and have been and have hidden within us will be revealed and our judgment will be seeing and knowing ourselves as we really are. Yet this judgment is tempered by God’s mercy, by the love of God which forgives us and welcomes us home.

But this morning I would like to consider briefly Jesus’ teaching, his parables about the Kingdom of God, and the presence of God in our lives. These parables are very well known to most of us – we have heard them over and over, they are familiar to us and we experience a certain zone of comfort with them, because we all know the right answers and we imagine ourselves responding to them in the correct way.

However, the parables are not meant to pat us on the back, but to give us a kick in the pants. They are not meant to comfort us, but to challenge us, to change us. They speak out against the status quo. They challenge our traditional ways of experiencing and responding to God.

There is a poem by the Sufi saint Hafij which makes me imagine what it was like to hear one of Jesus’ parables for the first time. Hafij says,

Pulling out the chair
Beneath you mind
And watching you fall upon God

What else is there
For Hafij to do
That is any fun in this world!

And this is what I think Jesus is doing in his parables – he is pulling out the chair beneath our minds so that we might fall into God’s presence – we might discover the Kingdom.

And we might find the kingdom because it’s within us and all around us, hidden, waiting to be discovered. Take for instance the parable of the mustard seed. Jesus said “The Kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all 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.” (Matthew 13:31-33)

As with most parables there are several levels of dimensions of meaning here. Speaking of the most obvious level of interpretation Andrew Harvey says … “Jesus is speaking in this parable about the vast hidden power of the Spirit, of the ‘tiny seed’ of Godhead within each of us, which once sown grows rapidly and becomes a large ‘tree’ capable of sheltering and nurturing others.”

But to the farmers of Jesus’ time, the tiny mustard seed was a shocking image of God’s kingdom, because of the danger it represented to the grain fields. The New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan says this: “The mustard plant is dangerous even when domesticated in the garden and is deadly when growing wild in the grain fields. And those nesting birds, which might strike us as charming, represent to ancient farmers a permanent danger to the seed and grain. The point, in other words, is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three, four or even more feet in height. It is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control where it is not wanted, and it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas, where they are not particularly desired. And that, Jesus said, was what the kingdom was like. Like a pungent shrub with dangerous take-over properties.”2

The power of the Spirit is like the mustard seed, pungent, fiery, and wild and impossible to contain, and it threatens to upset all of our well made plans, all of our structures, all of our usual ways of seeing things and behaving. For once the power of the Spirit brings with it an abundance of life and love, we find ourselves in a reality, in which we are to love our enemies, and do good to those who hurt us, and to take care of our neighbors; to share whatever we have, not judge others, but to look first to our own behaviors and short comings. To love each other as he loves us. In short, in the Kingdom of God it’s not business or life as usual.

Once the mustard seed takes root, our lives are turned upside down. Now Jesus also said “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again the Kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

The kingdom of heaven is like finding hidden treasure that has been buried in a field. Who among us has not imagined such a thing happening. I know as a child I was always thrilled hearing about buried treasure and the possibility of being the one who found it. And in Jesus’ time this was a very real possibility. For in those days there were no banks where ordinary people could store their money. One of the common ways of safely storing one’s fortune during threatening times was to bring it in a location known only to the owner. It was not unusual for the owner to die without revealing the location of the buried treasure. It was therefore not uncommon for there to be an unexpected discovery of a fortune, for instance, when a farmer was plowing his field. It was this accidental discovery of gold, silver, or jewels that Jesus compares to finding the kingdom of heaven.

Who among us would not thrilled by finding buried treasure? Several points stand out here. First is that the Kingdom of God is, as Jesus tells us over and over, all around us, it is part of our ordinary reality. Secondly … even though it’s within us and around us, and readily available it is also hidden from us. It is here right now … even if we can’t see it or feel it. Third, we can stumble upon the Kingdom even when we’re not looking for it … like the man in the field we can be just going about our lives and there it is.

That’s what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, … and I know of others who were going about their lives and suddenly without warning the reality of the Kingdom found them. And the fourth and most obvious point: that the joy of the discovery of God’s presence is like that of finding buried treasure, or even more that the presence of God is the great treasure that in our hearts we all are hoping to find.

Jesus’ teaching was an attempt, as Hafij says, to pull the chair out beneath our mind, in order to communicate the amazing power of the Spirit, and God’s desire that we come to know our divine identity as children of God, and to transform the world into a place of divine love and justice. On a merely human level an impossible task; but not impossible to the Spirit of God once we have embraced it and allowed its power to be unleashed.

My prayer this morning is that each one of us might find the hidden treasure and know the joy, and the beauty, and the love that Jesus came to give us.

In His Name. Amen.
1 The Five Gospels, p. 194.
2 Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography.

Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:53 pm
Category: Sermons

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