Sermon on the Good Shepherd

 

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52: Five Parables of the Kingdom

 

This week’s Gospel lesson is a whole boatload of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, something Jesus talked a lot about but never described in plain words. He told little stories and vignettes about what it was like, stories that may seem simple on first reading, but the more you think about them, the less obvious their meaning becomes. If there’s one thing these particular parables have in common, it may be the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that requires patience.

The word “parable” literally means putting one thing beside another. It’s not as clearly defined as an allegory, in which every image has a direct, one-to-one symbolic meaning. Parables simply set two ideas in juxtaposition and let the listener sort out the similarities.

The earliest versions we have of most of the parables of Jesus do not include explanations; these were likely added by later editors in the communities where the Gospels grew into their final forms. All these parables have unexpected elements in them that at once deepen, illuminate, and confound our understanding of what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like. So I want to look at these parables, try to ignore the explanations, ask a few questions, and see where that takes us. 

Let’s start with the mustard seed. I’ve brought some Middle Eastern mustard seeds in this little jar. I’ll pass it around. You’ll notice they’re not like the ones we find in the spice aisle at Market Basket. They are really, really tiny, so small that if I were to take one out of the jar onto my finger and exhale, it would fly away and be impossible to find again until it sprouted. They’re smaller than a period on this page of 12 point type. And they’re the color of dirt. Sow them outside, and you can’t distinguish them from the grains of soil around them until they sprout.

I have also printed a picture of the kind of plant this mustard seed grows into, at least according to Google. It spreads and towers, definitely big enough for many birds’ nests. They say an average mustard bush is at least the size of the massive rhododendron in my back yard, which is probably a good 15 feet tall. Sometimes it gets taller than a palm tree. Several commentators I read said that the mustard tree in Israel is actually considered kind of a weed. It can be invasive and take over a garden.

I wonder how the Kingdom of Heaven is like a tiny seed, or for that matter, like an invasive shrub. How does it start? What makes it grow? What power is this that’s in a seed? I know it doesn’t happen right away. Growing anything that size takes time.

The parable of the yeast is very similar to the mustard seed, in that it starts small and gets bigger, but with an important difference. The yeast itself doesn’t grow into a plant, it causes the dough it’s in to grow and rise through its exhalations of CO2.

I’ve taught this parable to children as a kind of science experiment. The kids mix three quarter-cup measures of flour (into which, I will confess, a little sugar has been blended to accelerate the result), and they add ¼ teaspoon of yeast with some water, stir it, and set the bowl aside under a warm lamp. They come back at the end of the class to see what happened to it. They’re surprised to find that, with the passage of time, what was a small lump of dough is about ready to overflow the bowl.

According to my Oxford Annotated Bible, the leavening referred to in the parable to is more like a sourdough starter than the quick-rising dry yeast we get at the store. Traditional sourdough catches wild yeast from the air and propagates it, feeding it carbohydrates and creating carbon dioxide bubbles. Once the yeast is captured, you can use a bit of that same starter for each subsequent loaf, and the leaven continues to spread.

Making bread that way takes time and patience, just like growing a tree from a seed. Leaven permeates quietly, gradually changing the chemical composition of the bread. What chemical reaction is the Kingdom of Heaven causing in us? In the world? How are we being changed?

The next two parables are very similar to each other also. In one, a merchant finds a valuable pearl, and in the other a man finds a treasure randomly buried in a field. They used to do that in the time before bank vaults and the FDIC. They’d put their valuables in a clay pot and bury it like kimchee somewhere on the property. If a burial location wasn’t well documented, the treasure could be lost for a while until someone (like maybe a farm worker) came along and found it by accident. By law, whoever owned the land would own the contents of the pot, so to get the treasure, our worker has to buy the field, and it takes all his life savings. I expect it took him some time to sell everything and gather up the money. The Kingdom of Heaven is compared to this situation. It seems straightforward, right? The Kingdom is a treasure for which we give should everything else up. Well, maybe.

But then there’s the merchant looking for pearls. Again, he sells everything in order to buy this one special pearl. Like the man who finds the treasure, the merchant is surprised by his discovery, just as the children are surprised by the risen dough. The two stories are often read as if they were identical in meaning. But there’s one important difference in the text. The buried treasure is directly compared to the Kingdom of Heaven. But not the pearl.

The text doesn’t say the Kingdom of Heaven is like a pearl. It says the Kingdom is like a merchant looking for pearls. I wonder what the pearl is, then, if it’s not the Kingdom of Heaven? Who or what is the merchant? One reading has it that the merchant is Christ, who gave up everything for us, and the pearl is us. I like that interpretation, but are there other ways we could read it? What about the Kingdom is a surprise?

The fishnet parable seems to be the odd one in this Lectionary grouping. It bears similarity to one that precedes this passage, that of the weeds among the wheat that we heard last week. Like with those weeds from last week, the good and bad fish are gathered in together and separated later. The weeds will be burned, and the “bad” fish will be thrown out. And of course there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth for those bad fish. What makes a fish bad, I wonder?

The interpretation given here as if by Jesus probably wasn’t there originally. So maybe the bad fish equal bad people, as the explanation goes, but can we play with it a bit? How is the Kingdom of Heaven similar to a net full of every kind of fish? How many kinds of fish are there in the Kingdom? Are there guppies? Are there Squid? Are there sharks?

I was thinking how nowadays fishermen have quotas of certain kinds of fish, and after they meet the quota they have to throw them back, even if they’re otherwise perfectly good fish, so that the species can continue. A fish might also be thrown back if it’s too small, so it has the chance to keep growing. I like to picture Jesus’ metaphorical fishermen tossing the small fry back into the Sea of Galilee. Because maybe no one is irretrievably evil? Maybe they’re just not ready yet? Could the whole thing be about mercy?

Growing a tree from a small seed takes time, but the life is there all along in that tiny package. The whole plant is hidden inside it, waiting quietly to burst forth and eventually overwhelm its surroundings. Baking bread using wild yeast takes a lot of patience. So does sorting a large net full of fish. And I wonder how long the merchant searched to finally find that one pearl of great value. How many oysters did he have to pry open? And how long did it take to close the deal on that piece of real estate with the treasure in it? Maybe these parables demonstrate the patience of God, or maybe Jesus is reminding us that, although the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven is as inevitable as bread rising, it may not come all at once. It comes with small starts, painstaking processes, and sometimes very long waits, but it comes. Surely it comes.