We’re reaching the end of our journey through Jesus’ collection of parables. After offering Jesus’ two longer parables on the sower and the weeds of the field, this week the lectionary gives us everything it had previously skipped, leaving this series of rapid-fire, one to two sentence glimpses of the kingdom. Since this is really five separate stories—well, six, if you count the concluding one Jesus snuck in at the end—let’s refresh briefly on the purpose of parables.
One of my favorite comments on parables is from Pastor Nadia Bolz Weber, where she says that “reading parables…is like using riddles to get directions to the airport.” Jesus’ parables don’t give us simple solutions. In fact, the opposite seems true. Jesus’ parables seem to serve the purpose of intentionally disrupting the disciples and our views of how the world should be. Just when the disciples seem to think we have a handle on what Jesus is saying, he throws in a parable that scrambles our understanding.
But why would Jesus do this? Why would he intentionally hide the kingdom in this coded language? Is it, as some have argued, as a test to separate the true believers from the false? Or is he trying to give us some secret message that outsiders couldn’t follow? What’s he doing here?
Matthew explained Jesus’ purpose in verse thirty-five, “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.” I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world. Parables, in their open-endedness, offer images to ponder a truth that is bigger than explanation. Imagine that you’d never seen the sun on a warm summer’s day. Now imagine someone tried to explain the sun to you. They could tell you all day about how it is a gigantic ball of gases burning and reacting hundreds of billions of miles from the earth. They could tell you about the chemical reactions that take place, the rotation of the earth on its axis that cause summer and winter, the shifts in weather patterns as air moves over water and land, causing clouds and rain, or raising the temperature. All of this information is true, and none of it would give you the feeling of standing in the sun in the way that a story could. That is the beauty of parables. In the parables, Jesus makes known what is unknowable. Not in total, because the total is too vast, but in part.
So Jesus told parables to provide clarity, but he also told parables to obscure it. And the reason for that, I think, is because too much clarity is dangerous. There is a tendency in humanity to look for simple answers. We as a species are not fans things we cannot reduce to clear-cut yes/no answers, we find ambiguity frightening. We like simplicity, cause and effect. We would like a relationship with God where we do A and God rewards us with B. But the world God created is complex. Sometimes, we can do everything right, and still everything can go wrong. And if our faith is based on the conviction that when we do A, God rewards us with B, and instead C happens, and C is the worst thing imaginable, at best we can worry that we did something wrong. And at worst, it can shake us to wondering if God did something wrong. But tragedy and crisis are not proof that we have made a mistake, nor are they proof that God is not in control, they are simply a reality of an incredibly complex world. Think about what Jesus was preparing the disciples for. They thought he was coming to be a conquering hero, but they were going to watch him die. And if their faith was based on this false conviction of Jesus as warlord, then his death could cause them to lose hope. But if Jesus had managed in his teachings to insert just a sliver of doubt, just a seed of possibility, into their certainty, then they might be able to withstand the destruction of all they thought possible, and come thorough to the promise of resurrection on the other side. This is the gift of doubt that Jesus offers us with parables.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree.” Trees were an ancient symbol empire. The disciples would have expected a parable about the kingdom of heaven as a tree. But Jesus said it was like a mustard seed. Mustard seeds ARE small, that part is true. But they don’t become trees, or even particularly large shrubs. What they are is pervasive and stubborn. A good analogy to a king born in a stable who came riding to glory on a donkey.
The kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour. Yeast, right away, sets up all sorts of surprise, as it’s usually a symbol of corruption. Jesus himself said in Matthew, “beware the yeast of the Pharisees.” But here, Jesus describes the kingdom as yeast. Yeast that was, according to the original Greek, not mixed in but hidden in flour. There’s a level of sneaky subversiveness to this story. And three measures, that’s fifty pounds of flour. This is not one woman making a loaf for her family; this is baking on a wide scale. And what if, hypothetically, she wasn’t baking at all. The text doesn’t go into detail, it just says she hid yeast in flour until the flour was leavened. Imagine the surprise for whoever was baking, when their plain ordinary flour seemingly began to rise on its own, when the yeast hidden within it began to grow. The kingdom of heaven is like that.
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, of such value that when a plowman, who was not looking for treasure, but was just going about his every day work of plowing the field of another, stumbled across it, that he would sell everything to possess it. Even if it meant cheating the landowner on whose land the treasure was found. This one, as an aside, is the one that makes the least sense to me, the one I struggle with the most. Because the plowman’s actions seem if not illegal, at least a bit unethical. I don’t know what Jesus is telling me in this one. For me it reads a bit Machiavellian, but since that doesn’t really jive with anything else Jesus said or did, it seems like I must be missing something here. As you wrestle with this text this week, I’d love to hear any insights you might have on what Jesus could mean in the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, and on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold everything he had and bought it.” The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant whose whole job and goal and purpose is to seek out and find the pearl of great price. So what if the pearl is humanity. What if humanity is the pearl of great value, so sought after that God the merchant will go to any length, take on any cost to reach us. And are we not even more valuable than a pearl?
The kingdom of heaven is like a net that gathers up fish of every kind, both good fish and bad. The disciples’ ears must have perked up at this one. Remember, they were fishermen, Jesus called them to be fishers of people, clearly this one was for them. But then Jesus gave the explanation, the angels, not the disciples are to sort the good from the bad. The disciples don’t even have a part in the story. The kingdom of heaven is like a net which gathers up everyone within it. So vast, so encompassing is the kingdom, that all are gathered together in the kingdom of the Lord.
Have you understood all this, Jesus asked the disciples. Yes! They declared. But you don’t have to be Jesus to guess that they were probably exaggerating the truth a bit on that one. Jesus had to have known they had no idea what he was talking about. So instead he kept teaching and showing and challenging. Kept shifting their perspectives, kept opening to them new possibilities. “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven,” every disciple who has walked at the feet of the master, “is like the master of the household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” The images in the parables are old, familiar, and comfortable images. But in the hands of Jesus, these comfortable old truths take on new life and new meaning. Not at the expense of the old life and meaning, but with them. So that the wisdom within them is more than before. So I invite you this week, to let these parables challenge you. Let them confuse you. Let them even, maybe, upset you a little. Let your mind and your heart be open to possibilities you did not expect. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds, but it becomes a shrub so strong, so stubborn, and so pervasive, that even birds can nest in its branches. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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