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This morning’s Gospel is the final section from Matthew 13, where we’ve been all month. It consists of a series of very short parables. We have been programmed to misunderstand these parables, both because of our cultural & temporal distance from their original telling, and because of the way the church has tended to domesticate the Gospel in general.
I’m going to start at the end of the passage, where Jesus talks about parables as such. The version we are using today translates parables as “riddles.” When someone tells a riddle, it always requires the audience to think. Those of you who know the Batman story – & Hollywood has made sure we do – are acquainted with the Riddler – a criminal who gives clues in the form of riddles to the police and to Batman as to his next crime. They have to decipher the riddle in order to predict his next crime. That’s precisely the kind of work Jesus invites his listeners to do in his parables. Jesus asked his friends "Have you worked out the riddles?" They said, "Yes. That last riddle is about the end of time when God's agents sort out the good people from the bad. The bad will be very upset when they find themselves rejected."
This morning I’m asking you to do a little more work than you may be used to doing during a sermon because that’s exactly what Jesus asks his listeners to do when he tells a parable. Parables do not 'contain' knowledge; they cannot be explained or understood as a moral tale, argument, or statement can be. Parables provoke internal action, forcing us to a crisis that requires us to shift: we either stumble or change-and-become, we either enact a lie that we desire or we are transformed. So I am going to take each parable, share some information about both its cultural and biblical contexts, and then read the parable again and leave a few moments for personal, silent reflection on any new insights that may come to you.
Mustard Seed
Last week Elizabeth preached on the parable of the wheat and the weeds – a story in which an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat that a farmer had sown in his garden. Immediately following the telling of that parable, and before offering an interpretation to his faith community, Matthew places Jesus’ telling of the Parable of the Mustard Seed. Here he ups the ante by portraying a farmer who himself sows a weed into his field – on purpose. Last year I learned that my Guatemalan neighbor thought I had done the same thing. I had planted a papyrus plant in my garden a few years earlier. He told me that in Guatemala papyrus is a weed that people try to keep out of their gardens because it takes over everything. But after watching it grow in my garden, he saw that it actually looked nice, and didn’t take over everything. His thinking was transformed.
The Parable of the Mustard Seed is a humorous riddle, if not a joke. Unfortunately, for the 20th century person, it fits into that joke-response category of, "I guess you had to be there." We don't get it. Jesus’ original audience would have known that he was playing with a riddle told earlier by the prophet Ezekiel. The only difference was that in Ezekiel’s riddle, instead of a mustard plant it was a cedar tree. Without that detail we miss the rather burlesque element of Jesus changing Ezekiel's metaphor for God’s Bright New World from the mighty cedar tree to that greatest of all ... shrubs or, worse, weeds!
Could this represent what God has done in Jesus Christ? Could we say that Jesus is sown into this world as one who will willingly let himself be treated as a weed in order that we might finally see the deadliness of our thinking we know good from evil and that we can thus be God's servant by weeding out the evil? Is that really any different than Jesus being referred to as a stumbling block? With that background listen to what the Spirit might be telling you: God’s Bright New World is like a mustard seed which a farmer plants in his field. A mustard seed is very small to look at, but it can grow into a large shrub. It becomes tall enough for birds to make their nests in.
(Silent reflection)
Yeast
The parable of the yeast describes a hidden element (yeast) that nevertheless has a huge impact on the flour in which it is present. Taken by surprise, and even offended, Jesus' audience would have considered leaven unclean and corrupting; after all, the scriptures often used "unleavened" as a metaphor for the Holy. For a community that celebrated the Passover every year, the immediate reference for leaven would have been God’s liberation of the people from slavery in Egypt, when people ate unleavened bread because they were in a hurry.
In a culture like ours where leavened bread is common and even popular, (and where we perhaps spend far less time thinking about what is Holy and what is not), we don't hear the story the same way. We miss the offense and perhaps the power of what Jesus is saying. A more accurate image for our culture might be: “God’s Bright New World is like a virus in a dirty needle that a junkie took and injected into a vein so the whole body was infected.”
The parable says that the corrupt element is concealed within the flour. What is the corrupt element and what is the flour? The image that makes most sense in the context of the parables is that the yeast is God’s Bright New World doing its corrupting work in transforming life under Rome’s imperial rule. God’s ways are not human ways. God’s empire is not the same as oppressive political, socioeconomic and religious control. The "Pax Romana...was pax only if you were Romana, otherwise it was oppressio, oppression." So Jesus heals the sick, casts out demons, eats with tax collectors and sinners, urges mercy, promotes access to shared resources & constitutes alternative households. This is corrupting work in relation to the empire’s status quo because it replaces an unjust hierarchical system which furthers the interests of the elite at the expense of the rest. If a person is well adjusted in a sick society, corrupting is the path to wholeness. To be corrupted is to be transformed in encountering God’s Bright New World.
With that background listen to what the Spirit might be telling you: God’s Bright New World is like the bit of yeast a baker puts in a much larger amount of flour. The yeast works its way all through the dough.
(Silent reflection)
Treasure
We come to a pair of parables about selling everything in order to get something very valuable. Once again, it may be necessary to put the parable of the treasure in the field in more modern terms. It is like finding the technology stock you bought in the 1980s for $50 and suddenly realizing you are a millionaire. It is like the owner of DeBeers finally finding the perfect diamond and selling a billion dollar empire to have it. It is like the harassed physician tired of the HMOs, selling home and BMW and finding bliss in a mission in Congo. It is like the crack addict waking up with a clear head, free to choose a new life.
What does the treasure refer to? If we take our interpretation of the previous parables as the context for deciding, we will say it is God’s grace. That grace is shown as Jesus is sown into this world as one who will willingly let himself be treated as a weed (stumbling block) in order that we might finally see the deadliness of our thinking we know good from evil and that we can thus be God's servant by weeding out the evil. This is a message of grace that replaces the wrathful God of the Last Day with the forgiving God of the Cross. When we finally open ourselves to that grace, the reaction may be to sell everything else in order to purchase it.
With that background listen to what the Spirit might be telling you: God’s Bright New World is like a field with buried treasure in it. Someone discovered and buried it again. Then he sold everything he had and bought the field.
(Silent reflection)
Pearl
The parable of the pearl suggests that God’s Bright New World is a matter of discernment, of a choice between many possibilities, and the determination to place our greatest value with God and, by extension, with what God desires for creation. Because although the protagonist of this parable—the woman who finds the pearl – is an individual, the parables must be read in the overarching context of God’s Bright new World. In other words, the woman doesn’t buy the pearl to hoard it but to promote the common good. It is up to each of us to make that choice, to find our highest value in God. The choice we make is to live in such a way that we contribute to the realization of God’s will for all of creation.
Even though the treasure and the pearl are very similar parables, the first person found the treasure accidentally, while the woman found the pearl quite intentionally. Both are worth everything, and are worthy of the total commitment of everything we have and everything we are. Dianne Bergant says the reign of God is "the realization of knowing that we belong to God, that we are cherished and cared for, that we have been called to commit ourselves to the noblest values of the human heart. It is the prize that gives meaning to the present, and its fullest delight draws us into the future. It feeds our hungers; it satisfies our thirsts; it piques our curiosity.... The reign of God is the fulfillment of our deepest desires and our fondest hopes...."
With that background listen to what the Spirit might be telling you: God’s New World is like a jeweler with a special line in pearls. One day she came across a very valuable pearl. She mortgaged her business in order to buy it.
(Silent Reflection)
Net
The parable of the net must be understood in the overall context of the image of fishing in the Gospels. That in turn must be seen against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, which closely controlled fishing and assured its sovereignty over the water and its content by issuing licenses, establishing quotas and charging taxes. Jesus used the fishing image (from the call of the disciples to this parable) to challenge this dominant reality by asserting God’s sovereignty over all who resist God’s rule, and by offering an alternative way of life. In this context the parable says that God’s own imperial purposes will surely be fulfilled in the future.
With that background listen to what the Spirit might be telling you: God’s New World is like a large net dragged through the sea so that every kind of fish is caught. When the net's full, the fishers bring it to land and put the fish that can be eaten into buckets. Fish which are no good are thrown back.
(Silent reflection)
Finally, Jesus said, "Every teacher who has been trained to teach in the Bright New World is like someone showing a visitor round their house. They point out their oldest and most treasured possession and the very latest thing they've bought. There are always old truths we must hang on to, even as Jesus and the Spirit keep leading us into new truth. Those who have ears let them hear.
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