When
you think about it, the Kingdom of Heaven is a funny idea. Clearly it is not like kingdoms on a map,
where Heaven is this pink country, over here between the green and the purple
ones. It is not like the plant kingdom
or the animal kingdom. Heaven, which is
Matthew’s way of saying “God” because, as a good Jew, he is shy about using the
divine name, has to include all countries, all plants and animals. Because God created everything, and sustains
it, and his sovereignty over it is unlimited and eternal. That is elementary biblical monotheism.
The
Hebrew scriptures say that it really is that simple. But they also tell us, and our own experience
confirms this, that from the human point of view, the picture is more
complicated. And it is that complicated
human situation that Jesus is addressing with his parables. Jesus isn’t a theologian, he’s a
preacher. So the purpose behind his
parables is not to convince people to get new ideas about God. It is to train them for the Kingdom of
Heaven. It is to give them a way to
follow that leads through the tangle of human complications to the simplicity
of life in God, with God. It is to help
to see how God really is present and active and working in the world around
them, in their lives. The parables are
meant to show people how to align themselves with the flow of God’s power, to
go with it, and to let it carry them where God wants to go.
But
when we hear parables one after another the way Matthew’s Gospel presents them,
it seems that they are not all saying the same thing. For example, there are those that compare the
Kingdom of Heaven to a person who discovers something unique and particular: a
pearl of great price, or a field with a buried treasure. That person then goes and sells everything
else that he has in order to purchase that one precious thing. But others say it is like something extremely
common, a mustard seed or yeast in dough, that grows and accomplishes its
purpose easily and naturally. Is it like
the dragnet that catches every kind of fish in the sea, so that they can be
sorted into good or bad, or like the one we had last week about the field where
the wheat and the weeds are growing up together, and it does more harm than
good to try separate them? If you were
trying to turn these sayings into a consistent doctrine of what the Kingdom of
Heaven is and how it operates, you’d have to conclude that Jesus is a pretty
poor theologian.
But,
again, that would be to misunderstand what the parables are trying to do. As we’ve said, they are not aimed at getting
people to understand a concept, but to go in a different direction with their
lives. I think it helps to see how this
works if we imagine that Jesus spoke each of these parables on a different
occasion. Each time, there were people
in the audience who hadn’t been there before.
Each time, the setting was a little different—a market town, a fishing
village, or a farming community—and the situation was different—the news from
the capital, the questions people asked, the things that had been going on in their
lives. The parables seem to say different
things because each circumstance and audience called for something different.
And,
in particular, every person and every crowd that Jesus spoke to had its own form
of resistance to his message. We all
have our habitual, unexamined ways of thinking, which are a way of keeping God
at a distance. So if you inviting people
to get involved in their lives in a different way, to be a part of what God is
doing in the world right now, you need words that take them where they don’t
expect, and maybe don’t want, to go. The
author of Matthew understands this, and he uses Jesus’ parables in a way that
he thinks will have the most impact on his
audience, and will speak to their
situation. For his community of
marginalized Jewish Christians, the parables manifest the unique importance of
Jesus as a prophet and teacher. They
speak to the mystery of why it is that so many of their brothers and sisters
not only fail to understand his significance, but strenuously, even violently
oppose it. Matthew makes the parables,
with their unexpected reversals of meaning, a metaphor for the Gospel as a
whole. He turns the drama of
understanding or not understanding the parables into the prelude to the final
judgment of the world. Matthew sharpens
the parables into a sword, to cut through fear, confusion, and indecision and
show how high the stakes are in this fight and to say that it is time to take
sides.
And,
just so we understand what he is doing, Matthew concludes this section on the
parables in the following way: Jesus
asks, "’Have you understood all this?’” and the crowd all answered, ‘Yes.’"
(Again, the focus of the passage is that
the people should grasp what they are hearing and decide about it for
themselves.) 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.’" This could be a reference to Jesus, who
quotes the law and the prophets, when it helps to get his point across, but also
feels free to create surprising new teachings.
But it could just as easily refer to Matthew himself, who has the
audacity to write a new book of holy scripture for the sake of his community. He works creatively with all kinds of old
material—the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, different collections
of the sayings of Jesus, many would say the Gospel of Mark—and shapes them into
a new story that he hopes will wake people up to see what they could not see
and do what they fear to do.
This
process didn’t stop with the writing of the Gospel of Matthew. The Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t frozen in that
moment, like an insect in a lump of amber.
It has kept growing, like the seed of a mustard plant, so the process of
trying to communicate it hasn’t stopped either.
And if we want to perceive the working of God in the world in our own
day, to align our lives with it, and to help others to get into that flow, the
question of what language to use looms large.
What treasures can we bring out of the storehouse, both old and new,
with the power to change the way we see, and the way we walk? Of course, as a preacher, I wrestle with this
question almost every day. But I don’t
think this is just my work, or just my responsibility. I’ve been trying to introduce it into the discernment
conversation that is happening in formal and informal ways in our congregation
right now—as we seek to clarify our shared understanding of who we are and what
we need and what we are called to become, I keep wondering “what are the images
and stories from our tradition that speak most powerfully to our
circumstances?”
And
this needn’t apply only to our life together in the parish. For our personal faith to come alive, and for
us to become effective Christians in the world, we all need some training as
scribes for the Kingdom of Heaven. I
think some regular reflection on the scriptures, in private reading or familiar
conversation, even if it is just to take the little lectionary insert from the
bulletin home after church, to read again and think about it during the week
can be really important. Not in order to
construct a theological system, or to be able to quote verses for the sake of
argument, but to rummage in the storehouse of our own imagination, to wonder
about what those ancient people said, and why it was important to them and how
it might be important to us. And if you
are already doing this you know what kinds of surprising treasures you bring
out of it, some of them old, and some of them new.
No comments:
Post a Comment