Penelope Bridges
My mind is full of questions today, prompted by our Scripture readings. First, I have questions about Genesis. In today’s episode of the Jacob soap opera, Laban tricks his nephew Jacob into marrying the wrong girl; Leah obviously goes along with the deception; and somehow it’s not until the morning after the wedding that Jacob discovers the truth. After another seven years of indentured servitude, he marries the right girl, his beloved Rachel, in addition to Leah. So much for Biblical marriage values.
My question is: what does this story teach us about God? How can this incredibly dysfunctional family, full of cheats and shady characters, represent the people chosen by God to carry forward a covenant of love and faithfulness? Look at the twisted threads of this story: Jacob, the younger twin, becomes the patriarch rather than his older brother Esau. Rachel, the younger daughter, is Jacob’s true love; but it is Leah who becomes the mother of Judah, and many generations later it’s Judah’s descendants who will include Joseph, the legal father of Jesus. Perhaps the answer to my question is that God works in mysterious, unexpected ways, through flawed characters and unlikely plot twists.
Turning to the Gospel, after a couple of weeks of Jesus telling long, detailed parables about wheat and weeds, today he offers us a scattershot of soundbites, super-short parables that cover a multitude of contexts: gardening, baking, treasure-hunting, investment practices, fishing. So here are my questions about the Gospel: What ties all these diverse things together? And how do they together offer us an image of the Kingdom of God?
These images of mustard seeds, yeast, fishing and the rest might feel distant from us in our postmodern, money-based, urban economy. But each of them represents a dynamic that we can recognize in our own context today.
The mustard seed was a tiny thing, an invasive weed, that stowed away in a sack of good seed. It took root and grew to be something much bigger than its host crop, ultimately and perhaps serendipitously providing a home for wildlife.
In the time of Jesus yeast was regarded as something unclean and unwelcome in the home, as a catalyst for fermentation and rotting. Yet a woman can take that unclean thing, allow it to swell and multiply, and use it to make an abundance of bread that will feed a large family.
The treasure is hidden in a field that someone comes across accidentally: it’s not his field, but he buys the field to obtain the treasure without disclosing to the owner what he has found. Not the most honest or transparent way to do business.
The merchant makes a risky investment, putting all his eggs in one basket or rather one perfect pearl.
And the net indiscriminately gathers up all kinds of marine creatures, both those good for eating and those regarded as dangerous or ritually unclean; and the fishermen throw away what they don’t want, leaving the dead fish to rot in the sun.
If Jesus were telling parables of the Kingdom of God today he would use very different images. Maybe he would say:
The Kingdom of God is like a meme that someone posted to social media and it became viral, provoking a world-wide response.
The Kingdom of God is like a Bitcoin that someone bought with their life savings.
The Kingdom of God is like a lottery ticket that someone picked up off the street.
The Kingdom of God is like a successful lawyer who abandoned her practice to go to seminary and seek ordination.
The Kingdom of God is like a crowd at a Pride parade that gets sprinkled indiscriminately with holy water, blessing both those who welcome it and those who resist it.
Jesus asks his listeners, “Have you understood all this?” and they answer, “Yes.” Hmmm. I wonder. If I were to ask you if you understood the parables I just suggested and you said yes, I would suspect you were not paying attention; because even I am not quite sure what they mean in detail. A parable doesn’t have to make sense in its every nuance: it’s like a cartoon, a rough sketch of something that illustrates a broad truth.
And here’s what I think that broad truth is: Do you see how there is something shady, something subversive, something disorderly about each of these images, both those in the Gospel and those I suggested? The Kingdom of God, according to the parables, is reckless, messy, unpredictable, even a little dangerous, and certainly unorthodox in the way it grows and spreads.
Like yeast or a mustard seed, the Kingdom of God can be nurtured in small, quiet, unobtrusive ways, taking time to become visible and to have a noticeable effect.
Like the field with hidden treasure or the single pearl, the Kingdom of God has tremendous value, but that value may not be immediately obvious, even to those who think they own it; and those who seek it may have to take some risks, even to the extent of handing over their whole life, in order to find it.
And, like the net that gathers in fish of every kind, or the holy water at the Pride parade, the Kingdom of God welcomes “all sorts and conditions of men”, as the old Prayer Book puts it; including saints and sinners, people we may regard as unqualified and good for nothing, people we like and those we don’t like, people whose theology matches ours and those who are startlingly different. And, in the end, it will be up to God alone (or God’s deputies, the angels) to do the sorting out.
Because we are not qualified to decide who or what belongs in the Kingdom of God. We are not even qualified to understand exactly what it is. Our job as followers of Jesus is to be inclusive and non-discriminating, to invite everyone to be a part of this messy, subversive enterprise, and to give it what it needs to grow. We can be like the mustard seed or the yeast, or the meme, with small initiatives, individual invitations, random acts of kindness, protests against injustice at every level, seemingly insignificant gifts and sacrifices, each adding our own mite to the mission of the church. In this place at this time, we can invoke the Kingdom of God right here, in tiny pockets like mustard seeds or grains of yeast in the broken world that we inhabit.
Here’s a little homework for your own pondering: what does the Kingdom of God look like for you? What image or activity might you employ? I would invite you to spend a minute now discussing it with your neighbor, but I have a feeling it might take more than a minute for most of us to come up with answers that would satisfy us. And perhaps that in itself is a characteristic of the Kingdom of God: that it’s so hard to define. To paraphrase a famous moment in legal history, we may not be able to define it, but I am convinced that we will know it when we see it.
We will know it by the joy, peace, and community that will one day envelop our world and all of creation. In the meantime we will continue to pray as St. Paul urges us, trusting in the unconditional love of God and using the words Jesus taught us: thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
