"The Kingdom of Heaven is like..."

A Sermon by Jamie Howison on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Robert Farrar Capon

We have before us tonight a set of five short parables, all of them parables of the kingdom. In Robert Capon’s categorization of the parables, the first ones that appear in the gospels are a series of parables of the kingdom, and that’s where we’ve been reading for the past couple of Sundays with first the parable of the sower and then last week with the parable of the wheat and the weeds. As they’re presented to us this evening, they come quickly: the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like, the kingdom of heaven is like…

The first two say something about the mystery of the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field,” Jesus says. A mustard seed is tiny—perhaps not the tiniest of all seeds, but certainly small enough to suit his teaching purpose—and it grows to be the greatest of shrubs, he says to them, which might lead you to pause for a moment. As prairie people, we’ve probably all driven past a field of domesticated mustard, and it just doesn’t qualify as a great shrub, right? Except that Jesus isn’t talking about domesticated mustard, but about the sort that would have grown close to the Sea of Galilee, and which routinely reached to a height of eight or ten feet.

So the point is that the kingdom Jesus is promising is like something very small that grows into something very large, which is a point that is deepened and nuanced when he turns to his next brief parable about yeast. “The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” Notice first of all that he’s not shy about having a woman symbolize the role of the Father here, which is notable. And because we don’t typically know anything about “measures” of flour, we don’t really get the full scale of what he’s saying. As Robert Capon puts it,

This is no slip of a girl making two tiny loaves for her husband’s pleasure. This is a baker, folks. Three measure is a bushel of flour, for crying out loud! That’s 128 cups! That’s 16 five-pound bags! And when you get done putting in the 42 or so cups of water you need to make it come together, you’ve got a little over 101 pounds of dough on your hands.

When Jesus says the whole is leavened, he’s not kidding. The lump stands for the whole world… (Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom)

The world, in other words, is leavened in such a way that once the yeast goes to work, there’s no way to stop it. Once the kingdom of God is at work in the world—at work in a way that is hidden in the same way that yeast is essentially dissolved into dough—well… its work is being done even if all we can do is to trust that fact.

But no sooner has he got the imaginations of the disciples spinning with the scale of that image, and he’s on to two more. This kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone will then turn around and do all he can to put together the funds to buy that field. It is like a merchant who sells all he has to purchase one pearl of great price. It is worth everything we’ve got, in other words. Don’t fuss around with any fearful anxieties around being a cautious investor. This thing he calls the kingdom of heaven is worth your everything. Oh, and you’ll not ever regret risking your all for it either, which is really the point of these two quick parables.

And here I can imagine that the minds and hearts of those disciples are just spinning, as the four little parables just add more and more to their understanding of who they’re really sitting with here. This Jesus is somehow at the very heart of the Kingdom of God… right?

That’s what you see in the Gospels; a gradual awakening in their somewhat thick heads to the fact that Jesus is the Christ; the promised one, the Messiah, the bringer about of the God’s kingdom right in their midst. Of course, it dawns on them rather slowly, and in Matthew’s telling it is fully three chapters later that Peter finally has the courage to say it out loud.

Jesus said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. (Mt 16:15-17)

And even at that, Peter will still slip and stumble and not quite get right what the fullness of Jesus life—and death—ultimately mean for the world.

But back to today’s gospel. After those four quick parables comes one more, and this one has a tougher edge. Listen again.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

He's talking to a group that includes a good many folks who’d made their living fishing, so they know something about nets and what all gets pulled up when you’re out to catch decent fish. Interestingly, the original Greek doesn’t use the word “fish”—they caught fish of every kind—but instead it is the Greek word genous, which means something closer to breed or species. Those nets hauled up bottom feeders, shellfish (considered out of bounds for a kosher diet), and all manner of detritus from the bottom of the sea. Of course along with that comes all of the lovely fish they’d set out to catch, and so now the sorting begins. They keep the good, he says, but throw away the bad; in Greek the sapra, or the rotten.

This then moves to its parabolic climax, which says that at the end of the age the angels will come and divide the evil from the righteous, tossing the evil or the wicked into the furnace of fire.

“Do you understand all of this?” Jesus asks them, and there are nodding heads all around. But I wonder, what did they understand? Did they think then that they had to somehow count themselves amongst the righteous, paying more attention to the demands of the torah and lining themselves up to be the righteous characters who will sit at his right and left hands while the angels do their sorting work? If that’s where they’d landed, then what they needed was a serious dose of their teacher’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension, and probably a good solid dose of the proclamation that St Paul will ultimately bring to the world and the church. Paul is not persuaded, of course, that any one of us can be righteous on our own steam, but rather we are “justified by God’s grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Or, to cite Robert Capon once again,

We are not judged by our previous performances; rather, we are judged by what Jesus did for us on the cross. He pronounces an authoritative ‘good’ over the whole world that he has caught in the net of his reconciliation.

But, you might ask, what about the detritus that is pulled up from the bottom of the sea, the stuff that is deemed sapra, or rotten? Here I offer one final insight from Fr. Capon:

It is only those who want to argue with that gracious word who are then pronounced ‘bad’. Both heaven and hell are populated entirely and only by forgiven sinners. Hell is just a courtesy for those who insist they want no part of forgiveness.

And speaking for myself, I most definitely want a part of that forgiveness.