July 24, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A New (sub)Version

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 78:1-8
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52, 54-58

“The kingdom of heaven is like . . .”

Matthew 13:31 (NRSV)

It has been said of Matthew’s Gospel: “Matthew will speak to those who value order and history, and sow subversive seeds of the kingdom.” All through Matthew’s Gospel, in and through his ordered account, there is the possibility of being surprised and ambushed by the unexpected. This is a reminder that God chooses whom God will choose to be instruments, servants, agents of God’s purpose.

Leith Fisher
But I Say to You: Exploring the Gospel of Matthew

It has been a somewhat bleak week in the news. I was glad on Wednesday to discover this little gem, a report from Britain about a company that was advertising for jobs in a newspaper: “Nail Technicians Needed, Experience Necessary” went the advert. The company eventually pulled the ad when they received a boatload of applications from beauticians because, you see, they were a construction company looking for formwork carpenters, people who put nails into wood!

Be wary of meaning, be wary of assumptions, I thought when I heard that story. It reminded me of a favorite story, which comes from one of Anthony de Mello’s collections of wisdom stories. One day the priest announced that Jesus himself was coming to church the following Sunday. People turned up in large numbers to see him, as you can imagine. Everyone expected him to preach, but Jesus only smiled when he was introduced and said hello. Everyone offered him hospitality for the night, especially the priest, but he refused politely. He said he would spend the night in church. How fitting, everyone thought. He slipped away early next morning before the church doors were opened. And, to their horror, the priest and the people found that their church had been vandalized. Scribbled everywhere on the walls was a word, “Beware.” No part of the church was spared: the doors and the windows and the pillars, the chancel, the Communion table, even the Bible on the lectern, all with that word written, “Beware.” Scratched in large letters and in small, in pencil and pen and paint of every conceivable color. Wherever the eyes rested, you could see that word. Beware. Beware.

This was shocking to the people, irritating, confusing, terrifying. What were they supposed to beware of? It didn’t say. It just said “Beware.” The first impulse of the people was to wipe out every trace of this defilement, this sacrilege. They were restrained from doing this only by the thought that it was Jesus himself who had done the deed. Over time that mysterious word, beware, began to work in the minds of the people each time they came to church. They began to beware of the scriptures, so that they were able to profit from God’s word without falling into bigotry. They began to beware of sacraments, so they were sanctified without becoming superstitious. The priest began to beware of his power over the people, so he was able to pastor to them without controlling. And everyone began to beware of religion that leads the unwary to self-righteousness. They became law-abiding, yet compassionate to the weak. They began to beware of prayer, so it no longer stopped them from becoming self-reliant. They even began to beware of their notions of God, so they were able to recognize God outside of the narrow confines of their church. They learned to beware.

I share that story as a frame for our thinking this morning about these holy stories that we have heard read, these parables. So often when we encounter the parables, there is a familiarity about them. We expect Jesus to be teaching in this way. It is, of course, an important teaching tool of Jesus, and I’m sure many of us could tell off the top of our heads some of the well-known parables: the parable of the good Samaritan, of the prodigal son, many of these familiar, heart-warming stories. The word in the New Testament that we have, parable, comes from the Greek, meaning to lay one thing alongside the other. It has its roots in and is translated from a Hebrew word, mashal, a word that has a number of different meanings throughout the Bible. It can mean a proverb or a riddle or a fable or a simple story. There is always in this word, mashal, an element of there being double meaning; that’s where you get the parable piece—one thing laid beside another.

In the Seventy-Eighth Psalm, the psalmist speaks about the parable as a dark saying, so perhaps it would be good for us to beware of these parables a little and not just take them at their face value. That would be to stand in a good historic line, for interpretation of the parables has been something that scholars have engaged in over the centuries. One of the very popular ways of approaching this was to see the parable as what’s called an allegory, in which something in the story relates to something else outside the story, a doctrine or a belief. The classic example of this from the medieval church was the understanding of the parable of the good Samaritan, in which each character in the story has an allegorical part. So, for example, it was understood that the victim, the man who was set on by the robbers, stood for humanity in its brokenness and fallenness; that the thieves, the robbers, represented the devil, who was assailing humanity; that the Samaritan is Christ come to save humanity. The beast is the incarnation of Jesus, and the inn that the man is taken to is the church. It was understood that there was a code that you needed to get, and once you had the code you could understand the story.

This long-standing tradition of interpretation shifted at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, when there were a number of important books on parables, particularly those by C.H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias. They argued against these complex allegorical coded meanings and said that at the heart of the parables there is a very simple meaning in each one, a meaning that is immediately accessible to the hearers that Jesus taught so that the people could understand. This is a powerful approach. It helps us as well to recognize some of the Jesus’ skill in storytelling, how he takes the ordinary things of the world and uses them as reflections of the mysteries of our faith, the mysteries of God’s love, for that is what he is talking about in the parables. Ordinary things like mustard or yeast, fish, a family.

Talitha Arnold, a pastor and writer, is helpful in this, she writes, "In the parables it is as if God is in every nook and cranny of daily life." That’s an important thing for us to hold onto, the truth of this immanence, this closeness of God’s presence surrounding us. It’s one of the geniuses of the Celtic Christian prayer tradition to recognize this: God’s presence in the everyday. There is a well-known collection of prayers from the Western Isles of Scotland called the Carmina Gadelica, Latin for “The Songs of the Gaels.” These prayers and runes and blessings are translated from the Gaelic into English and are words that people would be saying as going about their daily business. One of my favorites is the blessing while churning the butter:

Thou who put beam in moon and sun,
Thou who put food in ear and herd,
Thou who put fish in stream and sea,
send the butter up betimes.

There is an incredible joining of the God of creation with the God who cares that the butter come up and be churned. It is very similar to St. Francis’s famous Canticle of the Sun, which we sing as “All Creatures of our God and King.” This sense of God’s presence suffusing creation is very important for the parables, because the parables are not about a concept of heaven that is the not-yet or that which will come in some form of the afterlife, but rather that heaven is absolutely present in the breaking-in of God’s love into our time and place.

So I don’t want to lose sight of the importance of that aspect of the parables, the sense of God’s presence in the everyday. But there has more recently been scholarship done that has moved away from the notion that in each parable there is just one single point, one single meaning that Jesus is trying to get across, but rather the parables speak to us at different levels and in different ways in different contexts.

A good example of this might be two of the parables we heard read this morning: the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; the kingdom of heaven is like yeast.

Now on first looking we might say, yes, there is a plain meaning here: mustard is a small seed and you put in a little yeast and the bread rises, and so this about great oaks coming from little acorns or however you might phrase it. And you might also come at it in a familiar way because, I don’t know about you, but I like mustard on my brats and my hot dogs. And I like yeast because that makes bread for the bun for my brat and my hot dog, and so we can become a little familiar. And then I think, beware, remember our story.

It’s interesting to learn that this plant that Jesus speaks about, this mustard plant, is actually a weed. It is, in fact, the last thing that any farmer in their right mind would want to plant on their land. It’s not just a weed, but it’s one that colonizes whole areas, whole fields, once it is planted. And it’s important to remember the context of the hearers of these parables, so that when Jesus speaks about yeast being folded into the bread, we remember that this is a culture of unleavened bread, that people didn’t want leavened bread. Why? Because it would go off, it would rot. And the reason it would rot was because of the yeast in it. The yeast certainly allows the bread to rise, but it eventually is a corrupter.

Mustard. Yeast. These are not things to be celebrated and welcomed, but rather things to be suspicious of, things, even perhaps, to be rejected. Do you start to get a sense of the “dark saying” in this parable? Jesus is offering a new version of where God’s presence, God’s reign, God’s kingdom comes to us. It’s a new version; we might say it’s a sub-version of what people expect. People expect a God of power and majesty. They expect a messiah who is a warrior, one who is come to overthrow the empire of Rome. Jesus upsets that concept; he subverts that idea and says that the presence of the love of God does not come in the ways that we expect.

It’s not in the powerful, in the mainstream, in the prevailing culture, but it’s through the ways that we perhaps least expect that God comes to us, indeed through that which the world would reject; that is where the gospel lies. And perhaps we should not be surprised in reflecting on this wafer. Isn’t that at the heart of the very gospel that we come to live into and to proclaim? That the last shall be first. That to save your life, first of all, you have to lose your life.

That the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. And isn’t that just played out in the very story of the life and ministry of Jesus? Even, at this point, after telling the parables where he goes to his hometown of Nazareth. What? To be rejected by those who knew him. There is in this rejection a kind of fulfillment of the parables.

So, friends, seek ye first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, but stop looking in the places you expect to find it.

Amen.