Proper 12A
Parables of the Kingdom?
Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52
It's high summer. So why does a punnet of soft fruit cost £1.99? This time of the year you should be able to get strawberries, and peaches and apricots for half that—or have I gone addle-headed? It's not my imagination is it? I see the sign "Strawberries Half Price" but the label reads £2 bar a penny, and the implication is that £4 would be a just price for a punnet of strawberries. £4 for strawberries in July! My Gran who was something of a Strawberry Queen must be turning in her grave. At this time of the year she and her neighbours would have so many that she literally couldn't give them away.
Food prices have risen sharply recently. We all know it. It’s a vexation and a worry—the supermarket bill constantly rises. I’m old enough to remember when there were no supermarkets. I can just remember being able to spend a farthing in a shop – there were 960 farthings in a pound – and I could buy from Mr Read’s mobile shop a chewy sweet, called a Black Jack or a Fruit Salad for a farthing. That meant the thruppence my Gran used to treat me with went quite a long way.
According to the National Statistics Office, in those days the average family spent a full third of its total income on food. Yes, you could buy four Black Jacks for a penny—but there were simply a lot less pennies available to buy frivolous things like chewy sweets. Despite the recent price increases, nowadays the average family spends less than a sixth of its income on food. We spend far less of what we earn on this basic necessity than was spent when Black Jacks were a farthing each.
Think on those often repeated and terrible pictures of places in this world where the reverse is true—where food price increases aren’t about the proportion of income that must be spent because the ordinary price is now beyond the resources local people have to exchange. I remember the film clip of a camel herder struggling to get his emaciated beast to its feet knowing that if he didn’t its death would mark the end of any chance he had of feeding his family. Drought had driven down the value of animals while things like maize had increased in price by 500% or more. A goat there was worth less than the cost of a pair of plastic flip-flops.
Jesus put before the crowds another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like ...’ Like what? Does the supermarket shopper who is exasperated at another ten pence on a loaf of bread hear the same parable as the despairing camel driver? No. The one hears rather sentimental tales of unanticipated growth, something big and good coming from something small and insignificant. The comfort of thinking God can do something wonderful with even the tiniest bit of faith. The other hears a frightening tale of an invasive plant sowed perhaps in desperation because it grows and therefore might produce something usable quickly, but with it is the threat that because it is so hard to get rid of it may stultify the land and make it unavailable for future better crops. Once it is grown big it will seed itself again and again; the danger of God’s purposes that grow and can’t be stopped; that can't be controlled.
[If we are to hear the voice of Jesus in these parables, we have to hear them as disturbing and challenging, not reassuring and familiar. We have to hear them with the ears of the camel herder not the supermarket shopper]
Or the supermarket shopper hears a nice little domestic tale of a woman kneading dough. Her careful handling is rewarded by a huge risen mixture that will nourish many. But the other hears it as speaking of corruption—after all in the Jewish faith leaven is the thing to be avoided at the holiest time of the year, Passover. To the nomad yeast is a difficult thing, it oozes and bubbles and collapses, it's hard to handle when you need to be ready to follow the animals quickly. It’s a kind of contamination of the flour that otherwise is easily handled and cooked. And what she produces is enough to feed a hundred. How do you pack that quickly onto a camel?
Jesus told these parables to people much closer to the herdsman’s experience than to the supermarket shoppers’. More than four out of every five people who lived in the Palestine of Jesus’ day lived lives nearer to the experience of the camel herder than the supermarket shopper. They lived a subsistence existence—and it is out of that living that they heard these parables.
The people who heard these parables first heard them not as homely and comforting but as subversive; for Jesus speaks of a kingdom that is invasive, unstoppable, a nuisance, urgent, shocking, and abundant. If you want to see what the kingdom is – Listen, Look, Sense, says Jesus; serfs, bonded labourers, are buying land, a peasant woman has baked bread for a hundred people – only God knows how – the kingdom of heaven is rising, and there we find our daily bread. If leaven really is a symbol of corruption; who are the leaven in society? The very people to whom Jesus is speaking, of course. To the wealthy, influential and powerful, the plebs are the tacky mix-ins you’d rather avoid but you can’t because someone is needed to wash the steps, plough the fields, and dig the sewers. Well, says Jesus, I’m here to tell you that in God’s society things are turned upside down, that there is hope and possibility for the leavening lump. Those who are considered unclean, the dregs, the hoi polloi, are the very ones amongst whom the kingdom comes – this is shocking stuff.
God’s empire is absolutely unlike the Roman Empire. It's pervasive rather dominant – it’s like a pungent weed that takes over everything – it’s not mighty and majestic and noble in the sense of imperial – yet it cannot be domesticated. It is universal in scope – fish of every kind were caught. It doesn’t just happen – sometimes you have to search for it like a merchant intent on finding the best pearls. It’s risky and people do amazing things to be part of it – like selling all that you have to buy a field for heaven’s sake! Do you ever wonder what the man did when he got hold of that field? Does he just sit there self-satisfied in the knowledge that he knows something about the grass no one else knows? That’s no model for faith. No, the one trained for heaven brings out of the treasure what’s old and what’s new. In other words shares it that others may see it—whether in old ways or new.
These disturbing little tales tell us that we cannot possess the treasure for ourselves. We cannot own and control the Gospel of God. It comes as a great and wondrous treasure. Here we are gathered in the field. ‘We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own goodness, but in you manifold mercy …’ That’s the way we are always invited to the field of great treasure. We didn’t have to buy the field: Christ bought it for us—for supermarket shoppers and camel herdsmen. For all.
So hear these parable anew – the gospel is Good news – literally, it can’t be old hat. So how might we write them anew to hear Jesus speak here and now? Try it for your self. The kingdom of heaven is like one grape mouldering in the bag brought from the hypermarket. Left in the light the mould grows and next day every grape in the bag is mouldy.
The kingdom of heaven is like a slot machine. Many come and gamble their money and leave with nothing. Then comes a woman with her last pound coin. She hits the buttons, the dials spin, and the cherries halt in a line, the lights flash and the music plays, and out pour the coins until there are too many for her carry.
The kingdom of heaven is like a bee. It stings and can kill some people, but the land of milk and honey wouldn’t have any honey without it.
Or one I’ve been toying with over the last few days: do you remember Tracey Emin’s art work My Bed short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1999. Displayed in the Tate it literally was a bed: rumpled sheets, pillows, tights and a towel—all stained. With alongside it vodka bottles, slippers, underwear, empty cigarette packets, other detritus, and a white fluffy toy. It caused great media furore and was eventually sold to Charles Saatchi I think for £150,000. Earlier this year it was auctioned for a staggering £2.2 million. So how about ….?
The kingdom of heaven is like Tracey Emin’s My Bed. All who see it, judge it. To some it is harrowingly frank, moving and authentic; to others it is a sham, distasteful and disgusting. No one who sees it is indifferent; it draws from each condemnation or praise.
What do you think? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but it does do what Jesus does in these parables—takes objects and thoughts in common use and makes of them signs of the kingdom, refusing the temptation to domestic them to suit our own outlook, and looking for that determined hopefulness that turns the commonplace into the language of heaven, that dares to talk of heaven in the language of earth. Or as someone put it, if you want to grow towards God you have to grow like an onion—with your head firmly on the ground.
Food prices have risen sharply recently. We all know it. It’s a vexation and a worry—the supermarket bill constantly rises. I’m old enough to remember when there were no supermarkets. I can just remember being able to spend a farthing in a shop – there were 960 farthings in a pound – and I could buy from Mr Read’s mobile shop a chewy sweet, called a Black Jack or a Fruit Salad for a farthing. That meant the thruppence my Gran used to treat me with went quite a long way.
According to the National Statistics Office, in those days the average family spent a full third of its total income on food. Yes, you could buy four Black Jacks for a penny—but there were simply a lot less pennies available to buy frivolous things like chewy sweets. Despite the recent price increases, nowadays the average family spends less than a sixth of its income on food. We spend far less of what we earn on this basic necessity than was spent when Black Jacks were a farthing each.
Think on those often repeated and terrible pictures of places in this world where the reverse is true—where food price increases aren’t about the proportion of income that must be spent because the ordinary price is now beyond the resources local people have to exchange. I remember the film clip of a camel herder struggling to get his emaciated beast to its feet knowing that if he didn’t its death would mark the end of any chance he had of feeding his family. Drought had driven down the value of animals while things like maize had increased in price by 500% or more. A goat there was worth less than the cost of a pair of plastic flip-flops.
Jesus put before the crowds another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like ...’ Like what? Does the supermarket shopper who is exasperated at another ten pence on a loaf of bread hear the same parable as the despairing camel driver? No. The one hears rather sentimental tales of unanticipated growth, something big and good coming from something small and insignificant. The comfort of thinking God can do something wonderful with even the tiniest bit of faith. The other hears a frightening tale of an invasive plant sowed perhaps in desperation because it grows and therefore might produce something usable quickly, but with it is the threat that because it is so hard to get rid of it may stultify the land and make it unavailable for future better crops. Once it is grown big it will seed itself again and again; the danger of God’s purposes that grow and can’t be stopped; that can't be controlled.
[If we are to hear the voice of Jesus in these parables, we have to hear them as disturbing and challenging, not reassuring and familiar. We have to hear them with the ears of the camel herder not the supermarket shopper]
Or the supermarket shopper hears a nice little domestic tale of a woman kneading dough. Her careful handling is rewarded by a huge risen mixture that will nourish many. But the other hears it as speaking of corruption—after all in the Jewish faith leaven is the thing to be avoided at the holiest time of the year, Passover. To the nomad yeast is a difficult thing, it oozes and bubbles and collapses, it's hard to handle when you need to be ready to follow the animals quickly. It’s a kind of contamination of the flour that otherwise is easily handled and cooked. And what she produces is enough to feed a hundred. How do you pack that quickly onto a camel?
Jesus told these parables to people much closer to the herdsman’s experience than to the supermarket shoppers’. More than four out of every five people who lived in the Palestine of Jesus’ day lived lives nearer to the experience of the camel herder than the supermarket shopper. They lived a subsistence existence—and it is out of that living that they heard these parables.
The people who heard these parables first heard them not as homely and comforting but as subversive; for Jesus speaks of a kingdom that is invasive, unstoppable, a nuisance, urgent, shocking, and abundant. If you want to see what the kingdom is – Listen, Look, Sense, says Jesus; serfs, bonded labourers, are buying land, a peasant woman has baked bread for a hundred people – only God knows how – the kingdom of heaven is rising, and there we find our daily bread. If leaven really is a symbol of corruption; who are the leaven in society? The very people to whom Jesus is speaking, of course. To the wealthy, influential and powerful, the plebs are the tacky mix-ins you’d rather avoid but you can’t because someone is needed to wash the steps, plough the fields, and dig the sewers. Well, says Jesus, I’m here to tell you that in God’s society things are turned upside down, that there is hope and possibility for the leavening lump. Those who are considered unclean, the dregs, the hoi polloi, are the very ones amongst whom the kingdom comes – this is shocking stuff.
God’s empire is absolutely unlike the Roman Empire. It's pervasive rather dominant – it’s like a pungent weed that takes over everything – it’s not mighty and majestic and noble in the sense of imperial – yet it cannot be domesticated. It is universal in scope – fish of every kind were caught. It doesn’t just happen – sometimes you have to search for it like a merchant intent on finding the best pearls. It’s risky and people do amazing things to be part of it – like selling all that you have to buy a field for heaven’s sake! Do you ever wonder what the man did when he got hold of that field? Does he just sit there self-satisfied in the knowledge that he knows something about the grass no one else knows? That’s no model for faith. No, the one trained for heaven brings out of the treasure what’s old and what’s new. In other words shares it that others may see it—whether in old ways or new.
These disturbing little tales tell us that we cannot possess the treasure for ourselves. We cannot own and control the Gospel of God. It comes as a great and wondrous treasure. Here we are gathered in the field. ‘We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own goodness, but in you manifold mercy …’ That’s the way we are always invited to the field of great treasure. We didn’t have to buy the field: Christ bought it for us—for supermarket shoppers and camel herdsmen. For all.
So hear these parable anew – the gospel is Good news – literally, it can’t be old hat. So how might we write them anew to hear Jesus speak here and now? Try it for your self. The kingdom of heaven is like one grape mouldering in the bag brought from the hypermarket. Left in the light the mould grows and next day every grape in the bag is mouldy.
The kingdom of heaven is like a slot machine. Many come and gamble their money and leave with nothing. Then comes a woman with her last pound coin. She hits the buttons, the dials spin, and the cherries halt in a line, the lights flash and the music plays, and out pour the coins until there are too many for her carry.
The kingdom of heaven is like a bee. It stings and can kill some people, but the land of milk and honey wouldn’t have any honey without it.
Or one I’ve been toying with over the last few days: do you remember Tracey Emin’s art work My Bed short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1999. Displayed in the Tate it literally was a bed: rumpled sheets, pillows, tights and a towel—all stained. With alongside it vodka bottles, slippers, underwear, empty cigarette packets, other detritus, and a white fluffy toy. It caused great media furore and was eventually sold to Charles Saatchi I think for £150,000. Earlier this year it was auctioned for a staggering £2.2 million. So how about ….?
The kingdom of heaven is like Tracey Emin’s My Bed. All who see it, judge it. To some it is harrowingly frank, moving and authentic; to others it is a sham, distasteful and disgusting. No one who sees it is indifferent; it draws from each condemnation or praise.
What do you think? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but it does do what Jesus does in these parables—takes objects and thoughts in common use and makes of them signs of the kingdom, refusing the temptation to domestic them to suit our own outlook, and looking for that determined hopefulness that turns the commonplace into the language of heaven, that dares to talk of heaven in the language of earth. Or as someone put it, if you want to grow towards God you have to grow like an onion—with your head firmly on the ground.
