Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot, Christ Church, Bulkington, and Holy Cross, Seend
Romans 8.26–39; Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52.
“‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered ‘Yes.’
Sir John Everett Millais, The Leaven (1864) in the Prints and Drawings Room, Tate Britain, London.
Have you understood all this? The yeast and the flour and the treasure in the field, and the pearl of great price? And the good fish and the bad fish – and the furnace of fire?
The disciples confidently told Jesus that, yes, they had. But at this stage of Matthew’s Gospel, when He is still teaching and healing in Galilee, there is much they don’t understand about Jesus Himself. The disciples are far from working out that Jesus is the Messiah, further still from realising that Jesus is not here to bring them a lifetime of comfort and worldly success, but to die for the sake of their eternities. So perhaps one of the things that we’re seeing in this morning’s Gospel is how much the disciples have yet to understand about Christ, how much work the yeast has yet to do, how far the mustard seed has yet to grow. As with them, so also with us – or at least let us hope that God still has much spiritual growth to raise in us.
One point of parables is that people can never understand them in their entirety – they land differently with each of us, and each of us will read them differently at different points of our lives. Like the kingdom of heaven itself, when we try to grasp the parables too tightly, to turn them into definitive statements of policy that we can use to make ourselves into insiders and others into outsiders, then they disappear into meaninglessness.
Yet there are insiders and outsiders, says Christ. There are good and bad fish – and the bad fish will be thrown into a furnace of fire. I always like to sidestep the implications the implications of the bits of the Bible where people get put in the fire by talking about the refiner’s fire, the furnace that turns a cheap alloy into gold or silver. But what is left when you throw an unhealthy fish into a furnace, but perhaps a few charred bones? This set of parables isn’t just hard to understand, it finishes on a hard and judging note.
Now, it won’t have been apparent as you heard it read, but the lectionary-setters have remixed the original – look at the pew-sheet. The first two parables were told to the crowds at the lake, the final three told later to the disciples privately.
The two preached to the crowds have a common theme: the kingdom of heaven is often like things that work in the background, things that are small and hidden at first – a mustard seed growing under the ground, yeast in a batch of sourdough – that produce extraordinary abundance in the fullness of time. The mustard bush parable is obvious, but the “three measures of flour” sounds abstract at first. It is actually a Hebrew measure of the volume of dry goods – Jesus is talking about 25 litres of flour here, which would result in about 20 kilos of bread once baked. The kingdom of heaven isn’t like a little morsel to scrape with gruel, but enough bread for a serious wedding party. So the crowds are told that what seem to be little things work away in the background to produce a tremendous abundance. The kingdom of heaven is not about God being stingy with us, or demanding asceticism for its own sake. In the kingdom of heaven, all our hungers will be well satisfied, and the natural world will flourish.
The first two parables given to the disciples privately imply that you must be prepared to give up everything you have for the kingdom of heaven – that again is obvious – and that if you understand how precious the kingdom of heaven is, that is a price you will gladly pay. More than that, the kingdom of heaven is something hidden, that most people miss. Even when they possess it, they can fail to appreciate it, and even intentionally dispose of it. The people who sell the field and sell the pearl don’t seem to realise the pricelessness of the treasure they are selling for worldly gain. Christ Himself will, in the end, sell everything for the kingdom of heaven: those whom He walked among failed to understand who He was, and almost all of them abandoned Him.
As for the last parable, I can’t escape the furnace of fire, but I don’t like the people who dwell too much on it. Christ told us that we will know people by their fruits, and I tend to find that people who spend too much time dwelling on the furnace of fire – always for other people, never for themselves – produce fruit that seems far from ripeness, an immature Gospel that resembles the attitudes of the scribes and Pharisees.
That’s appropriate given the easily missed final verse about scribes trained for the kingdom of heaven. The scribes are usually paired along with the Pharisees as the major villains in Matthew’s Gospel, obsessing about the details of Scripture while manipulating its interpretation to suit themselves. But a scribe trained in the kingdom of heaven, who interprets Scripture through the lens Christ provides, not only discovers new treasure but cleans and restores the old treasure.
Contrary to our prejudices, it is Paul who softens what Christ leaves hard, in perhaps the finest and most hope-filled passage of all of Paul’s writing, the last part of the eighth chapter of his Letter to the Romans.
Firstly, Paul talks about what the Holy Spirit does to help us – because we do not know how to pray as we should, the Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words”. God is on our side, and if we love God, then all things will work together for our good, even when they seem at first to be threatening or overwhelming. Whatever separates the good from the bad fish, it isn’t a test of wisdom or our power.
Paul also writes of the central truth of Christianity – that far from seeking to punish us or destroy us, the Father sent the Son into the world to die to save us. And if He gave us that, Paul reminds us, is there anything else he will fail to give us? God Himself, in the person of Christ on the Cross, paid the pearl merchant’s price to open the kingdom of heaven to us.
But if nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, why the talk of the furnace of fire? Maybe it is ultimately ours to take the choice to walk into it. Maybe to refuse us the freedom to choose our own destruction would be for God to reduce us to infants – but can our own stupidity and wilfulness really separate us from the love of God forever?
Perhaps. So take your immortal destiny seriously. If there is anything you fear could lead you to that fate, then remember that forgiveness is offered to you at any time. Confess your sins honestly and fully here every Sunday so you can receive God’s forgiveness when the priest pronounces absolution. You can always see me or another priest privately if you need to. God is always far more ready to forgive than we are to ask for forgiveness.
Have you understood all this? Well I, for one, have not. But the little I understand is bread enough to leave me abundantly satisfied on life’s journey. Where it ends is in the hands of God. I trust that it will end with me receiving treasures beyond my earthly imagining, not through my wisdom or good behaviour, but through His love.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.
