New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
30 He also said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it? 31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; 34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.
In
an episode of the Golden Girls, over the kitchen table probably eating
cheesecake, one comforts another mourning the loss of a friend by saying,
“Maybe it was just a blessing in disguise.”
The wise elder, Sophia, replies, “I always wondered why blessings wear
disguises. If I was a blessing, I’d run
around naked.” To be honest, that’s kind
of how I’ve thought of Jesus speaking the
Word in parables. If the Word is what we, as Christians, believe to be a healing word, a saving word, a transforming word, why complicate the message in parables? And rather than Christ rely on our feeble attempts at deciphering His Word in the parables, shouldn’t He have just let the Word run around naked for all to see?
Parables.
They are not quite nursery rhymes, where the moral of the story is made
abundantly clear by the happily-ever-after end.
And they are not quite riddles, for I do not believe Jesus was
attempting to confuse or trick anyone. Instead,
they are vague references, analogies, to something profound and mysterious. They are hazy reflections that require our
individual interpretation; individual interpretations that necessarily complicate
corporate dogmatism, doctrines, and creeds.
For instance, those of us raised in church think we know what Christ’s
parables mean because we have been taught time and time again what they are
supposed to mean based on our tradition’s interpretation of them. And those not raised in church may think they
know what the parables mean because if one really looks at the stories hard
enough he can tease them out logically and rationally. There’s a kind of universal ethic or reason
that can ultimately be discerned.
But I’ve started to wonder, do we really
know what they mean? Can we ever really
know what they mean?
Over the course of my life, I have been
taught so many things, so many contradictory things in fact, that I
consistently find myself hesitate before giving an answer because I’m afraid
the hearer will believe me to be wrong.
I over-intellectualize, over-think, over-analyze the problem and then
the possible solutions, so much so I have to remind myself to stop, take a
breath, BE. I look for the pieces of the
puzzle and then look to how to arrange them.
Even now as I offer this sermon, with sensing your expectation of my
providing answers to these parables we have read, I cannot help but stop and hesitate
and ponder. I tax my brain while my brow
creases and my head aches. Sure, there
is a part of me wants to offer an interpretation of the parables we read about
Christ’s explanations of the Kingdom of God.
But another part of me is much more like the bumbling, simple-minded,
dumbfounded disciples than I wish to admit, who asked more questions in not
trusting their discernment. That part,
like them, ironically fears that Christ, who loves me so dearly, will actually shake
his head sadly and, like he did to his disciples, say, “Do you not understand
these parables? Then how will you
understand any parables?” Unfortunately,
I have not been afforded the luxury of having Jesus explain everything he meant
to me in private.
Some of this insecurity I will blame on
my own Christian tradition which demanded an absolutism of faith and condemned
doubt. Either you had the right answers
or you had the wrong answers, and if wrong, well, that was a very bad and hot
place to be. Some of this insecurity I
will blame on the academy which advocates for critical thinking but in many
cases still has its mind made up about what is right and wrong, liberally or
conservatively speaking, historically speaking, contextually speaking. But really a lot of this fear of being wrong,
of not having the right answer, I blame on Christianity’s historical attempt to
strip any authority from our bodily senses, from our own embodiment of the
divine. I blame our theological
traditions for negating the Spirit’s voice coming from our feelings, as if our
feelings are too tumultuous to be of God.
Instead, what is still lauded when doing interpretation is that we do it
with our minds, with our mental faculties. As if we are still living in modernity, where
every “if” has a “then,” or every “plus” or “minus” has an “equals” sign, we read
the parables and try to “figure them out,” “decode them,” “unravel the meaning”
from them as if they were holding onto true meaning with cold, clinched fists.
Honestly, because of such bias, I would
be relieved if I could look up these parables in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary
and see if my definition of the Kingdom of God is right. Even the Gospel writers themselves perpetuate this
in attempts to give clear, distinct answers about their faith in Christ, a faith
that was being challenged from all sides during the contexts of their writings.
But the more I’ve thought about it, the
more I have sat with these stories Jesus told, trying to figure out what he
meant was the Kingdom of God, trying to figure out what I should offer you
today, I’ve started believing that’s not what Christ wanted us to do at all
when he told parables. He didn’t want us
to hear the story and then walk away with the one solution. Instead, I believe Christ offered parables to
those to whom he spoke so that they, we, anyone and everyone, are able to
connect to and embody the narrative with the raw sense, the emotion, the feeling
he wanted to portray so as to find a treasure of answers, from God to you.
Jesus, himself, had personally, humanly
experienced the content of his parables.
He touched the soil with the skin of his fingertips, felt it under his
fingernails when he scribbled something in the dirt, breathed in the dust of
the roads and the odor of livestock. Jesus
heard birds singing from their nests, saw them carrying food to their chicks
there and lamented that he had no place to rest his head unlike them calling from
their homes in the branches above. He even
felt alone, out of the know, misunderstood, when his extended family thought he
was insane and sent him packing with the family he had to create in the
disciples. And even if these parables
were stories that had been told to him as a child, it is likely that he knew
farmers personally and probable that his mother or aunt grew a mustard shrub
and other herbs in their gardens. Because
Jesus lived, he felt. He lived and
breathed his narratives.
Therefore, for Jesus and his followers, I
believe these parables are not about a clear picture, a mirror image of what the
Kingdom looks like, but instead about the deep feeling the Kingdom evokes from
the core, from our hearts. When he says,
if you have ears, hear, eyes, see, I believe he says, use the gift of your
humanness, your human senses, those profoundly mysterious parts of your
embodiment to become fully aware, to interpret from your experience what God is
saying to you, God’s children, heirs to the Kingdom. Move through the barriers you have between
body and soul, mind and heart, and just feel.
So my dear fellow-intellectuals, whether we
like it or not, these parables about the Kingdom of God are really more touchy-feely than mathematic formulae. They require all your senses to come
alive. When you read them, you must
smell the soil of the earth, let it cake your hands when on your knees as the
sower. You must walk through the wide,
open field and hear rows of stalks that seemed to appear overnight rustle
against one another in the breezes. You
must see the bright color of the grain’s head to know that it is ripe for
harvest in autumn and feel your stomach ache for the warm bread it will soon make. When you read the parables, you must feel the
tiny mustard seed in your fingertips. And
then in amazement years later, cool under its expansive shade on a hot, summer
day. You must hear the birds in spring making
their little homes above you in that wide mustard shrub, flitting from branch
to branch with beaks full of twigs while chirping their unique melodies. After hearing the parables like those who
heard them for the first time, you must sense.
You must tingle. You must feel.
So in thinking about these parables read today,
I ask not what does the Kingdom of God look like to you. What is the answer to the parable offered by
Christ. But rather, I invite you into an
exercise, to wonder along with me, based on your human experience along with
your embodied embrace by God’s Love, how do these parables Christ offers about
the Kingdom of God make you feel? Using
all of your human senses, your emotions, body, and spirit, what does the Kingdom
of God feel like to you? Look, listen, touch, taste, and smell.
“The kingdom of God is as if someone would
scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the
seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk,
then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in
with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
[T]he kingdom of God…is like a mustard
seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on
earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs,
and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in
its shade.
In closing, I would be remiss if I did
not very briefly offer you what these two parables feel like to me, what the
Kingdom of God feels like to me, today, this moment in my life as I hopefully
graduate and head off and away with some uncertainty into my own narrative, so
let me just offer this:
After feeling the parable of the sower,
for me, the Kingdom of God feels like the following living parable in my
life: The time of my looking out the
window to the sky to pray on a day I was especially worried, distraught, and afraid
and seeing a bright red heart-shaped balloon suddenly rise up into view towards
the big white puffy clouds, which immediately caused me to remember Christ’s faithful
love, so I exclaimed, no matter what - it’s all going to be okay. Like the continuing seasons of God’s Love
ever there for me to harvest, that’s what the Kingdom of God feels like to me
today.
After feeling the parable of the mustard
seed, for me, the Kingdom of God feels like the following living parable in my
life: The time on a chilly twilight in
New York City when I was walking back to my apartment among the crowds, lonely
and brokenhearted after a bad breakup, when on 8th Avenue and 34th
Street near Madison Square Garden, amidst all the steel and concrete and glass,
a single firefly dropped and passed in front of my tear-filled eyes, blinking
its natural light, causing me to smile, and leading me down the street towards
home. How a tiny insect of my rural
roots flew into the massive, anonymous city and made me feel safe, secure…
Home. That’s what the Kingdom of God feels like to me today.
Possibilities,
Security,
Home:
Radical Supernatural Love.
That’s what the Kingdom of God feels like
to me today.
After feeling these parables and after
reflecting on your own living, embodied parables, what does the Kingdom of God
feel like to you, today?
