When I see pictures of Number 10 Downing Street, my only surprise is that it isn’t a revolving door. This is the week in which our nation has had its seventh new Prime Minister in ten years.
And one of the early criticisms of Andy Burnham, as he announced his first policy decisions, was that many thought he was a people-pleaser. To be a people-pleaser is a weakness. You cannot please all of the people all of the time.
Yet what is one of the most frequent comments I get when people discover I am a minister? They say, “Oh, it must be so hard trying to please everyone” – as if pleasing everyone is what I should do, despite the fact that we recognise elsewhere such behaviour is a weakness.
It is not my job to try to please all of you. It is my job to please God. Whether I do or not is another matter. But that is why I am paid a stipend, not a salary. A stipend is a living allowance so that I can pray and seek what God wants me to do.
All that said, I nevertheless want the content of my preaching to reach as many people as possible. And most weeks, I know that’s a forlorn hope. The theme will be relevant to some people, but not to others.
However, this week is unusual. We heard a variety of short parables from the teaching of Jesus. They come from a block of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven. So, while I am not setting out explicitly to please any of you, I do hope this week that there may be brief relevant elements in the sermon for most people.
We have five parables in our reading, and I will offer a brief point from each.
Firstly, the mustard seed:
We live in a world where people think they need to get known in order to have influence for good. You have to climb the greasy pole of politics, but to do so you need to be known. You may want to publish a book to get your message across, but publishers will ask what kind of a platform you already have: how many people follow you on social media, how many are signed up to receive your email newsletter, and so on. And we have the whole realm of the ‘social media influencer’, who has thousands of followers on YouTube or maybe Instagram. There they pronounce their views and review products that have been sent them free of charge by the manufacturers.
Before we scoff too loudly at current trends, let’s reflect on how many of us said when we were children that we wanted to be famous. How many of us encouraged our own children to follow their dreams, because anybody could see their dreams come true. It’s all cut from the same cloth.
But in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Jesus reverses this. What we do in our present obscurity leads to future greatness in the kingdom.[1] Jesus himself lived out this example. Craig Keener says that Jesus came as a meek servant, wandering around Galilee healing the sick with his group of obscure disciples. The Romans took no notice of him until he offended Jewish aristocrats over the temple system.
In a world with governments in turmoil and full of wandering teachers and magicians, Jesus’ initial arrival as a meek and politically inconspicuous servant rendered his mission as opaque as his parables, except to disciples bearing the insight of faith.[2]
Jesus was content with obscurity. Yes, Jesus, the Son of God! But he knew that even there, without being famous, without being a public face, God could and would do his kingdom work through him.
Are we content to do kingdom of God things quietly, and leave the growth to God?
Secondly, the yeast:
This parable says something similar but takes it a step further. It says something like this: if you are willing to accept the call to serve the kingdom of heaven in obscurity and trust the outcomes to God, will you also be open to just how much God can accomplish this way?
Let’s listen again to Craig Keener:
Although Roman cities had bakeries, Galilean women baked their own families’ bread … The amount of flour involved here … represents roughly fifty pounds, providing enough bread for over one hundred people. A housewife would not normally fix so much meal and could not knead more than this; the unnatural magnitude of the illustration probably suggests that the kingdom far exceeds daily examples to which it may be compared.[3]
Do you want to see God do big things in the world? Then learn that your part in that purpose is not to hype things up but to continue working in obscurity and praying that God will spread the influence far and wide. It’s not something we hack for ourselves.
In pointing out that the word ‘yeast’ is better translated ‘leaven’, Maggi Dawn puts it this way:
If you joined (or observed) the great trend for making sourdough bread during the COVID pandemic, you will understand this: while yeast is something you add to flour to make it expand, leaven is more like sourdough: you add the flour to it, and the new flour is absorbed into the whole. The Kingdom of God is less about making small things bigger, and more about transforming the nature of everything it touches.
Are we ready for God to do something bigger than we can conceive? Do we want him to do that? I’m sure we do. If that is the case, then our task is not to fire up the hype machine, but to continue doing kingdom work in obscurity while praying that he will transform the nature of everything he touches through us.
Thirdly, the buried treasure:
I bought my current camera three years ago. It’s far and away the most complex camera I’ve ever owned. It’s also easily the best camera I’ve ever had.
But that also means it is by some distance the most expensive camera I’ve ever bought. How did I afford it, especially on a minister’s income? I traded in every piece of existing camera equipment I owned but could do without. I sold other possessions over a significant period of time.
And I’m glad I did it. For me, it was worth it, even though the new beast took a lot of getting used to, and indeed I am still learning more about its capabilities and features.
Jesus tells us in the parable of the buried treasure that the kingdom of heaven is worth so much that it will cost us everything we have. It is not that the owner of the field now uses the treasure to lead an extravagant lifestyle; instead,
The man not only recognised that its value outweighed all he had, but he acted accordingly.[4]
You can see the question this poses of us. Christianity is no hobby or leisure pursuit. It isn’t a preference, or a taste. It will take all we have. It will reorder our priorities. We do not just add it as a layer on top of everything else: rather, we start again from scratch with our lives when we enter the kingdom that Jesus announced.
For while the gift of salvation is free, discipleship is costly. As the great German Christian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out, there is no such thing as ‘cheap grace’ in God’s kingdom. How can there be when it cost Jesus everything?
Fourthly, the merchant and the jewels:
Just as the parables of the mustard seed and the yeast are quite similar, so are the parables of the buried treasure and this one. Both have something to say about the cost of discipleship in God’s kingdom.
But look how willing the merchant is to sell everything he has in order to buy a fine pearl. Yes, taking up the challenge to follow Jesus is a costly affair. But it is not all misery. When we throw our lot in with Jesus wholeheartedly, we shall discover that it is all worth it. We shall find the joy of the kingdom.
the kingdom is like the merchant, not like the jewel: it’s less about some product or result you are promised, and more about what happens to you.
The kingdom changes us. We become different people. Our values change. What was once significant to us is no longer, for the kingdom has made us see everything in all creation differently. Disposable people are now precious to God. The things that the world chases after are no longer satisfying to us. A switch has flicked inside us. Now life is illuminated in a different way. It can’t be any other way:
One who was unwilling to sacrifice everything else for the kingdom, who did not believe its reality sufficiently to stake all one’s future on it, was unworthy of it.[5]
But if we are sold out to Jesus, then everything is new.
Fifthly and finally, the net:
This final parable, which picks up on the common sight around the Lake of Galilee of fishermen separating the edible and kosher fish from the inedible[6], makes the most serious point of all.
This is the end game. This is where it is all leading. A final judgement, where God will vindicate the righteous and send the wicked to eternal loss, puts paid to the idea that God’s love means he will save everybody, whether they like it or not. Again, Maggi Dawn puts it well:
the Kingdom of God may be the best thing ever, a matter of immense rejoicing, freely offered to anyone who wants to join it — but it’s not fluffy. It’s free, but it’s not cheap. It demands something of us, and its consequences are serious.
Jesus doesn’t tell us here who are the wicked and who are the righteous, but I think it’s safe to assume that the righteous are those who have responded positively to the kingdom message. They have embraced God’s free gift of salvation in Christ by repentance and faith and have taken on board the blessings and demands of the kingdom. They are the ones who have sold everything to gain treasure and rejoiced in their pearl of great price. They are the ones who are willing to work in obscurity like the mustard seed or the yeast, not building their own reputation but that of Jesus, as they seek to transform everything they touch.
Whichever of these parables speaks to us today, they all speak to us about our life in the kingdom.
And whichever it most relevant to us in our current situation, Jesus asks us, as he did the disciples at the time, ‘Have you understood all these things?’ (verse 51)
Have we understood the response we need to make to God’s kingdom?
[1] Craig Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p388.
[2] Keener, p387.
[3] Keener, p388f.
[4] Keener, p392; italics his.
[5] Keener, p392.
[6] Keener, p392.
Big Circumstance 