Trinity 8

30 July 2023

Trinity 8

Preached by The Revered Andrew Hammond, Chaplain, St John’s College

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

Jesus put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’

He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’

‘The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

‘Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’ And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’

Aficionados of the Antiques Roadshow may remember the episode where one of the experts brandished what looked like a pale orange boiled sweet. It was in a segment on pearls, and it turned out to be a Melo Melo pearl, which is to say a pearl from the Melo Melo snail. This is a giant carnivorous sea snail found in South East Asia. The pearl we see on the programme was worth £200,000. I would have to sell everything I own many times over to buy that.

Actually I’m not sure I’d want an orange pearl. The one Jesus had in mind, in that well-known, tiny parable of his, was presumably the more familiar oyster pearl. Since first they were found, that beguiling nacreous silvery sheen has worked its magic on us: we are fascinated by its smooth simplicity and milky depth.

So when Jesus spins his two-sentence story, of the pearl of great price, his hearers would get it straight away. This wasn’t just an affordable pearl, it was a fabulously beautiful and therefore invaluable one. ‘And that’s what the kingdom of heaven is like’.

Each of those mini-parables – the mustard seed, the yeast, the buried treasure, the pearl of great price – makes a single, punchy point: in this case, then, we hear four punchy points about how we should think of the kingdom of heaven.

If we are at all regular churchgoers, we will know these parables, and might be tempted to nod them through, so to speak. ‘Ah yes, the kingdom of heaven is amazing. How wonderful’.

Or – and this is the challenge to the preacher – we slow down and try to think about them in more detail, find more to say. You will have heard any number of sermons along these lines. Perhaps we reach for ear-catching facts about horticulture, baking, metal detecting and – indeed – mega-pearls. At their best, of course, these can usefully enhance our sense of quite how amazing the kingdom of heaven is. But we risk distracting ourselves.

Or, we can disappear down some unproductive rabbit holes. This can happen when we confuse parables with allegories, for example. Usually, a parable has one big point. An allegory, on the other hand, has a meaning (at least one) for each and every detail of the story.

So down one rabbit hole we start trying to extract meaning from, say, the imagined person who plants the mustard seed, or bakes the loaf, or digs up the field, or goes to the jewellery merchant. This is relatively harmless, but also pointless. Literally pointless, as it’s missing the point of the story.

The much more unhelpful rabbit hole is the one we end up in when we start musing over any seemingly-unpalatable implications of the story. We then risk getting into all sorts of tangles about whether you should find the owner of the field and tell them you’ve found treasure, rather than pretend you just want the field. Or you agonise about impoverishing your entire family in order to own a jewel, which may be indescribably beautiful but is not going to feed anyone. Does Jesus really want us to seek first the kingdom of heaven by being greedily deceitful or obsessively materialistic?

So our challenge is to stick to the main point of each parable, and hope to understand each of those points without distracting ourselves with ancillary and indeed unintended details. What more can we say about the kingdom of heaven, to amplify those ideas? – the ideas of the kingdom being fruitful and a source of shelter and hospitality; being expansive and a source of daily nourishment; being of immense and surprising value; and being just incomparably beautiful.

Let me make just one suggestion for now. That is, that we allow these ideas of what the kingdom of heaven is like to provide really quite specific challenges to the background assumptions we might have when using the word ‘kingdom’.

The ‘kingdom of heaven’, or the idea of God as a king, is actually itself an image, a parabolic idea, you might say. ‘What’s God like? – well, he’s like a king’. Again, it’s just making a single point. It’s a human idea, kingship, conveying power and importance. Obviously we want to think of God as pre-eminently powerful and important. But we must not get caught up with allegorising the whole phenomenon of kingly rule; and especially not by reflecting all sorts of less-than-appealing aspects of earthly kings back onto God.

In fact, the four ideas in today’s parables would undermine such an undertaking, even if we tried. A first century idea of kingship would not long survive the combined force of such qualities: fruitfulness, hospitality, expansiveness, nourishment, value and matchless beauty.

By the time we’re thinking of kingship in those terms, we are beginning to see God’s reign as quite different from any human, social or political construct. The kingdom of heaven is about the quality of relationships between people, and between people and God. This is a kingdom which doesn’t have rules or laws, but values. The power God exercises as, in this image, king, is unstoppable love and an intimate, infinite understanding of us; it is not power exercised as control, based on fear or favour.

If this sounds all rather idealistic, well, yes, it is. It is about God’s idea for how we might live better, an idea made flesh, in our flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ. So in the end those little parables should stir us to think how we can live just that bit more fruitfully, hospitably, expansively and nourishingly; and thus become people who have treasure to share and beauty to reveal – and who can help build and populate a kingdom which is, ultimately, not like any earthly kingdom.