Matthew 13

. . . and some seeds the robins eat.

It's story time!

      Matthew 13 is dominated by parables of the kingdom and how it comes about. Matthew calls it “the Kingdom of Heaven;” I grew up thinking it was about that place where good people go after death and the judgement; a place whose location was mysterious but which was definitely “up,” not down.

      Our cosmology has advanced; from Genesis to Galileo and Copernicus to Stephen Hawking, the universe has expanded so that now, in 2015, the plane on which many mansions could be built for the redeemed becomes a real challenge to the mind of the literalist, who needs to live in a state of faith-in-what-is-not-seen, or what liberals might call a state of denial.

      In any case, the talk these days is about a kingdom that begins here on earth with the hearing and accepting of the teachings of Jesus Christ and tends toward a redeemed future, also a challenge to faith when we listen to the news these days. The trends seem to be in the wrong direction.

      At the front of our church is a large, wooden relief sculpture of the sower, his back to us, walking away, scattering seed while we in the pews follow. A fine image designed by our artist-in-residence, Wes Ens. Scattering seed and praying that nature will prosper it is an image central to the church and to the faithful who hope to be Christ's constant followers. And that's about as much as needs to be said about the opening story in Chapter 13; a great allegory, at least for those with ears to hear.

      And that's how the kingdom begins: seeds scattered and sown.

      And in quick succession come the little stories of the kingdom: the central image follows on the sower—the images of seed tie the next stories together.

      We used to have a small seed-cleaning mill through which we'd slowly feed the seeds we planned to plant in the spring. A series of screens would select out that which wasn't wheat (we called it dockage) and a fan would blow out useless pieces of chaff and straw. I never saw the devil putting mustard and thistle and buckwheat seeds among the good wheat, but farming experience has helped me to appreciate that you needed to let the bad plants grow with the good until harvest, that the seed-cleaning mill would reject the bad seed on judgement day—and feed it to the chickens.

        Hell meant being eaten by chickens.

      (Nowadays of course, you're more likely to spray the devil out of your crop: what's the lesson in that?)

      Jesus explains a few of these allegorical verses to the disciples but once the imagery of the seed has been established, their import is hard to miss. The Kingdom grows like the mustard plant, it is as tenuous as scattered seed. There follow two non-seed allegories; one for the fishermen in the crowd who have pulled up nets and kept the good fish and thrown the junk fish back, and a treasure seeker who having discovered something precious in a field, sells everything he has and buys the field. The Kingdom is greatly to be desired.

      And 13 ends with another aphorism taken from Hebrew archives; it's a good one: “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town and in his own home.” Must we always assume that wisdom comes from really smart people in faraway places . . . and that our brother or neighbour can't possibly know what he's talking about? 

     Shheesh!