The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Last week, you'll remember, a farmer sowed his field with good seed, but while he was asleep an enemy sneaked in and sowed weeds in with the wheat. And his workers asked if they should pull out the weeds. And the farmer said, "No, let the weeds grow up along with the wheat, because if you try to weed the garden you might pull up some of the wheat as well. At the harvest everything will be worked out." "The kingdom of heaven is like that," said Jesus.

And in today's Gospel, Jesus gives us a whole collection of short parables, a collection of puzzles, really, a collection of riddles that tease the imagination and challenge conventional wisdom. And when Jesus gets through telling them, he asks his disciples, "Have you understood all this?" And they say "Yes." Well, I wonder.

Everyone listening to Jesus knew that the kingdom of heaven was something great. Whether the kingdom of heaven was to be established by human military power or by the direct intervention of God, to everyone it represented the most magnificent of realities.

But Jesus says, "Consider the mustard seed. It's the smallest of seeds. The kingdom of heaven is like that." Jesus compares the most sublime reality in the universe to something so small you need glasses to see it.

Jesus then compares the kingdom of heaven, the purest of all realities, to something his listeners considered impure. He compares it to leaven, to yeast.

The people of Jesus' day believed that yeast was a corruption. Leavening changes flour into something it is not. Leaven, therefore, was like hypocrisy, a sign of sin, so the Law did not permit the use of leavened bread on solemn occasions. Like sin, yeast was to be avoided and removed from the house.

But right after saying that the kingdom of heaven is like a field where weeds and wheat grow together, and right after comparing the kingdom of heaven to the smallest of seeds, Jesus goes on to say that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven. It's like a woman putting corruption into flour.

"Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear." Now go home and think about it a while. Perhaps we ought to do just that.

Well, I have thought about it a little, and one of the things I've thought is that the mustard seed and yeast are little things that make big things happen. Perhaps that's Jesus' point, or part of it at least -- that the kingdom of heaven is not static, but dynamic. It may even be a little messy, like weeds and wheat growing up together, and a little smelly, like yeast. I don't know.

What I do know is that the people Jesus was talking to were a lot like us. They didn't care much for unlike things being mixed together. "Do not mate different kinds of animals," commanded the Torah. "Do not plant your field with two kinds of seeds. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. And do not marry a foreigner." Things and people foreign to one another are best kept separate. Synthetics are out. It was understood by Jesus' listeners that that was the way God himself intended things when he created the world. That's why these commandments were in the Law. And yet here is Jesus telling stories that challenge this conventional understanding. "The kingdom of heaven," he says, "is like a field where two kinds of seed, wheat and weeds, grow together. Don't separate them. And the kingdom is like a woman who mixes a corrupt substance into her flour."

We're gearing up for elections again, and between now and November much will be said about the need to throw the bums out. A lot will be said about the need to do some weeding in our social and political gardens, and in this connection I am reminded of an essay by C. S. Lewis.

Lewis wrote the essay 61 years ago, in 1941. Apparently there was a move to establish a so-called "Christian Party" in England at the time. And in the essay, Lewis worries about religious parties in politics, because, he says, we human beings have a way of wanting to do political weeding according to our own tastes, as if our tastes are God's tastes. We have a way of claiming that our own personal values are God's values and our own purposes God's purposes. And that was a concern to Lewis.

"Whatever it calls itself," Lewis said, "[a Christian party] will not represent Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity. It will have no more power than the political skill of its members to control the behavior of its unbelieving allies.

"But there will be a real and most disastrous novelty. [A Christian party] will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. [It will claim to speak for God.] By the mere fact of calling itself the Christian party, it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time -- the temptation of claiming for our favorite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to [God]. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal is always great." (The Guardian, January 10, 1941)

Well Lewis' concern made me think about another parable about the kingdom of heaven. But this is not a parable Jesus told; this is a parable Jesus did, a parable he acted out in response to the religious parties of his day.

Later, on their way to Jerusalem, right after Jesus tells his disciples that he will have to suffer and die, and after they admit that they really don't understand at all what he is talking about, Jesus goes on into Jerusalem, and he teaches some more and he tells some more parables. And people get mad at him -- furious, in fact -- because, as Thomas Merton puts it, he tells the scribes and the pharisees that they are like a man riding an ox looking for an ox, and that they wouldn't know an ox or a kingdom of heaven either if they saw one. And then he tells his disciples that he hopes they will finally get the point when he does what he's about to do. And then he is arrested by those who don't get it, and he is nailed to the Cross. And there, just before he dies, he says, "Tetelestai!" "It is finished! It's done! It's accomplished, completed!"

What's completed? What is Jesus talking about? Is it possible he's talking about the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus' disciples, and the religious parties (the priests and the scribes and the pharisees) -- and we, too, of course -- are like a man riding an ox looking for an ox. Or we're like the customs agent who was suspicious of a particular man who came through his booth on a bicycle every day. The agent was sure the man was smuggling something. So every day he made a thorough search of the man's backpack, his water bottle, and the little tool kit behind the seat. Every day he took the hand grips off the handle bar and looked inside them. One day he even made the man take the tires off, so he could see if there was anything inside the tires. But he never found any contraband. Then one day, his curiosity just killing him, the agent told the man he was sure of his suspicions, and that he just had to know what the man was up to. "If you'll just tell me what you're smuggling," he promised, "I'll look the other way and won't turn you in. But I've just got to know." "I'm smuggling bicycles," the man confessed.

Sometimes we just can't see what's right in front of us. Is it possible that God's purpose, what God wanted and created in the beginning, the kingdom he has been at work to bring to perfection for all time since the beginning, is the Cross? Is it possible that what has now been perfected, completed, is someone's loving the world so much that he is willing to lay down his own life for the sake of the world he loves? Is it possible the kingdom of heaven is like that? Is it possible, in fact, that such love is the kingdom of heaven?

Is it possible that the kingdom of heaven is all around us like the air we breathe, and like the loving relationships we have with the people we work and live and go to church with?

Is it possible that the kingdom of heaven, though hidden, is also obvious -- that God loved the world so much that God himself was willing to become flesh and live among us, and to mix with us -- the divine mixed in with the mortal, like the yeast in the dough and the seed in the ground -- and willing to suffer with us and for us because he loves us, and willing even to suffer mockery and to die for us? Like seed. And all this so that we, too, might experience the same completion, so that we too might know and live such sacrificial love, which is the purpose of God? Is it possible that this is what heaven is?

Get it?

The disciples didn't. Mention "Messiah" to them, says Robert Capon, and they would picture a king on horseback or a religious party holding a convention, not a carpenter on a cross. Mention "forgiveness," and they would start setting up rules about how many times you have to do it and when you can stop doing it.

I think the yeast and the mustard seed are like this: they are the power of the kingdom of heaven. It is a power that is small and hidden. It is power that the world doesn't see, because the world is too busy being impressed with big, flashy things like force, which can be very noisy and bombastic, but whose power is really very small. Things like rockets and bombs and so-called Christian politics, and all that.

But consider real power. Consider the power you need to remain in loving relationships with other people, like the power God needed to perfect and complete his creation on the Cross, the power you need to bring the kingdom of God. The power you need to do that is the power of restraint, not the power of force.

Capon suggests that we human beings busy ourselves asking the wrong questions about God. If God wants to turn this messed-up world into heaven, we ask, why doesn't he just knock some heads together and put all the bad people under a large flat rock and get on with the job? After all, he's God, and he is powerful enough to do whatever he wants to do.

But suppose that's not God's purpose. Suppose weeding out all the weeds and putting all the "bad guys" under a large flat rock, or in a blazing furnace, or in some other kind of hell somewhere, or suppose having Israelis blow up Palestinians, or having Palestinians blow up Israelis, or having Americans send all the "foreigners" back to where they came from, or having Americans change one religious party in Iraq with another...suppose this is not God's purpose. Suppose this is just our purpose, which we like to claim is God's purpose as well.

Suppose the purpose of God, the purpose God hopes to complete and make perfect, is to stay in loving relationship with the world he created. And suppose God's purpose is for us to do the same. Knocking heads simply will not accomplish that! Neither will pulling weeds or establishing religious parties.

Consider, Capon says, what it's like with someone you know and love, such as your own child perhaps: "Direct, straight-line, intervening, [head-knocking] power does, of course, have many uses. With it, you can lift the spaghetti from the plate to your mouth, wipe the sauce off your slacks and carry them to the dry cleaners, and perhaps even make enough money to ransom them back. Indeed, straight-line [head-knocking] power -- 'use the force you need to get the result you want' -- is responsible for almost everything that happens in the world. And the beauty of it is, it works. From removing the dust with a cloth to removing your enemy with a .45 [or an F-16], it achieves its ends in sensible, effective, easily understood ways.

"Unfortunately," says Capon, "[head-knocking power] has a whopping limitation. If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is [not to knock heads, but] to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line [head-knocking] power becomes useless.

"Oh, you can snatch your baby boy away from the edge of a cliff and not have a broken relationship on your hands. But when he is twenty just try interfering with his plans for the season and see what happens, especially if his chosen plans play havoc with your own.

"Suppose he makes unauthorized use of your car, and you use a little straight-line [head-knocking] verbal power to scare him out of doing it again. Well and good. But suppose further that he does it again anyway -- and again and again and again. What do you do next if you are committed to straight-line [head-knocking] power? You raise your voice a little more nastily each time till you can't shout any louder. And then you beat him, if you are stronger than he is, until you can't beat any harder. Then you chain him to a radiator till.... But you see the point. At some [time] in that difficult, personal relationship, the whole thing will be destroyed unless you simply refuse to use it, unless, in other words, you decide that instead of dishing out justifiable pain and punishment, you are willing, quite foolishly, to take a beating yourself.

"But such a paradoxical exercise of power is a hundred and eighty degrees away from the straight-line variety. It is, to introduce a phrase from Luther, left-handed power. Unlike the power of the right hand, which, interestingly enough, is governed by the logical, plausibility-loving left hemisphere of the brain, left-handed power is guided by the more intuitive, open, and imaginative right side of the brain. Left-handed power, in other words, is precisely paradoxical power, power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.

"More than that, it is guaranteed to stop no determined evildoers whatsoever. It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts. But then again, it might not. It certainly didn't for Jesus; and if you decide to use it, you should be quite clear that it probably won't for you either. The only thing it does insure is that you will not -- even after your chin has been bashed in -- have made the mistake of closing any interpersonal doors from your side. Which may not, at first glance, seem like much of a thing to insure, let alone like an exercise worthy of the name of power. But when you come to think of it, it is power -- so much power, in fact, that it is the only thing in the world that evil cannot touch. God in Christ died forgiving and loving. With the dead body of Jesus God wedged open the door between himself and the world and said, 'There! Just try and get me to take that back!'" (Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom, pp. 18-20)

And so, instead of riding into Jerusalem on a horse, Jesus rode in on a donkey. Instead of founding a Christian party or mobilizing troops, he took his disciples to dinner. And then he told them again that he loved them, and he asked them to love each other as he has loved them. And then, after they all either denied or betrayed or abandoned him, he walked up the hill to Calvary where he asked his Father to forgive them, because they don't understand, and they don't know what they do.

St. Paul speaks to us today about this purpose of God. "In everything, as we know, the Spirit works for good with those who love God and who are called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined...," says St. Paul.

My! How we've distorted this truth, or missed the point, or confused our own purposes with the purposes of God! Predestined the elect, we've said. Predestined the chosen, the privileged, the "good guys," those who believe right -- predestined them for glory and salvation, we've said, while predestining the rest to hell.

But we've ignored the last part of Paul's sentence! Listen to the conclusion Paul draws from his premise: "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers."

Or, better, listen to it in The Revised English translation: "For those whom God knew before ever they were, he also ordained to share the likeness of his Son, so that he might be the eldest among a large family of brothers."

The purpose of God, Paul knows, is that God intends, and has intended since the beginning, that we should all be like Christ, that we should be like him who dismissed the horse in favor of the donkey, and who took Peter and James and John, and even Judas, to dinner, and who loved them even unto the Cross.

The kingdom of heaven is like this -- a kingdom of wounds, not a kingdom of weapons. This is the mystery of life, the saving mystery, which is the kingdom of heaven to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Do we understand all these things?

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.