11th Sunday after Pentecost

11TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
(Proper 12, Year A)
July 27, 2008
Ss. Peter & Paul – Fr. Phillip Ayers

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For 52 verses of the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus preaches on the Kingdom by telling parables. That’s a lot of verses! That’s a lot of preaching and teaching for one sitting. Yet, despite going on for quite a while, Jesus drew—and kept—large crowds listening to him, an interesting fact, considering that nobody had to be there.
In contrast to this, listen to this:
A rich man said to his rector: “I want you to take a three-month, expense-paid sabbatical to Europe. When you return, I will have a surprise for you.” The rector accepted the offer on the spot.
Three months later, the minister returned and was met by the wealthy parishioner. A new nave had been built in the rector’s absence—a state-of-the-art house of worship. When the rector walked into the new edifice, he noted one striking difference. There was only one pew, and it was at the back of the nave. “A church with only one pew?” the rector asked with concern.
“You just wait until Sunday,” the wealthy parishioner countered. Sure enough, when the time came for the Sunday service, the early arrivals entered the church, filed into the pew, and sat down. When the pew was full, a switch clicked silently, gears meshed, a belt moved, and automatically the rear pew began to move forward. When it reached the front of the nave, it came to a stop. At the same time, another empty pew rotated up from below in the back, and more people sat down. And so it continued, pews filling and moving forward until finally the church was full by 11 o’clock.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed the rector. “Marvelous!” (You may have deduced by now that there was a problem with everyone wanting to sit in the back pews.)
The service began, and after the hymns and readings the rector started to preach his sermon. He launched into the text, and when 12 o’clock came, he was still going strong—with no end in sight. Suddenly, a bell rang, and a trap door in the floor of the pulpit dropped open.
“Wonderful!” exclaimed the congregation. “Marvelous!”
Jesus, as a preacher and a teacher, was never accused of being long-winded, pedantic, or boring. His sermons were not lectures with three points and a poem. They were not apologetic in nature. And they were short on citing religious precedent to back up his contention, what is called exegesis. He spoke “with authority,” which means he spoke out of his direct experience of God. No one ever “put him on the clock” or took friendly wagers as to how long his preaching would last. Jesus never needed a trap door. (When wrist-watches with alarms came into vogue, a young chorister used to time my sermons – I could hear it go off after 10 minutes!)
Why was Jesus so compelling with these parables? One reason comes from Hebrew prophecy: “I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world” (Mt. 13:35). He spoke of mystery. He was a spokesman for an unseen realm called the Kingdom of God. The prerequisite for hearing the parables: “Repent” Jesus told them, which, as Marcus Borg has reminded us, was not a fevered call to moral improvement, but rather, “Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.”
So, rather than try to argue people into the reality of the Kingdom—rather than trying to command them, or to moralize them into it—Jesus enticed them into it through the use of parables. The parables invited his listeners to participate in the reality of God as he himself did.
Isobel Anders has captured this parable-dynamic beautifully. She contends: “The parables of Jesus are intended to instill in the hearer a longing for the Kingdom of God and the world of the spirit—from which we ourselves have been brought by God to this earth—and to which we are summoned to return.”
On the lips of Jesus, the Kingdom of God itself was a comprehensive metaphor, and the individual parables its offspring. Jesus used both to bridge the gulf between finite beings in the finite existence and the unseen dimension of the spirit. At once, the parables were as tantalizing as they were challenging, as large in meaning as they were small in construct. In all cases, the parables of the Kingdom, as Marcus Borg so aptly teaches: summoned the listener to a new way of seeing, a new way of living, and a new way of centering.
As W.H. Auden said, “You cannot tell people what to do, you can only tell them parables; and that is what art really is, particular stories of particular people and experiences …”. Or, as Lane Denson offers, “… like jokes and jazz, if you’ve got to have parables explained, don’t bother. Parables are not to be explained, they are to be understood, and like most of the important things in life, they are understood only by our opening ourselves to them and listening with wonder and imagination, participating in them in a way.
In the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast, we encounter images of the domain of God that nobody expected to hear. As The New Interpreter’s Bible [Vol. VIII] says: “We find not the natural and expected, but the supernatural and the surprising. The big tree growing from the tiny mustard seed is like the comic post card illustrations of a farmer with a gargantuan tomato strapped to the back of a flatbed truck. That one, lone woman working with that massive amount of flour has either lost her mind or is working for the Kingdom bakery … a modern analogy to these parables would be: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a preacher who preached every Sunday to a congregation of 25 people in a city of 2 million residents. The preacher kept on preaching until the whole cit believed the gospel’” (p.311).
Nothing whatsoever can be compared in value to experiencing the Kingdom—not even buried “treasure” or “fine pearls.” Jesus evokes the attention of the simple folk he addresses. The Kingdom might start out the size of a single coffee ground, but it will mushroom into a force to challenge and ultimately supersede the kingdoms of Herod and Caiaphas and Rome—indeed all earthly powers. But unless you are looking for the Kingdom, unless you have set aside enough of your “agenda” to make room for its reality, it will remain a “hidden” dimension, effectively nonexistent. We need a childlike willingness to accept it, and our eyes need to be opened to see it (Jn. 3:3). But it is indeed in our midst—“at hand.”
Ancient mariners told stories of many ship crews that died for lack of water while adrift in the occasionally windless waters of the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. An irony surrounded the desperate experiences, however. It seems that the mouth of the Amazon River—the largest river in the world—widened to some 90 miles, and it flowed out nearly 200 miles to sea.
From time to time, many a suffering, dehydrated ship’s crew would be lucky. They would see other ships, and plead to them for water. The other ships would yell back to them—to their great surprise—that all they needed to do was lower their buckets and haul up all the fresh water they needed. The full force of the Amazon current flowed all around them. If only they had known. If only we would know!
[Ideas and quotations from Synthesis 7/28/2002 and 7/27/2008]