Kingdom Stories-Matthew 13

Jesus’ kingdom stories or parables–like Jesus himself and his cross–are an open secret. It both reveals and conceals God. It’s simple yet profound. It’s easily understood yet mysterious. The trained disciples who deny themselves and follow Jesus daily (Mt 16:24) “get it” [eventually], while the crowds remain entertained fickle admirers, who come and go.

• Jesus’ parables are apocalyptic, eschathological and teleological in character. It’s a secret [available to all] and requires understanding (Mt 13:11, 13-15).
• The parable of the sower is about wealth (Mt 13:22), which affects our response to the gospel.
• The parable of the weeds, mustard seed and net is about patience–having all the time in the world.
• Jesus’ parables are about the kingdom of God where there’s joy (Mt 13:44).

“The parables help amplify the profound Christology that suffuses Matthew’s narrative, namely that, in Jesus, the reign of God has come.” Donald Senior. (The parables must be understood, like Matthew’s whole gospel, christocentrically.) “At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” C. H. Dodd. “Jesus’ parables are not simply meant to be theoretical. Their significance points again and again to everyday life: they ask to be lived, not to be grasped by the intellect.”  Ulrich Luz.

To become Jesus‘ new family Jesus uses parables as a way to trains his disciples, to help them discern how the kingdom of heaven is established. For you don’t become Christ’s family through birth, but by learning to be his disciple. The parables, like TSOM, have always been crucial for the church community to survive in a world that assumes that family/biological kinship is more determinative or important than our kinship with Christ. Jesus’ great parables can be read as a commentary on his claim that those who do the will of the Father are his brother, sister, mother. The boat Jesus sits to deliver his parables is the church that the parables bring into being.

Crowd and disciples. On the same day his disciples are accused of breaking the Sabbath (Mt 12:2) Jesus leaves the house and sits beside the sea (Mt 13:1) and a great crowd gathers around him, such that Jesus must get into a boat in order to address the crowd, who stand on the beach while he sits in the boat to instruct them (Mt 13:2). This is a similar situation to that of TSOM. When Jesus delivers the sermon, the crowd hears Jesus, but the disciples are the ones to whom Jesus directs the sermon (Mt 5:1-2). Similarly, Jesus instructs the crowd through the parables (Mt 13:3), but he explains them to the disciples because they are the ones who must learn to live in light of the parables (Mt 13:11).

Why speak in parables. Jesus has used parablelike comparisons earlier in his ministry. In TSOM, a wise man builds his house on the rock (Mt 7:24–27); the new cannot easily be joined to the old by analogy with cloth and wineskins (Mt 9:14–17) and unclean spirits are like those who must search for homes in waterless regions (Mt 12:43–45). But he now uses and explains his parables in a systematic fashion. In response to the disciples’ question of why he speaks to the crowd in parables, Jesus gives an odd response, quoting Isaiah (6:8–13) that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (Mt 13:13). Jesus’ parables is at once prophetic and apocalyptic, which matches his person and work.

Jesus speaks in parables to reveal what was hidden from the foundation of the world (Ps 78:1–3). The God of Israel, the Lord who made all that is, will be found in a virgin’s womb. Jesus is the parable of the Father making manifest what was present in the beginning. Our recognition of this revelation requires our transformation in order that we might see that this man, this Jesus, is God incarnate. Like his willingness to go to the cross, it at once hides and reveals God, so the parables are meant to reveal the kind of transformation necessary for those who’d follow Jesus to participate in the kingdom of heaven, which is his mission to effect.

The parables, like Jesus, are apocalyptic. The parables use dramatic imagery indicating their apocalyptic character, and witnesses to the new age begun in Jesus. The parables, like the new age, at once offer redemption and judgment with the salvation that has come. At the end of the age angels will separate the sinners from the righteous and evildoers will be thrown into a fiery furnace, where there’ll be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt 13:42, 49–50). This is very strong language, for Jesus has come to reign as Lord and calls us to live accordingly.

Christology and discipleship are inseparable in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus uses the parables to instruct the crowd and the disciples, but explains them only to the disciples. The disciples will be given the gift of interpretation, but… When asked if they understand all Jesus has taught them through the parables they answer “yes” (Mt 13:51)–which they’ll understand fully only after the crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples will “see,” but they will be blinded by the light. Their blindness, a blindness that the parables are designed to create, is not hopeless, because they’ll continue to follow Jesus.

The disciples are the good soil on which the seeds of the kingdom have been spread, because if they weren’t, we’d not be the church of Jesus Christ. We exist because the disciples under the Holy Spirit proved to be adequate witnesses. The soil of the disciples are fertile because they’re not afraid to ask Jesus to explain the parables. The parable of the sower, Jesus explains, is to help the disciples discern what they‘ve been given. They’re given the secrets of the kingdom through their calling to be disciples of Jesus. Those secrets, secrets open to all but known only to those who respond to Jesus’ call, distinguish the new from the old age, the disciples from the crowds.

Results that the proclamation of the kingdom produces is Jesus’ explanation of the parable of the sower. Some respond but not understand, making them vulnerable to the “evil one” (Mt 13:4, 13). The gospel is dangerous. Like Peter, we think that we’ll be able to follow Jesus, but when faced with the power of Rome and the leaders of Israel it’s hard to remain faithful to a crucified Lord. Peter, like so many of us, is too ready to follow Jesus (Mt 13:5-6, 20-21). To be too ready to follow Jesus means that we fail to understand that we do not understand what kind of Messiah this is. Jesus uses this parable to remind us that discipleship will hurt. The word cannot flourish among those who continue to be shaped by the cares of the world. Jesus tells us that we can’t serve God and mammon (Mt 6:24) but it is a hard-learned lesson, even for the disciples.

Why the church in Europe and America is dying is very simple. The parable of the sower is about wealth (Mt 13:22). It’s hard to be a disciple and be rich. It’s hard to imagine any text more relevant to the situation of churches in the West than he parable of the sower. We may think, it can’t be that simple, but Jesus certainly thinks that it’s that simple. The lure of wealth and the cares of the world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke our imaginations (Mt 13:7, 22). As a result, the church falls prey to the deepest enemy of the gospel—sentimentality–a gospel is for “giving our lives meaning” without judgment.

Church without discipleship. Strategies to recover the lost status and/or membership of the church hope that people can be attracted to become members of the church without facing the demands of being a disciple of Jesus. For a time they may be “joyful,” but such joy cannot survive persecution (Mt 13:5-6, 20-21). Such churches’ shallow strategies can’t understand how Christians might face persecutions. This is a particular problem in America, where Christians cannot imagine how being a Christian might put them in tension with the American way of life. This is as true for Christians on the left as it is for Christians on the right. Both mistakenly assume, often in quite similar ways, that freedom is a necessary condition for discipleship.

The church in America is simply not a soil capable of growing deep roots (Mt 13:5, 21). This parable expresses Jesus’ judgment on the situation of the church in America. It may seem odd that wealth makes it impossible to grow the word. Wealth, we assume, should create the power necessary to do much good. But wealth stills the imagination because we are not forced, as the disciples of Jesus were forced, to be an alternative to the world that only necessity can create. Possessed by possessions, we desire to act in the world, often on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions.

Using violence to secure the good on behalf of the defenseless is what many who follow Jesus believe that we must be willing to do. Accordingly, pacifists are regarded as irresponsible. Yet a pacifist creates a dependence on others as well as a vulnerability that forces one to conceive alternatives to violence otherwise unimaginable. Don’t forget that a commitment to nonviolence carries implications about our possessions. Also, nonviolence and possessions are correlates of the character of the church. A church that’s shrinking in membership may actually be a church in which the soil of the gospel is being prepared in which deeper roots are possible.

Different results, different gifts. It’s good news that Jesus tells us that even good soil produces different results (Mt 13:8, 23). Paul calls attention to the variety of gifts present in the church in 1 Cor 12:5–11. The church is not only constituted by people of different gifts, but what’s true within a church is also true of different churches. God has given peculiar gifts to the churches in the southern hemisphere that has enabled the growth of those churches. It’s not for us Christians in churches of the north, to say whether their growth is an increase of a 100, 60, or 30 fold (Mt 13:8, 23). Such judgments require time measured in centuries, for if the parables tell us anything it’s that Jesus’ disciples don’t need to be in a hurry, because we have all the time in the world to be the church.

Augustine sees that the parable of the wheat and the tares (Mt 13:24-30) is not Jesus’ justification for the mixed character of the church, but that the parable is given to encourage Christians to endure in a world that will not acknowledge the kingdom that has come in Christ. The parable of the wheat and tares, like all the parables, is an apocalyptic parable, but apocalyptic names the necessity of the church to be patient even with the devil.

Be patient with those who think we must force the realization of the kingdom, just as Jesus was patient with Judas. Jesus’ parables tell us what the kingdom is like, which means that the kingdom has come. It’s not necessary for Jesus’ disciples to use violence to rid the church or the world of the enemies of the gospel. Rather, the church can wait, patiently confident that, as Augustine says, the church exists among the nations.

A people who refuse to be hurried is what’s required to see the world, to understand that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (Mt 13:31). The parables that follow the parable of the sower and of the wheat and tares serve as commentaries on the way that disciples must endure in a world that refuses to acknowledge its true nature. The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed or yeast because to be drawn into the kingdom of heaven is to participate in God’s patience toward his creation. So, there’s a kind of madness with being a disciple of Jesus. Jesus is teaching us to see the significance of the insignificant. At this point in his ministry Jesus is not commanding the attention of the Roman authorities. From the perspective of those in power, Jesus is no more than a confusing prophet to a defeated people in a backwater of the Roman Empire.

There‘s a joy that the kingdom produces. It’s a quite different joy than those who live on rocky ground and as a result too quickly receive the seed of the kingdom (Mt 13:5,20-21). The parable of treasure in the field and of the precious pearl (Mt 13:44-45) make clear that much is required if we are possessed by the joy of the kingdom, for it seems that the discovery of the kingdom of heaven requires the selling of all we have in order to buy the field that contains the treasure of the kingdom or the pearl of great value. The parables addressed solely to the disciples remind them that Jesus requires that they abandon their former lives to follow him. They’ll soon learn that much more will be asked of them as Jesus leads them on his journey to Jerusalem.

The task of the church is to be uncompromisingly patient. Jesus makes clear that the disciples are fortunate to be so “netted,” because the net of the kingdom, when full, will be filled with good and bad fish (Mt 13:47-48). The disciples have been schooled with the patience necessary to sustain the care of the kingdom by the angels (Mt 13:49). Jesus asks if his disciples have understood “all this,” and they answer “yes” (Mt 13:51), which is premature, because the disciples have just begun to understand the master of the household who brings out of his treasury both the old and the new (Mt 13:52).

Taking offense at Jesus‘ teaching and deeds. Jesus then goes to his hometown (Mt 13:53). Previously when he returned to Nazareth he did deeds of power. This time he teaches in the synagogue (Mt 13:54a). Those who hear him are astonished and perplexed by his wisdom and his deeds of power (Mt 13:54b), because they knew him as the carpenter’s son. They ask, is not his mother the same Mary we all know, and are not his brothers named James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas (Mt 13:55)? His sisters are also present. So they ask, “Where did he get all this?” And the people of his hometown “took offense at him” (Mt 13:57). Perhaps they found his teaching even more offensive than his healings.   

Familiarity that breeds contempt. Jesus teaches with authority, offending those who think they know him. They think he’s presumptuous and not professionally qualified to teach or perform deeds of power. Likewise, our familiarity with Jesus makes it impossible for us to recognize him when he comes to us thirsty, a stranger, naked, or a prisoner. We’re burdened by such images of Jesus. None is more destructive than the Jesus who has nothing better to do than to love us, to help us love our families, and to care for those less fortunate than ourselves. So the question for us is whether we’d provide hospitality to the Jesus who seems to have better things to do than satisfy our needs.

Rejection is the embodiment of prophecy. Jesus observes (Jn 4:44) that “prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.” Jesus places himself in the great line of Israel’s prophets who were rejected by those whom it was their task to serve as prophets, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The prophet became the word spoken, making real God’s redemption. Jesus is the end of prophecy because he is God’s word whom the prophets have said was to come. For him to be without honor in his own country, in his own home city, is not just another rejection of an idealist. It’s the rejection of the one who alone is able to save Israel.

His rejection is providential. What often appears as a disaster in the OT retrospectively is providence. Joseph tells his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Gen 45:7–8). Jesus is rejected by his own, but that rejection allows the Gentiles to be brought into the covenant (Rom 9–11). Such judgments cannot be made prospectively as if we could anticipate God’s providential care, but retrospectively they can be a form of faithfulness. Jesus “did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.” It’s not their unbelief that limits his deeds of power, as if if they had had more faith he could’ve performed deeds of power. The problem is because any deeds of power would only lead to further misunderstanding and rejection. Yet it’s Jesus’ fate to be misunderstood and rejected. Even so, Jesus desires to be understood and accepted in his hometown—even in Jerusalem.

Reference:

1. Hauerwas, Stanley. Matthew. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI, 2006.  MATTHEW 13  The Parable of the Kingdom.

The parables are a form of instruction important for the proclamation of the gospel and exemplify the character of the gospel. Donald Senior observes: “Since the beginning of chapter 11, Matthew has focused on Jesus as the revealer of God’s reign and on the varying and often hostile responses to that revelation. By their nature, “parables” fit into the dynamics of both revelation and response. “Parables” are extended metaphors or comparisons designed to draw the hearer into a new awareness of reality as revealed by Jesus, yet their artful nature adds a special twist of paradox and unexpected challenge. C. H. Dodd’s classic definition has captured the essential elements of the parable: “At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.” It is this opaque character of the parables that made them an extension of the mystery of Jesus’ own person and helps situate the parable discourse in this section of Matthew’s gospel. The parables help amplify the profound Christology that suffuses Matthew’s narrative, namely that, in Jesus, the reign of God has come. At the same time, the ability to penetrate the meaning of the parables and to “understand” them, or conversely, the refusal or inability to understand the parables, separates the disciples from Jesus’ chronic opponents.” (Senior 1998, 146–47)

In response to the disciples’ inquiry about his use of parables, Jesus refers them to Ps. 78. Parables are “dark sayings” that we have heard from our ancestors, but now in those same sayings full meaning can be understood. Now, the speaker of the parables and the parables spoken are one. Jesus speaks in parables so that we might become scribes for the kingdom of heaven capable of revealing the new that has been in the old (Mt 13:52). The parables represent Jesus’s continuing instruction, an instruction faithfully followed by Matthew, to understand Jesus’ fulfillment of the OT. Ulrich Luz notes: “In Jesus’ parables we find, again and again, that his own works and his mission to Israel are mirrored in parabolic form, for example, in the parable of the invitation to the great feast, or that of the mustard seed. Herein lies the germ-cell for their later salvational interpretation. But we discover, again and again, that Jesus’ parables are not simply meant to be theoretical. Their significance points again and again to everyday life: they ask to be lived, not to be grasped by the intellect.” (Luz 1993, 91) Luz is certainly right to suggest that the parables invite parenetic [persuasive, encouraging] interpretation, but such readings are but the expression of the salvation they mirror.

The parable of the sower is about wealth (Mt 13:22) and the parable of the wheat and tares is about impatience and the joy that is the patience Jesus makes possible. [The parable of the sower is not advice about how to plant seed, nor is the parable of the wheat and tares meant to tell farmers how to farm.] Chrysostom argues that those who would explain the parables must not do so literally, for such an approach can lead only to absurdities. The parables are not meant to reveal what we know about mustard seeds, but rather Jesus uses the parables to instruct the disciples, not only concerning why Jesus chooses to teach in parables, but also to explain what the individual parables mean. The parables must be understood, like Matthew’s whole gospel, christocentrically.

The parable of the wheat and tares follows the parable of the sower. This parable has been used to justify, in this time between the times, a compromised church. For eg., Augustine’s understanding of the two cities, the city of God and the city of man, is used to explain this parable and expound upon Jesus’ explanation of the parable to the disciples. The clear contrast that Augustine draws between the city of God and the city of “man,” some contend, is a contrast that can be drawn only at the end of the age (Mt 13:40) when the angels will collect and burn the weeds. Augustine said that “in this wicked world, and in these evil times, the Church through her present humiliation is preparing for future exaltation. She is being trained by the stings of fear, the torture of sorrow, the distresses of hardship, and the dangers of temptation; and she rejoices only in expectation, when her joy is wholesome. In this situation, many reprobates are mingled in the Church with the good, and both sorts are collected as it were in the dragnet of the gospel; and in this world, as in a sea, both kinds swim without separation, enclosed in nets until the shore is reached.” (Augustine 1977, 831)

Reinhold Niebuhr understood himself to stand in the Augustinian tradition because he drew on this parable to justify the compromises that Christians should make to act responsibly in the world. Niebuhr uses the parable to condemn all forms of Christian attempts to live without sinning. According to Niebuhr, this parable doesn’t teach that a specific form of evil doesn’t exist, but that in history good and evil are so mixed (in particular in the church) that we try to distinguish between them only to our detriment. Niebuhr acknowledges that Christians must make provisional distinctions, but he recognizes there are no final distinctions: “Let both grow together until the harvest.” Man is a creature and a creator. He would not be a creator if he could not overlook the human scene and be able to establish goals beyond those of nature and to discriminate between good and evil. He must do these things. But he must remember that no matter how high his creativity may rise, he is himself involved in the flow of time, and he becomes evil at the precise point where he pretends not to be, when he pretends that his wisdom is not finite but infinite, and his virtue is not ambiguous but unambiguous.” (Niebuhr 1986, 47–48)

Niebuhr used his interpretation of the parable of the wheat and the tares to argue that Christians cannot and shouldn’t be committed to nonviolence. The church, for Niebuhr, only betrays itself and the world when Christians pretend they are anything more than fallible human beings; the church is a sinful institution. Accordingly, the lesson to be learned from the parable of the wheat and tares is primarily a lesson in humility. Christians must recognize that in the church and out of the church love and self-love are “mixed up in life, much more complexly than any scheme of morals recognizes. The simple words of the parable are more profound than the wisdom of all our moralists. There is a self-love that is the engine of creativity. It may not be justified ultimately for that reason, but when we look at history, we have to say it is an engine of creativity” (Niebuhr 1986, 45).

The problem with Niebuhr’s understanding of the parable of the wheat and tares, a widespread interpretation to be sure, is that not only does it contradict Jesus’s explanation of the parable of the sower, but such a reading is not faithful to Augustine’s understanding of the two cities. Augustine does understand the church to be mixed in its composition, but that does not mean that he thinks the church is indistinguishable from the world or that Christians can or should act as non-Christians act. For eg., Augustine, in the paragraph following the observation quoted above concerning the mixed character of the church, notes that Jesus chooses disciples of humble birth and without education so that if there were any greatness in them that greatness would be Christ himself acting in them. Jesus even shows forbearance to the one among them who, through evil, betrayed him, though Christ was able to use him for good. So . . . “after sowing the seed of the holy gospel, as far as it belonged to him to sow it through his bodily presence, he suffered, he died, he rose again, showing by his suffering what we ought to undergo for the cause of truth, by his resurrection what we ought to hope for in eternity, to say nothing of the deep mystery by which his blood was shed for the remission of sins. Then he spent forty days on earth in the company of his disciples, and in their sight ascended into heaven. Ten days after that he sent the Holy Spirit he had promised; and the greatest and most unmistakable sign of the Spirit’s coming to those who believed was that every one of them spoke in the languages of all nations; thus signifying that the unity of the Catholic Church would exist among all nations and would thus speak in all languages.” (Augustine 1977, 832)

Niebuhr was wrong to think Augustine could be used to support his position.   Augustine presumes the eschatological character of the world inherent in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of heaven. The world, for Augustine, is known only because Jesus has called a church into existence. Such a perspective is foreign to Niebuhr because he understands the gospel to be an account of the human condition that can be known whether a church exists or not. The gospel, for Niebuhr, has become a knowledge that does not need a church for its intelligibility. From such a perspective, an apocalyptic like Jesus can be seen as only mad.   We must be careful in drawing attention to the “smallness” of Jesus’ beginnings, because such attention can be used to suggest that Jesus’ proclamation of the nearness of the kingdom is justified because we now know its power in Western civilization. So our willingness to begin small is legitimated because we now think that everything worked out the way Jesus said it would. Accordingly, these parables are not apocalyptically understood, but rather they are interpreted as exemplification of the modern belief in progress. Such interpretations of the parables as well as justifications for “starting small” cannot help but distort the character of the kingdom. We dare not forget that the parables’ apocalyptic character has not changed. By our fruits we’ll be known; the fruits remain those blessed by the Beatitudes. Whatever worldly success Christians may have had, those so-called successes have too often distracted the church from its task to be no more than a place for nesting birds.

Jesus’ explanation for why he uses parables such as the sower and the wheat and the tares means that two thousand years of Christian history are not sufficient to insure Christian faithfulness or to sustain the reasonableness of Christianity. The apocalyptic character of the kingdom remains in spite of Christian so-called success. Christians must continue to live as if all hangs on our faithfulness to this man, because all does hang on the reality of the kingdom as well as our response to the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed and is.

The disciples’ “yes” is a lesson for us who think we can better answer Jesus’ question because we now have the whole gospel. Indeed, we have the gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—not to mention the letters of Paul–and those who wrote commentaries on the NT. It’d be a mistake to disdain these gifts, but any “yes” we may give to Jesus’ question must be a “yes” of a promise rather than a result. Our continuing struggle to understand the church’s relation to Judaism, the struggle of the scribe, makes clear that any “yes” we give is one of striving not accomplishment. But what a wonderful thing it is to be made part of that striving.   The parables of the kingdom of heaven make clear that the kingdom of heaven is not “up there,” but rather is a kingdom that creates time and constitutes a space. The time and space that the kingdom constitutes requires that people exist in time and occupy that space. Jesus teaches us through the parables so that we might be for the world the material reality of the kingdom of heaven, for in Jesus we see and hear what many prophets and righteous people had longed to see and hear (Mt 13:17). Indeed he is the parable of the Father.