Parables

Sermon Notes 26th July
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 by Desiree Snyman

Parables are not “earthly stories about heavenly matters,” but “earthy stories about heavy matters.” They create an everyday playground for you to wonder and wander within, but then a punchline turns everything you thought you knew upside down. The immediate, domestic and straightforward interpretation of a parable is usually the lazy option — and rarely the correct one.

 I am grateful for Chris Lockley’s “Parables” sermon two weeks ago, which helped us discern a slight but important difference between the way Jesus speaks and the way Matthew speaks. Jesus is provocative and offers parable. Matthew often offers allegory. 

You may be familiar with George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a classic allegory criticising totalitarian regimes. The farm animals revolt against their human masters and set up what is supposed to be a more equal society. Until, of course, the pigs assume control and begin their own reign of terror, eventually justifying their privilege with that wonderful manifesto:

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

That is allegory. The characters and events point beyond themselves to something else. 

Empowered by Chris’s insight that parable and allegory are different, we can begin to discern the moments where Jesus speaks in parable and the moments where Matthew seems to speak in allegory. Matthew 13 is a sermon in parables about the kingdom of heaven. Just to be clear, the “kingdom of heaven” means the kingdom of God. Matthew just doesn’t like using the word “God.” The kingdom of God is not simply somewhere we go when we die. The kingdom of God is a state of being, a consciousness, a friendship with God and others. The kingdom of God is within, it is always available, all the time, right here, right now. The kingdom of God is not simply somewhere we go when we die. It is God's reign: God's alternative ordering of life, already breaking into the present and yet still awaiting fulfilment. In each set of parables there is one longer parable with an explanation, followed by shorter parables without an explanation. When we have an explanation, when somebody tells us that this character means this, and this object means that, and this group of people represents those people, we have moved from parable towards allegory. Playful parables allowing for many meanings is often Jesus, while the judgement-based allegories are more than likely the community writing in Matthew’s name. Which brings us to the parable of the net. 

Matthew says the kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea which catches fish of every kind. When it is full, the fishermen haul it ashore, sit down, put the good fish into baskets and throw out the bad. Then comes the explanation, the allegory. At the end of the age, the angels will separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire. Which sounds rather less like a playful parable and rather more like one religious group telling another religious group to go to hell. Perhaps that is exactly what is happening.

 As I have explained before, the Gospel of Matthew was written for a community living in the aftermath of catastrophe: the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, the death and displacement of its people, the end of sacrificial religion, the end of the Jewish priesthood, and the profound transformation of Jewish religious life. Without the Temple, Jewish faith increasingly centred upon Torah, synagogue and rabbinic interpretation. In the background of Matthew’s Gospel, we can hear the hostility of a family argument. Pharisaic Jewish leaders and Christian Jewish leaders are fighting over what faithfulness now looks like. Pharisaic Jews and Christian Jews caricature one another, condemn each other, and use every opportunity to tell one another to go to hell. Which makes the explanation of the net sound rather different. Family fights can be vicious. While Anglicans partner well with other denominations in caring for creation or the poor, providing religious education for children in schools or running community-based services such as LinC, they can be hostile to factions within the Anglican denomination. Think about some of the internal fighting between rational, credible, progressive, broad-stream Anglicans and the rabid evangelism of Sydney Anglicans to understand how quickly religious siblings can start speaking about each other in less than charitable terms. I should point out that those caricatured, tongue-in-cheek remarks are intended to prove precisely the point I am making. Internal family fights take hostility to entirely new levels.  

Now compare Matthew’s fishing story with a similar saying preserved in the Gospel of Thomas. The dating of Thomas is disputed. Some place traditions within it very early; others date the Gospel in its surviving form much later. A Coptic version was famously discovered among the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in Egypt in 1945. In Thomas we hear: “A man is like a skilled fisherman who cast his net into the sea.” He pulls it up full of little fish, but among them discovers one large and excellent fish. So, he throws all the little fish back and chooses the large one. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Notice what has happened. There are no angels. There is no furnace. Nobody is sent to hell. And perhaps most importantly, nobody tells you what the parable means. You must wrestle with it. You must wonder and wander within it. So perhaps the parable of the net is not about the external rejection of unbelievers at all but internal fighting within a family group of believers in Antioch.  

We come to two, tiny parables that are even stranger. The mustard seed and the leaven. We have domesticated both. We hear “mustard seed” and imagine something quaint and lovely. Perhaps a little pot of Dijon mustard beside a nice piece of ham. But mustard was not necessarily a respectable garden plant. It could be invasive. Once established it could spread and become extraordinarily difficult to control. In our context it would be like a macadamia farmer deliberately planting a camphor laurel tree. 

When Jesus says: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…” his listeners may not have heard: “The kingdom of heaven is like something small and sweet which eventually becomes something lovely.” They may have heard: “The kingdom is like a weed.” An intrusive weed. An uncontrollable weed. 

Then Jesus says: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour.” Again, we have domesticated the image. We imagine a nice packet of commercial yeast from Woolworths. Ancient leaven was old, fermented dough, kept back and allowed to sour in a dark dank place, then introduced into fresh dough so that fermentation spread through the whole batch. Leaven was unstable stuff, a symbol of the “unclean”.  

There is something wonderfully earthy about all of this. A weed. A woman. Fermentation. Things spreading where they are not supposed to spread. Things bubbling away out of sight. Things refusing to remain controlled. On the one hand: weeds, women and the wild. On the other hand: the patriarchal, the tamed, the settled city-state civilisation, the military-industrial complex. And that takes us back into the deepest memory of Israel. 

At harvest festivals the Hebrews recite the words of Deuteronomy:

“A wandering Aramaean was my ancestor.” A wanderer. A nomad. And then a slave. The foundational story of Israel is not the story of a great city, a great army or a great king. It is the story of people who escaped. People who walked out of Egypt as runaway slaves, wild and free. The story tells us that when the freed slaves leave Egypt, they must learn again how to live on the land and be wild and free by eating wild and free manna. There is a fascinating theory that manna may have some relationship to the sweet secretions associated with scale insects feeding on tamarisk trees in the Sinai — a substance traditionally collected and eaten by Bedouin communities who called it “man”. For 40 years, Moses learned how to rely on the land for its provision while being deprogrammed from everything Egypt had conditioned into him. Under the tutelage of the African clan of herders, he hooked up with and eventually married into, he was retrained in the wilderness after fleeing Egypt as an OG on the run, with a price on his head. Whether or not that finally explains the biblical manna is not really the point. The theological point is that the people have left Egypt. They have left the city-state. They have left the system that fed them in exchange for their labour and their slavery. And now, in the wilderness, they must learn again how to trust the land, how to receive, how to gather enough for today, how not to hoard. Again and again the Hebrew tradition insists upon release. The land must rest. Debts must be released. Slaves must be freed. The machinery of accumulation must stop. Creation must be allowed to breathe again. 

The manna story, the wild weeds, and the uncontrollable leaven tell how the kingdom of God interrupts the human project of controlling everything — land, animals, labour, wealth, time and one another. It insists upon regular release back towards the undomesticated condition of creation — including those particularly troublesome wild creatures called human beings. The mustard seed, intrusive, uncontrollable, wild, and dangerous points backwards, behind the ploughed fields, towards growth unauthored and unauthorised. Simultaneously the mustard seed points forward, towards a question: What is the ultimate role of wildness? What might the things we call “uncivilised” have to teach civilisation? Civilisation has a dangerous capacity to make terrible things seem normal. The normalcy of civilisation. The banality of bureaucracy. The invitation to normality. (The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/26365-the-gathering-of-the-manna 

It’s up to you to decide what the parables mean for you, but this is how I hear their invitation: To be wild. To be free. To be untamed. If the kingdom is wild, then I don't get to decide in advance where it will grow. It may invade conservative gardens and progressive gardens. It may disturb the certainties of Sydney evangelicals—and the comfortable certainties of people like me. I remember the words of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, who remind us that Jesus was not murdered by unusually evil people. He was killed by the normalcy of civilisation: by empire, law, religion and the ordinary machinery of power doing what they normally do. I think, too, of Hannah Arendt’s haunting phrase, “the banality of evil.” The Holocaust did not depend only upon monsters. It depended upon ordinary people, ordinary offices, ordinary bureaucracies: processing forms, obeying instructions, keeping the machinery running. 

The “normalcy of civilisation” and the “banality of evil” troubles our easy assumption that what is normal is therefore good. The normal, civilised, tamed option is so often to accept the world’s wisdom and call all of that sensible:

·      Protect what is ours.
·      Secure our borders.
·      Accumulate wealth.
·      Build bigger armies.
·      Measure our wellbeing by GDP. 

But what if the kingdom of God is not sensible? What if the kingdom is wild?

What if the kingdom is the mustard seed, an intrusive weed that gets into the carefully cultivated garden and refuses to stay where it is put? What if the kingdom is the leaven — hidden away, fermenting, swelling, disturbing the neat and unleavened order of things? Then perhaps the wild option is to give money to the poor and dispossessed. The wild option is to welcome the refugee and make space for emigrants. The wild option is to spend less on the machinery of war and more on education, medicine and care for the vulnerable. Perhaps the kingdom asks us to remember that our ancestor was a wandering Aramaean; that our foundational story is about runaway slaves; that Jesus himself was a refugee. 

The parables ask me a disturbing question: Do I want to be normal, respectable, tamed and safely domesticated? Or do I want to be wild? Because perhaps that is what freedom looks like. Perhaps wildness is not recklessness at all. Perhaps the wildest thing we can do in a world organised by fear is to hope. To love. To believe that another world is possible even when there is very little evidence before our eyes.

So, I conclude with words attributed to a Jewish prisoner, said to have been found written during the Second World War:

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when I cannot feel it.
I believe in God even when God is silent.
That, perhaps, is the wild faith of the kingdom.