Lectionary Reflection for Proper 12A on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
THE QUESTIONS THAT CHANGE LIVES
I have always had a deep love for questions. I am not always able to sense when my questions may seem unhelpful or rude, but I am inspired and grateful when someone takes my inquiries seriously and explores the possible responses with me. And I get especially excited when the perfect question, in the right situation, at a pivotal moment, opens up a world of insights, imagination, and new energy.
Most questions are little more than a quest for information, but some questions—the most important ones—change our lives. Questions like “Will you marry me?” or “How can we solve this problem?” or “What have we not considered in this situation?” or “Why does this happen?” or “What do I really believe?” can shift our paradigms dramatically and lead to remarkably new understandings, experiences, and ways of being.
The Gospels portray Jesus as someone who loved questions, too. Often, when he was asked a question, Jesus responded with another one,1 and many of his conversations began with him asking a question.2 But perhaps Jesus’ most well-known and important questions were not framed as questions but as parables.
Jesus’ parables are not like riddles—intellectual conundrums we need to solve. They are deep, searching, and challenging questions that come to each of us in our own way and speak into the different realities of our lives. They are not just stories that pass on information. They are challenges that seek to transform.3 But crucially, Jesus’ parabolic, life-changing questions are not easy to hear and understand because they require a response that engages our whole being: mind, heart, body, behaviour, and relationships. That’s why we so easily miss their points, and why some Christians can support and follow leaders whose lives, values, and principles are the opposite of those reflected in the parables. Christian Nationalism, the Prosperity Gospel, and Fundamentalist Bibliolatry cannot stand when confronted with the parables of Jesus. Which is why their devotees either ignore them or interpret them as individualistic, evangelical, and motivational stories.
But if we seek to take Jesus’ message and mission seriously, if we truly desire to embody in our own lives the values and priorities of Christ, and if we long for a world that reflects the love and justice of God’s reign, then we cannot ignore the parables. We must place ourselves under their gaze and allow them to confront and challenge us. And this is exactly what the ‘Parables Discourse’ in Matthew 13 does.
THE PARABLES COLLECTION
Matthew’s Gospel puts the parables at the heart of its narrative and structure. The ‘Parables Discourse’ is the third of the five extended discourses of Jesus, which scholars believe are meant to echo the five books of the Torah. It describes in story form many of the truths that Jesus had begun teaching up to this point in the Gospel, and it points forward to the next few chapters where Jesus models what it looks like to embody the truths of God’s reign that his parables reveal.
The writer begins with the parable of the soils, which highlights the reality that some people will not be able to receive Jesus’ message.4 This includes, of course, followers of Jesus who sometimes struggle with the challenges and sacrifices God’s reign demands. Then he reminds us, through the parable of the wheat and the weeds, that good and evil, true and false, loving and cruel, welcoming and exclusive people will also live side by side, and the call of the Gospel is not for us to judge and “deal with” sinners, but to nurture beauty, truth, and goodness, while trusting God to work things out in God’s time.5
Mixed in with these two parables, which are the only two Jesus interprets for his disciples, is a collection of quick, simple, and enigmatic stories that reflect the nature of God’s reign. The six parables in this collection are presented in three pairs, with each pair revealing an essential characteristic of God’s reign and asking us to explore how those characteristics are becoming visible and influential in our lives and relationships. To people in ancient Israel living under the oppressive Roman Empire, and to people living now under oppressive human empires of every kind, these parables call us out of our cynicism and despair. They reassure us of God’s presence and activity in a world where God often seems absent or indifferent.6 And they remind us that God’s reign is “pressing into the world, laying claim to it, transforming it, though it takes bold and imaginative vision to see it”.7
THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
The first pair of parables in the Lectionary reading for Proper 12A sits between the parable of the wheat and the weeds and Jesus’ explanation of it. Both the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the yeast describe tiny things that turn out to have a significant impact. Far more than stories of positive thinking or maintaining a healthy self-image, these parables describe a fundamental principle of the reign of God: that there is nothing insignificant in God’s reign and it does not expand through political power, financial wealth, or grand, fame-attracting strategies. In Zina Jacques’ words, “It does not play by the rules of reasonable expectation. It is expansive, extensive, and extravagant”.8
Shortly after Jesus tells this parable in Matthew’s Gospel, he expresses the same truth about God’s reign when he feeds the crowd of five thousand people using only a few loaves and fish (14:13–21). While traditionally this miracle is viewed as a supernatural multiplication of food, it would perhaps be more in alignment with the message of God’s reign for it to be a miracle of changed hearts. Could it be that when people saw Jesus sharing the ridiculously small portion of food that he and his disciples had, they were moved to share whatever snacks they had brought? And if so, surely the miracle is that when everyone shares their tiny “mustard seeds” or “bits of leaven”, there is more than enough to go around—which is fundamentally what God’s reign is about. Rather than God swooping in to fix everything for us, Jesus’ teachings and parables show us what can happen when we are willing to risk our little, add it to the little of others, and see the abundance that can result.
The challenging question raised by these two parables of small things is this: What small influence or resources do we possess that could have—or maybe already do have—a significant, meaningful impact for the common good in our families, neighbourhoods, and societies?
