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St. Stephen's Anglican Church
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, July 27, 2014


Parables of the Kingdom of Heaven


Text: Matthew 13:31-33,44-49

The Kingdom of Heaven. That is a phrase Jesus used often:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew 5:3)

and,

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you certainly will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 5:20)

You could summarize Jesus’ mission as calling people into the Kingdom, and making a way for them to get there. Jesus refers to the Kingdom of Heaven three dozen times in Matthew’s Gospel. However, it isn’t until Chapter 13 that He begins to teach in answer to the obvious question, “Exactly what is the Kingdom of Heaven?” When we 21st-century people ask a question like that, we are looking for a systematic, analytical answer. Jesus never gives us that. Instead, He teaches about the Kingdom of Heaven in parables. In chapter 13 alone, there are eight parables. We heard five of them in this passage we read this morning. And that is what I want to look at. In those five parables Jesus makes three points about the Kingdom of Heaven:

1. It grows miraculously.

2. It is enormously precious.

3. Although everyone is invited, not everyone will get there.

First of all, let’s allow ourselves a definition of the Kingdom of Heaven. When we put together all Jesus said in the Gospels, we understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is how things are when God has set everything right. It is that state of perfection for which God made the world, and for which He created human beings in His image for His glory. In the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s people are living in complete obedience to His will.

When Jesus taught us to pray, He said we should pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” For us, living now in this world, the Kingdom of Heaven is right here in our midst, and yet it has not fully come to pass. But the Kingdom of Heaven glows and radiates wherever God’s people are obeying Him, worshiping Him and enjoying His blessing. It is radically different from the world. That is why Jesus says one must be born again to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (John 3:3-7)

In order to grow His Kingdom here on earth, God has chosen to use a people of His own, whom He has formed and groomed and developed. The first two parables we read this morning—about the mustard seed and the yeast—are the ones that make the point about growth. The mustard seed, Jesus says, is the smallest of all seeds, but it grows into a great tree. The woman baking bread mixes yeast into the flour, and Jesus says it spreads until it is all throughout the dough. Both of these are mysterious processes that amaze anyone who looks at them with a curious eye. To those people to whom Jesus spoke, both would have been considered something only God could make happen.

What Jesus is saying is that the miracle of the Kingdom of Heaven is the way it spreads and grows, through the hand of God working in the world. Even today, that is a powerful message. Last week, you I talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That is a scientific observation of the nature of all things in the universe. It is demonstrated with such unfailing consistency that it is called a law of nature. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that everything runs down over time. Heat cools off. Energy dissipates. Living things die. Things that are orderly become chaotic. Even that mustard tree will die. And that yeast bread will be gobbled up by people who will spend the energy it gives them, and they will one day die. But Jesus is not talking about bread and trees. He’s talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, which is God’s reign, and God’s plan and God’s righteous will. It is not going to run down. It is going to spread and grow, because God is at work in the world restoring that which has been spoiled by human sin

&And so, although the forces of evil thought they had defeated God’s plan when Jesus died on the cross, He rose triumphantly from the grave. And the world thought Jesus was gone after He ascended into heaven; but He left behind a church in which He abides. And although that church often looks weak and sometimes seems to be running down like everything else, God has sent the Holy Spirit into the world to do, through the Church, miraculous things to grow the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not running down. It is burgeoning. And everyone who believes in Jesus and turns their lives over to Him can see that growth and that hope and can put their trust in God’s future.

The parables Jesus told about the treasure buried in the field and the pearl are about the preciousness of the Kingdom of Heaven. He gives us a vivid image of a man who discovers a treasure buried in a field that is not his own. And it is such a fabulous treasure, the man must possess it no matter what it takes. So he sells everything and buys that land. It was the same with the merchant Jesus depicted who wanted to own the finest pearl he had ever seen. He sold everything and bought it. These are images the people would have understood, and so do we. In worldly terms, when something is valuable enough to you, you will make any sacrifice you need to in order to obtain it.

Jesus is illustrating the simple point that nothing in life matters as much as getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a hard sell. It was a hard sell in First-Century Palestine, and it’s a hard sell now. We love our stuff. We want more of it. We go to great pains to acquire more stuff. But when it comes to belonging to God, just what are willing to sacrifice for Him? Jesus is telling us there is nothing in all creation that is worth missing out on the Kingdom of Heaven. How many ways did He say that during His teaching ministry?

That points us to what Jesus is saying about the Kingdom of Heaven in the fifth parable we read this morning. Everyone is invited, but not everyone is going to make it. Jesus uses a fishing net to illustrate this. The net was let down into the lake and caught “all kinds of fish.” When the net was full, the fishermen pulled it up. And then they sorted. The good fish got put into baskets and the bad were thrown away. “This is how it will be,” Jesus said, “at the end of the age.” (Matthew 13:49) In fact, Jesus went on to be even more direct.

The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. [Matthew 13:49b-50]

Even those who put our assigned scriptures together thought it a little harsh of Jesus, so they chose to cut it off at the first half of verse 49. But Jesus tells us the sad reality. The most precious thing in all creation has been offered to everyone, but not everyone accepts it. Not everyone is willing to do what it takes to accept God’s offer. The net is thrown out to catch “all kinds of fish.” But not all those fish are going to end up in the Kingdom. It is clear from the other parables in this chapter, and everything Jesus taught, that there will come a reckoning, and a separation, and a judgment.

What makes that Good News is that it is not the heroic goodness of a person that gets Him into the Kingdom. It isn’t the fact that you did more good things than bad in your lifetime. To see the Gospel as Good News requires that we recognize that not a single person who ever lived can be good enough to earn entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven. That sounds hopeless, but it is not, because God has made a way for us where there is no way. He did it by sending His only Son to die on the cross to take our place and to wipe away our sins. In order for us to claim that benefit, it takes only for us to acknowledge that Jesus is the Son whom God has sent, to believe in Him, and to embrace Him as our Savior and Lord.

The painful reality is that people find that hard. And they seem to be finding it especially hard in our country today. For the last 200 years the people who shape our worldview have been selling a story that the world was not created by God, and life is not a gift from God, and there is no divine moral compass for the world. And over the last 150 years, Christian theologians have been questioning the truth of the Bible. And over the last 50 years, our culture has become more and more accepting of what these people have been selling. So that, what we see around us today is that there are a lot of wonderful, well-meaning people who have no interest in the God of the Bible. They have heard of Jesus, but He is nobody special to them. They look at people who belong to churches and say, “Those folks are naive and out of date.

My friends, our hearts ought to be turned toward those people. If you ask people what they love, you will get all kinds of answers.

Don’t you want to show them what real love is? Don’t you want to introduce them to the love of God, who so loved the world that He sent His only Son? Don’t you want to give them the experience of being part of a community of people in whom that love causes us to be there for one another through thick and thin, putting up with each other’s quirks and praying for each other’s healing and forgiving the careless things we say and do? Don’t you want to share with them the joy of knowing God?

This past Wednesday, one of our Bible Study groups gathered to pray over the land where we are building our new church. We began by talking about what all of us had been thinking, and what we needed to pray for. The overwhelming topic of discussion was the urgency for us to reach out with the Good News to the people right around us in the Northern Neck. And we are going to have to do it in a way that will resonate with them. We need to make our church a place where people who have avoided the church feel welcome and safe.

We may object that we are not experts at evangelism. We may complain that we do not know how to present the Good News. Let me tell you something. The Holy Spirit is going to fill that gap. If we love people who don’t know Jesus, and we tell them what we know in a way that makes it clear that we love them, that’s all we can do. The Holy Spirit will take it from there. After all, would Jesus tell us to preach the Gospel to all nations and then leave us high and dry, unable to comply?

Without question, these are difficult times for spreading the Good News. We are sailing against the current, the current of everything running down to death and disorder and darkness. But the wind that fills our sails is the Holy Spirit of God, who has been growing the Kingdom of Heaven on earth for over 4,000 years.

That is what Jesus is telling us today. And He is telling us that coming into that Kingdom is the most precious thing in the entire universe. And He is telling us the greatest tragedy imaginable is that some will miss out on that rich treasure.

Jesus wants us to work with Him to save them. What we have to offer them is God’s love. What we have to offer them is a taste of the Kingdom of Heaven. What we have to offer them is everlasting life.

©Jeffrey O. Cerar, 2014

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