Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 Have you understood all this?O God of grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Everyone take a deep breath and blow it out twice as slowly as you took it in. Do it again, breathing in the gift of oxygen; breathing out your gift back to the plants of carbon dioxide. Breathe the Divine Love come down – the breath of life – in and out. You know, in biblical terms, the word for breath, and wind, and spirit are all the same: ruach in Hebrew. I thought we might start with feeling thankful for breath – because —The news has been dreadful. Imperialism and insurgency and intransigence have been on the rise. Military action and occupation are creating a deadly cycle of violence and poverty, and more violence and more poverty. There is virtually no middle class and the gap between poor and rich continues to grow locally and globally. Food and water supplies are threatened. People of faith are being expelled from their homes and their communities are being decimated. It will get much worse before it gets better – it’s hard to imagine reconciliation. I’m referring, of course, to the conditions of first century of the common era – both early in the century when Jesus lived, and late in the century when the Good News (or Gospel) of Matthew was written. The writer of Matthew has good news for people who are suffering mightily: the kingdom of heaven has come near. Matthew writes about the kingdom of heaven almost three dozen times. For Matthew, heaven is a word that stands for the Holy Name – the Love Divine. The word “heaven” is a placeholder word for God in Matthew. So we can understand Matthew to be writing about the realm of God, also known as the Rule of Love.

Notice that none of the examples of the realm of God in our Gospel reading today have to do with religion – not with scripture or temple or synagogue or the priesthood or sacrifice or believing or not believing. [1] The realm of God is like this: it’s like a mustard seed sowed. It’s like yeast mixed into all of the flour. It’s like hidden treasure. It’s like a merchant searching. It’s like a fishing net. Do you understand? Well….maybe, maybe not.

Perhaps you remember what the first century Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his entry about mustard in his Natural History: “mustard…with its pungent taste and fiery effect …grows entirely wild…but…when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free from it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.” [2] The Mishnah, an ancient middle-eastern almanac of sorts, points out that it was unlawful to sow mustard in a garden and it was dangerous to plant it in a field. What’s more, attracting all the birds of the air to a place where one is growing food is exactly the opposite of what would be prudent. Jesus is saying that the realm of God is like a seed that grows into a big scrubby brush, which takes over where it is not wanted, that quickly gets out of control and that it attracts undesirables who will make a big mess. Jesus is saying that the rule of Love has blatant disregard for order or common sense, or for the reasonable expectations of law-abiding people. The realm of God, the rule of Love, is scandalous. Forget the crazy extravagant abundance of the parable of the sower that we heard two weeks ago, here we have just plain crazy!

Remember that Jesus used parables as subversive speech – they are surprising and disturbing – designed to provoke, raise questions, and pose dilemmas to get Jesus’ hearers to notice the oppressive realities of their lives and to challenge the boundaries of their fragmented world toward reconciliation, according to John Dominic Crossan and William Herzog [3] , and others. So what’s disturbing about yeast? First century yeast did not come in neat little packets. It came in the form of a putrid and decaying lump of dough. It was gross. Metaphorically, leaven in the Bible and other ancient literature is a symbol of corruption, of rot. Then it gets worse. A woman mixes the leaven in a lot of flower. Some ancient copies of Matthew say that she hid it. It is well-established that women in Mediterranean antiquity were ritually impure. So for a woman to hide something that will corrupt enough flour to feed more than one hundred people is doubly outrageous. Jesus is saying that the realm of heaven is hidden and unpredictable – and that it works under the guise of the contaminated. I was trying to think of a contemporary scandalous example. The best I could do is: the realm of God is like a teenager pouring grain alcohol in all of the punch for a large church gathering – not leaving any of it unspiked. Shocking.

Then we have the hidden treasure. In Jesus’ time, hiding valuables by burying them was the only way to keep them safe in case of danger or distress. Think of it as the ancient equivalent of a safe deposit box. And there were rules that protected the owner about what one had to do if one happened to find a buried treasure. It was not “finders keepers, losers weepers.” The finder had to attempt to find the owner – to proclaim the find — post notice – and if no-one claimed it, only then could the finder legally keep it. So, if the treasure legally belonged to the finder (because a legitimate attempt had been made to find the rightful owner), buying the field was unnecessary. If not, buying the field was cheating. Besides, having sold everything to buy the field, the finder is impoverished and can’t dig up the treasure without risking losing it. So here I think Jesus is saying the realm of heaven, the rule of love, is something that isn’t rightfully owned by anyone.

Need more? The writer of Matthew thought we did. The realm of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. Note well, it’s not that the realm of heaven is like a pearl. It’s like a merchant in search of pearls – who sells everything to buy one pearl of great value – but, ironically, this merchant isn’t worrying about what to eat or what to wear tomorrow or the next day. So the rule of Love is actually quite foolish!

And last – the realm of God is like a net that hauls in every kind of fish. It’s the fisher-people who spend their time and energy sorting out what they think is good and bad – the desirable and the undesirable. The realm of God, like a big net, doesn’t discriminate, Jesus says – it catches in everything in its path.

The thing is, Jesus is actually offering encouragement here. Oh right, you think, for whom? And that’s exactly the right question to be asking. For whom is this good news? Not the field owners or the farmers, not the religiously observant, not the law-abiding citizens or the good-deed-doers, nor the sensible merchants, not the fish sorters who truly wish the nets only hauled in the kind of fish they wanted. I think Jesus is offering encouragement to those who can’t manage to observe religious customs, or who break the law, or who make foolish decisions, who never thought the realm of God could possibly include them – who have been living without a net to catch them. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus announces a realm of God that is “subversive, unstoppable, invasive, a nuisance, urgent, shocking, abundant. It requires action and commitment and inspires extreme behavior” [4] to let everyone know and experience the Love Divine come down.

Now this can be pretty scary stuff for good girls like me – a religious doer of measured good deeds, a sensible person who can pass a criminal background check with flying colors, a property owner. I imagine a few of you fit that same description. So what about us? Is there anything for us? Here’s the good news that I can find for us. I think the writer of Matthew is inviting us to notice the oppressive realities of our own lives and to challenge the boundaries – the familial, social, religious, political, and economic boundaries – laws, customs, agreements and understandings that oppress people – that we assume cannot be changed.
Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health, says that “the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” [5] I think that probably what feeds that root of all that is wrong is fear. It seems to me that we are so often seeking to assuage that fear and get some security with justification rather than confession – you know, seeking to prove the rightness of our positions instead of confessing our limitations when it comes to loving. We are so often seeking to cover up our fear with outrage or resentment or even revenge rather than risking asking for or offering forgiveness, which makes us feel so vulnerable. We are so often seeking to punish rather than reconcile – because we get so afraid. Surely Jesus understood that because he says “do not be afraid,” more than any other thing he says in the Gospels. Do not be afraid to love more and more – even and especially your enemies. Do not be afraid to experience the Love Divine come down.

In his book of subversive activities for education [6] , Jeffrey Schrank’s epigraph is from one of my all-time favorite stories – A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head….It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” [7] In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is inviting us to stop bumping our heads for a moment and think of it. Think of the “subversive, unstoppable, invasive nuisance, urgent, shocking, abundant” [8] realm of God – of Divine Love come down — and adjust, tune our hearts and minds and lives accordingly.

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