It's Everything

Have you ever read passages of the Scriptures and marveled, feeling like you're reading them for the first time?  I had that feeling reading Matthew 13.  I'd heard homilies on all the individual parables of the Kingdom, but I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked at them as a composite whole. And what profundity!  It was awe-inspiring to "cast my net into the deep.

Matthew 13 is essentially the third Luminous Mystery--the proclamation of the Kingdom.  Jesus tells seven parables, teaching about the Kingdom of God.  He explains two of them and the chapter closes with he famous phrase, "a prophet is not without honor except in his own country" (13:57).  The seven parables are:

1) The Sower (rocky ground, fertile ground, etc.)
2) The Wheat & the Weeds
3) The Mustard Seed
4) The Leaven
5) The Treasure in the Field
6) The Pearl of Great Price
7) The Fishing Net

Rather than go over these one by one, here are some thoughts about the stories as a whole...

-I'm still taken with Pope Benedict's idea that in preaching the Kingdom, Jesus was actually preaching Himself.  More specifically, His Mystical Body.  It was in the first of the Pope's three Jesus of Nazareth books.  Reading the parables in that light, Jesus is the sower, the farmer, the treasure, the pearl, and the fisherman.  It adds a rich layer of meaning.

-The Kingdom is incredibly valuable.  And in one of those Christian paradoxes, it has a price even though it's free.  The merchant and the man who bought the field sold everything to gain their respective prizes.  All too often, we think about giving up worldly things for the Kingdom as a straight loss.  That is, we believe the secular world: giving things up for the Kingdom is like throwing something away.  We go from having something to having nothing.  But the parables assure us that the secular world is mistaken!  The two figures gain something of inestimable value.  It's not an empty trade.

-I was somewhat surprised at how clearly Jesus includes an eschatalogical element in two of the parables: the wheat and the weeds, and the fishing net.  There's no getting around it!  At the final judgment there will be a separating of the wheat and the weeds, the good fish and the bad fish.  To me, Jesus is very blunt here.

-Evil has a strange relationship to the Kingdom, but it won't be sorted out until the end of time.  On one hand, it's not a constituting part.  How could it be?  On the other hand, it's inseparable, since it's a result of the fall of man.  We can no more completely escape evil than we could escape our shadow.  In the parable of the wheat and weeds, the farmer (=Jesus) tells the workers not to pull up the weeds... lest the wheat come up with them.

I remember doing a paper for one of my history classes, regarding a movement of a number of utopian societies in turn of the century America.  It was interesting, but I couldn't help but think it a misguided effort.  These two parables?  Utopian societies have never & will never work.  Period.

To wrap this all up...

When I finished reading Matthew 13, I asked myself a question: what is the Kingdom for?  After all, you can define something in multiple ways.  Reflecting on Matthew 13, there are a few functions of the Kingdom of God.  First, it's meant to grow in us.  Individually and collectively!  And by growth, don't miss the parable of the sower--the seed that landed on fertile ground produced a hundred fold.  We're offered an infinite gift!  Second, it's something of incredible value.  It's everything, pure and simple.  Third, the Kingdom is meant to usher us to/into/through the end times.  We can't lose the teleological focus of our faith.  Too often we focus on the end times in the negative sense, or as something that's an end unto itself.  It's rather another step in the journey to our ultimate destination: heaven (hopefully).  Fourth, the function of the Kingdom is to detach us from the world.  There is a cost to discipleship that we can't escape!  Not everything is compatible with Christianity; no amount of wishing on our part can reconcile Christianity and opposing morals.