My wife Kathy and I have just returned from two weeks in the Midwest—a week each in Michigan and Chicago where we used to live. In coming home, we seem to have exchanged dangerous Canadian wildfire smoke for a Southern California tropical heat dome. Crazy weather like this forces us indoors, and that’s a good place to contemplate the peculiar sayings Jesus puts before us this morning.
Today’s Gospel gives us a string of parables in which Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, the leaven in bread, treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a miraculous catch of fish. You don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see that all these stories have something to do with abundance in the midst of scarcity. Jesus lived and taught among people who were poor and therefore went hungry much of the time. All of these stories assure us that, even in the midst of privation, the God we know in Jesus will meet our needs.
Out of all this string of comparisons, I would like to concentrate on the first saying and then the last.
The first:
“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
The last:
“Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
As to mustard: If you have ever seen a mustard seed, you know how small it is. Jesus’s parable describes how this minuscule seed can produce such a gigantic bush. The ancients were fascinated by seeds. They lived before the advent of biological science, and so to them seeds were little packets of miraculous power. This tiny thing contains the secret of life. It is also crucial to food production, and a successful harvest makes the difference between satiety and starvation.
As I think about the way tiny seeds produce giant bushes, I see Jesus giving us an image of the way God works. The world God has given us has more than enough to satisfy our needs. But because of social inequity, most of the time most of the people go hungry. By showing us the explosive growth packed in a tiny seed, Jesus illustrates God’s ability to bring forth much out of nothing. The abundance of the natural world gives us a living illustration of God’s will that everyone can have enough if we only reorganize our ways of distributing what God has given us.
And then there is this second saying, about the scribe who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
Last week at the Art Institute of Chicago I revisited a painting there I always return to, Nicolas Poussin’s 1640 picture, “Landscape with Saint John on Patmos”. The painting depicts the evangelist John, retired on the island of Patmos, engaged in writing the Book of Revelation. John is sitting on this beautiful island amid the ruins of classical Greek architecture—you can see the broken columns of former ancient Greece’s departed glory. The book of Revelation, of course, is the last book of the Bible, and it ends describing God’s creation of a new heaven and a new earth. As John receives and transcribes this glorious vision of the future, he is surrounded by the remnants of a broken past.
Surrounded both by the beauty of the natural world and the markers of a time that has passed, Poussin depicts John the evangelist reaching into what is old and bringing about something absolutely new. It seems he can only give voice to his vision of the future by contemplating the artifacts of the past. In its own way this picture gives us both a theological and a personal truth. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel,
Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. [Matthew 5: 17-18]
Jesus’s teachings are both new and old. Yes, they are sometimes startling, but they arise out of all that has gone before. Similarly, there is a personal truth here for us as well. A follower of Jesus is “like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old”. Just as Jesus does not reject what has come before him, so you and I need to see that our present arises out of our past. Our American penchant for what we call “reinventing ourselves” ignores the simple truth, often voiced by the great classicist Mary Beard: “The past is all we’ve got.” You are your history. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do something new. It does mean that your life has a logic and a trajectory, and that the present “you” is a product of all that has gone before in your life.
I’m never entirely sure why we want to beat up on our collective or personal pasts in the way we do. Today we smugly assume that we in 2026 are morally better than those who lived in 1826, 1526, or 26 BC. In the same way, we often dwell on our own personal pasts, and flagellate ourselves for things we did then that we naively think we wouldn’t do again today if we only had the chance. In today’s Gospel I hear Jesus telling us, in the language of the street, to “get over ourselves”. Who we are now is pretty much who we were then. The question is not, “how can I reinvent myself?” The question is, how can I take out of my treasure that which is new and that which is old? How can I weave a fabric of my life that makes peace with the past, looks with hope to the future, and lives with purpose and joy in the present?
A longtime priest friend of mine always ends every conversation with the words, “Be gentle with yourself.” He knows from experience. We continually beat ourselves up over the past—things we’ve done, things we should have done, mistakes we’ve made, people we’ve hurt. Be gentle with yourself. You think you’re smarter now than you were then, but chances are if you faced the same people or situations today, you’d do exactly what you did years ago. The past may not quite be all we’ve got, but it’s a part of us that we cannot simply deny or try to forget. Make your peace with your past. Bring out of your treasure that which is new and that which is old.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers us some startling new comparisons of what he is doing to a mustard seed, the leaven in bread, treasure in a field, a pearl of great price, and a miraculous catch of fish. These ideas are new, but they arise out of his deep engagement with the tradition called by Jews the “law and the prophets”. God is doing a new thing, but it comes directly out of the long historical sweep of God’s loving faithfulness. As you make your way into your own future, it’s a good idea to follow Jesus’s advice: take from your treasure what is both new and old, and go forward in the assurance that there will always, somehow, be enough to see you through. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment