Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
Ah wait! I forgot…. it’s sermon time, not story time!
We all love stories, don’t we? (Perhaps even more than sermons…). Human beings have always told one another stories, from the tales of hunting outlined in the cave paintings of our Neanderthal ancestors to the goings-on of Eastenders or Emmerdale… And chapter 13 of Matthew’s Gospel, is, in fact, full-to-bursting with these stories. It opens with the parable of the sower, which we heard two weeks ago, and continues with the parable of the weeds and the wheat, which we discussed last week. And then… well, then, as we hear in today’s reading, Jesus seems to be on a roll… telling one story after another, some of them so short that they feel more like a proverb than a real story: the mustard seed, the yeast, the hidden treasure, the pearl, the net. So many stories! The proliferation of stories in this chapter suggests that, for Jesus, they are an important way of communicating. But why?
Well, why do any of us tell stories?
It has been suggested that stories are one of the ways in which we seek to make sense of the world around us. In a world which often feels arbitrary and confusing, stories create patterns. They give a shape to experiences that would otherwise seem meaningless and random: Hercule Poirot solves the crime, the prince finds his princess, Odysseus returns to Ithaca, the hobbits make it back to the Shire, the very hungry caterpillar is transformed into a beautiful butterfly. I don’t know how many of you saw the wonderful Arts Guild production of Little Shop of Horrors this week. The story is fabulously bonkers, of course, but might we not see even there a cautionary tale for our time about genetic modification and the prioritising of profit over people?
Well, maybe… but it’s also true that not all stories come with an easily identifiable lesson and some only come to make sense to us in retrospect. A story that we read at face value as a child, may take on a whole new level of meaning when we revisit it as an adult. Some books – the Bible is one of them, of course – repay reading and re-reading multiple times and deliver fresh insights every time.
Jesus, I think, knows this, and he makes his stories short and snappy, not over-complicated, memorable, easily shareable… He knows that his listeners won’t grasp everything that he is trying to tell them, time is short, he has to keep moving, the crowds are large, a few pithy memorable images may have to be enough to leave his listeners with something to ponder as they return to their homes and get on with their lives.
It’s surely not a coincidence, then, that the first story in this collection is that of the sower. It is, according to Jesus’s own explanation, quite literally a story about storytelling… a story about how the word of God is heard, received, understood, and acted upon. The stories that we have heard today, then, are like seeds, seeds that God throws in our general direction and invites us to bring to fruition. The seeds are different from one another, the stories speak to us in different ways, but they have one thing in common: they all tell us something about God’s kingdom, about how God is at work in the world now, and about the perfect world that God is preparing – yes, already, even as we speak… the kingdom that Jesus taught us to pray would be realised on earth as it is in heaven. They tell us something about what God wants from us, about what God’s kingdom has to do with us.
The parable of the mustard seed is straight out of Little Shop of Horrors… a tiny innocuous seed grows and grows and grows. It grows to immense proportions, but luckily it does not turn into a bloodthirsty danger to human life. On the contrary, it becomes a home, a place of shelter and safety. Its branches reach up to the sky as if in invitation, and the birds of the air make their nests there. The kingdom of heaven, then, is a place of invitation, a place where all find a welcome, a place where those who have found a welcome are called to welcome others.
It is also, the second parable tells us, a place of nourishment. Just as a tiny amount of yeast permeates the dough and makes it rise, makes it palatable, so small individual actions, the apparently insignificant decisions that we make about loving our neighbours… or not, sharing what we have… or not, spreading the joy of the good news of Jesus… or not, make a difference to the realisation (or not) of God’s kingdom.
If the first and second parables in today’s reading are both about growth, the third and fourth both point us to hidden treasure, treasure so valuable that the heroes of the stories are prepared to sell all they have in order to obtain it. What could be worth giving up homes, livelihoods, families and friends for? Jesus’s disciples, who had done just that, surely knew the answer to this question… a treasure that is not measured in pounds and pence, but in lives transformed, in sight restored and sickness healed, in lives given back and in the promise of eternal life to come.
And, with that in mind, what must Jesus’s disciples have made of the final parable, the parable of the net? Might it not have rung some bells for those men whose nets Jesus had miraculously filled before calling them away to fish, instead, for people?
In the first parable of Matthew 13, the sower throws his seed out, scatters it across the land, and waits to see what will come up. The net, in contrast, is drawn in, bringing with it fish of every kind. Just as in the parable of the wheat and the weeds, this story imagines a time of reckoning, a time of judgement when those people who have lived good lives will be separated from those who have not, just as the good fish are separated from the bad – literally, those which have gone off, which are rotten (and this detail matters… the fish are not naturally or inevitably bad, they have gone bad, just as people can go bad even though they always have the potential to be good).
So far, so simple, right? Live a good life, follow Jesus… or face the consequences. So far, so simple… except that Jesus’s teaching is rarely, in fact, that straightforward, however much we’d like it to be so.
‘Have you understood all this?’ Jesus asks his disciples at the end of his story. ‘Oh yes’, they reply… and you can almost see them nodding enthusiastically, as he shakes his head slightly. Have they understood it though? Really? Have they understood what it means to follow Jesus? What it costs to follow Jesus? What it will cost Jesus himself? Clearly, as we read on, they have not… or, at best, have done so only partially. Some of these very same disciples will reject, betray, deny Jesus before his death. They will fall asleep when he needs them most, and even those who stick with him will have plenty more questions for him before they finally really get it…
The parable of the net recalls the way in which Jesus had first called his disciples, but it also prefigures the way in which, in John’s Gospel at least, after his resurrection, he fills their nets with fish one last time, before sending them out, no longer to fish for people but to feed his sheep… to feed them, that is, with the stories which will, in turn, inspire them to follow Jesus, to seek God’s kingdom.
Seen from this perspective, the net becomes – appropriately enough – a sort of ‘catch-all’ image which sums up all the stories that Jesus has told in this chapter. It stands for the kingdom of heaven, but it also points towards the act of discipleship, to all that we do when we fish for people, draw others to Jesus, tell his stories, feed his sheep.
In fact, even more than that, it reminds us that when we do these things we are working for the kingdom of heaven in the here-and-now. Not building the kingdom, for the kingdom is God’s to build and already exists fully and perfectly in God… but, as Jesus puts it in today’s reading, bringing out its treasure – helping others to see its richness and value.
The sower sows, casting his seed upon the earth, waiting for growth, expecting growth. The mustard tree calls down the birds of the air into its branches, the baker provides nourishment from the simplest of ingredients, and the storyteller brings out treasure, old and new, from the places where it is hidden and sows it, just like seed, in the world, waiting for it to take root and grow and flourish. Listen, Jesus invites us. You don’t have to understand everything. But recognise that in these stories lie hidden treasures, pearls of great price… Seek them out! Listen! These are stories worth hearing…