I love preaching on parables. I like preaching on big days
like Christmas and Easter, too. And momentous encounters like a dramatic
healing or a powerful miracle are also fun to preach on. But I get bogged down
in long exposition. “I am the bread of life…” Yeah, yeah, we get it already.
Round and round statements like “Whoever loses his life will find it” leave me
wanting some sort of direction. Parables are the answer to my summer-time
homiletical blues.
The kingdom of heaven is like... That’s the way Matthew
introduces the kingdom concept that Jesus focuses most of his teaching ministry
on. Not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of heaven. They’re the same thing,
of course, but the nuance is different, and, more importantly, the way we hear
it is different. Heaven, in the mind of the 21st-century reader, is
a place. It’s the place where “good
people” like you and me are going (sarcasm implied). But surely that’s not what
Jesus has in mind.
If Jesus were describing the “kingdom of heaven” as if it
were a physical place, then his parable would lead us to believe that heaven
has a bunch of wheat and weeds growing in it. But that’s not right. We get
that. Parables are glimpses into a bigger truth. So why then do we limit our understanding
of the kingdom of heaven to a specific place rather than a state of being that
is defined by the establishment of God’s perfect reign?
Tomorrow, I’ll get into what the parable actually teaches
about this kingdom, but, before I do, I need to stop and remember that whatever
it says isn’t supposed to be a simple picture of a simple place. That’s why
Jesus used parables. Matthew lets us know that Jesus is describing the “kingdom
of heaven,” which gives us a chance to talk about heaven not in terms that
popular culture would depict but with the strange, gospel characteristics that
Jesus uses to describe it.
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