The Divine Insurgency.

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

July 30, 2017

I.

The Kingdom of Heaven is an insurgency.  It is like a viral infection.  It is a small, even invisible, entity embedded in the world, which proceeds to spread its influence by subtle means throughout the body.

The Kingdom of Heaven is an epidemic of mindfulness, a plague of awakening, a contagion of expanded perception, and an outbreak of awareness and compassion.  It is a pinhole of light piercing the darkness, which spreads to illuminate everything.  It is like a tiny piece of the future which gradually reorganizes the way we live in the present and the way we interpret the past.  If that makes sense.

The Lord Jesus delivers here 5 little parables describing the Kingdom.  He means them to be obtuse and abstract.  As he says earlier in this chapter, he deliberately uses parables so that people will not imagine that they can obtain healing through their rational understanding.  He means we cannot think our way into acting differently. 

They are parables, not detailed, explicit doctrines; they are not direct, clear descriptions; they are not blueprints or schematics of the Kingdom of Heaven.  They are vague hints around the edges of what is real, which become more obvious the closer we get to realizing for ourselves what they are referring to.

In some forms of Buddhism they have these little riddles called, in Japanese, koans.  A koan doesn’t make rational sense.  You can’t figure it out with your reasoning or even with language.  The intent of a koan is to short-circuit your brain and spark a leap to a higher level of consciousness.

Jesus does something very similar with his parables. They are not meant to be figured out; they are meant to be lived in.  They are meant to be lived out.  They are meant to be experienced.  They are meant to short-circuit your ego-centric brain and unlock your true self.  Jesus speaks so often in parables because he doesn’t want to be understood; he says this explicitly at the beginning of this chapter.  Jesus wants to be followed.  

The parables start out as an insurgency in our minds.  Their intent is to overthrow and undermine our normal way of thinking and seeing.  In this sense the parables lead us into repentance, which literally means the renewal of our minds.

This is a particularly difficult if not impossible thing for me to understand, that it is not about thinking or understanding at all, that this is not something I can figure out or master by gathering enough information.  The new and different way of thinking implied in Jesus’ view of repentance is not what I would identify as “thinking” at all.  It is responding by trust or faithfulness with my whole self to the living reality of the Kingdom of Heaven here and now, with, among, and within us.

It is not about figuring it out first and then implementing what we have learned.  Because as soon as we place that rational filter between ourselves and the Kingdom of Heaven, we lose it.  Rather it is a matter of engaging with the Kingdom of Heaven, and flowing with it.  People who therefore let go of their thinking and act differently create a new and different world.  Their behavior infects others and spreads.  It becomes a new Way of life.

II.

Everything hinges on practice.  How do we practice these parables?  How do we practice the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven, upon us here and now?  It is not something we do; it is something we allow to have done to us.  We only let go.  We empty ourselves, which is the spirituality of Jesus.  That is why when we talk about practice we are first of all talking about prayer.

I’m going to let that sink in for a moment.  We cannot go out and live according to the values of the Kingdom of Heaven unless we experience and realize the reality of the Kingdom of Heaven which Jesus says in Luke is “within” each and all of us.  

These parables give us hints about prayer as a way to access the Kingdom.  Realizing this Kingdom within our own selves bears fruit in the world through our actions as changed, regrounded, renewed, reset people, people who are in touch with the True Humanity we see in Jesus, people who are aware of their own true nature as beings made in God’s Image.  

The first parable is that of the mustard seed.  Jesus emphasizes the smallness of the seed in contrast to the largeness of the shrubbery it grows into.  He is saying that we have to practice letting go of all significance and importance.  Only in realizing and embracing our own smallness and inconspicuousness, will our lives will be open to participate in God’s expansive hospitality and indiscriminate welcome. 

The second parable is about yeast that a woman adds to a measure of flour, showing that the Kingdom appears to disappear into the world even as it fundamentally alters the world from within.

The next pair of parables are about obtaining treasure by selling all we have.  Only by divesting ourselves of all possessions are we able to receive the munificence God has for us.  This starts with the interior “possessions” of our own ego-centric self-image, the self-serving stories we tell ourselves, and the whole gamut of our personality structure.  Once again, the practice is letting go, releasing, relinquishing. 

The parable of the net underscores the profligate acceptance, inclusiveness, and openness of God’s reality, suggesting that we have to let go of all discrimination and judgment, all distinctions between people, and certainly all condemnation of others.  Not only is there no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, but there is no good or bad either.  Everyone is in the net of the Kingdom.  It’s all good.  We practice this by cultivating interior non-attachment, opening into a life of inclusion, welcome, and acceptance. 

The other side of the parable indicates that the ones who are saved are those who participate in the radical acceptance and welcome of God.  While the rejected would be those who stubbornly held onto their self-righteous, discriminatory, differentiation, judgment, and condemnations of others.

III.

Jesus asks his disciples if they understand.  They say, “Oh yeah!  Sure! We get it!”  Which means that they really don’t.  It’s kind of a trick question because the one sure indication that you don’t understand what Jesus is talking about is claiming that you do.  Because it’s not about understanding in any rational, cognitive sense at all.  It’s not about having the right information or correct thoughts.  It’s about surrendering your own understanding enough to let God’s truth seep up into your consciousness.

Jesus says, “Yeah, I’ll bet you understand.  You guys are regular scribes in the Kingdom of Heaven, aren’t you?  High officials worthy of respect and honor, waiting to sit on my right and my left.  Well, there aren’t any scribes or legal experts in the Kingdom of Heaven!  Scribes are about preserving and enforcing the rules of the past.  But there is no past.  The past isn’t real.  You are like a householder who goes to the bank and collects something new and something old from his safety deposit box.”

No doubt this went way over their heads as it goes over ours.  But I suspect Jesus means that pretending there are distinctions and different values between new and old is a delusion propagated by people in power.  In reality, that is, in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is only now, the living present.  In prayer we let go of both memory and desire, we let go of our reasoning about how the new or the old is better or worse, we let go of the inequalities and separations between people and things, and instead we dwell together in God’s shalom, God’s peace, of equality and joy.

And this happens first in you, by means of prayer, which includes a silent, open listening for the Word in your heart.  Most of us talk too much in prayer.  We seem to be under the impression that prayer is about verbally laying our hearts open before God, and that is part of it.  But too often I worry that our words start coming between us and God, so that God can’t hardly get a word in edgewise.

What if we gave up our words and just listened?  It is a vulnerable and scary thing, to just listen for God.  Maybe we’re afraid that God won’t say anything we can understand.  We should probably count on that.  Or maybe we’re even more afraid that God will say things that we understand all too well.  

God always says stuff we don’t want to hear.  Like what comes across in these parables: If you want to be big, get small.  If you want to be rich, get poor.  If you want to be chosen, get ordinary.  This is not what our egos want to hear.  But believe me, if we want to hear it?  It’s not God.  It’s just you talking to yourself.  

IV.

What Jesus calls us to appears to be counter-intuitive, irrational nonsense.  It looks like the opposite of what makes sense to us.  In many ways, the Kingdom of Heaven as Jesus describes it is a kind of “oppositeland,”  where our normal understandings are turned upside down and the first become last, the rich become poor, and those who lose their lives save them.

In the end I am reminded of the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis, which spells out this paradox of faith that Jesus embodies.  You all know it.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy. 

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive, 

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, 

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

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