Something small and hidden
Something small and hidden

Something small and hidden

This week we continue with the Parables of Jesus in Mathew’s Gospel. The parables of the mustard seed (13:31-32) and the leaven (13:33) are twins. Both recount the story of something small and hidden that, through an organic process, becomes great. The two parables illustrate, by reference to the growth of a mustard seed and the expansion of leaven, a vital truth about God’s kingdom: a humble beginning and an almost secret presence are not inconsistent with a great and glorious conclusion.

The focus is neither on the smallness or insignificance of a present circumstance nor on the greatness of God’s future, both of which are taken for granted. The emphasis rather falls upon their connection, on two seemingly incongruent facts, the one being the experience of Jesus and his followers in the present, the other being their future in the kingdom of God. Our parables are then invitations to recognize that, between the minute beginning and the grand culmination, there is, despite appearances, continuity. Indeed, the one is somehow an effect of the other, so that the end is in the beginning. It may be that, for the present, the kingdom is obscure and without much influence. What matters, however, is not the beginning but the end. The kingdom may not open with great success, but success is its divinely ordained destiny. If leaven leavens the whole lump, and if a little mustard seed becomes a tree, similarly will the kingdom become, in the end, the measure of all things.

Everyday life is ruled by custom, habit, and routine, and these can all-too-readily cultivate a God-obscuring stillness. Unless one realizes that things are not what they seem to be and that they will not be as they are forever-as the leaven and the mustard seed reveal–one will miss what matters most–the pearl, the treasure–and substitute a god of lesser value and meaning. People can gain the whole superficial world and yet lose their own souls.

Persuaded that the true nature of things is not obvious, Jesus sets out, in word and deed, to fracture the mesmerizing hold of life-as-it-has-always-been. He seeks to shift our attention, to alter our perception, to expand our awareness, to change our behavior. Because he sanctions not the world as it is where the kingdom is obscure but only the world as it should be, when the kingdom will be all in all, he dislikes the default setting of our ordinary consciousness, whose defect is precisely that it accepts the present world as the real world.

He is disconcerted that we see without seeing and fail to strive to enter through the narrow gate and that we are so wedded to everyday life and find so much comfort in material trinkets and the unstable circumstances of fleeting lives. So he constructs these parables, in the hope that we might begin to ponder soberly God’s reign, and perhaps even to seek it, and perhaps even to seek it above all else.

Solomzi

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