Today we have a continuation of last Sunday’s Gospel reading on the parables describing the Kingdom. Matthew, in these parables, speaks consistently of the “kingdom of heaven” and it could be, for some people, a misleading phrase because it seems to refer to the afterlife, a future existence.
On many occasions, I have stated that Scripture speaks to the world in which are NOW living. The Kingdom represents the kind of world that God, through Jesus, wants to see realized among us in our own time. We should not be surprised. We pray for it whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” Why, then, does Matthew speak of the “kingdom of heaven”?
We need to remember that this gospel was written mainly for a Jewish audience. Recall that the Jews did not like to use the name of God directly. The term “heaven” can be interpreted as a euphemism for “God”. Matthew uses other devices to avoid mentioning God’s name directly, for examples: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven [by God]”; or “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy [from God]”. Mark, on the other hand, writing for a different audience, has no problems speaking about the “kingdom of God”.
“Kingdom” in the Gospel does not refer to a place that exists either in the here and now nor in the hereafter. The Kingdom is not only an environment, it also is a set of relationships in which God’s values prevail. What are God’s values? In practice, they are the deepest human values and aspirations as mirrored in the life of Jesus, who is himself the revelation of God in accessible human form. These values include truth, love, compassion, justice, a sense of solidarity with all other human beings, a sense of trust in others, a deep respect for the dignity of every human, a holistic concept of human growth and development. And, of course, all these are seen in the light of God, who is their Ultimate Source.
People who, individually and collectively, try to live these values belong with Jesus, to the Kingdom of God. They are united with the rule of God in trying to build a world that we all would like to see. It is very much something for the here and now. It is basically the vocation of the Church, and therefore the vocation of every parish community and of every member of that community. At the same time, we need to recognize that the Kingdom and the Church are not co-terminus (see the parable below). The Kingdom extends beyond the Church. There certainly are people, who may not explicitly know Christ or express allegiance to Christ, yet who live the ideals and the values of the Kingdom in their lives. In the same way, we cannot say we belong to the Kingdom simply because we are baptized Church members. We belong to the Kingdom only insofar as the Kingdom is an effective factor in our daily living.
In today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 13:24-43) we have three images or parables about the Kingdom at work among us. The first is the parable of the weeds among the wheat. Notice the play on words: weeds-wheat. The Kingdom of God calls for people to live with the highest ideals and greatest generosity. It also calls for a great measure of tolerance, patience, and understanding in seeing the Kingdom become a reality.
The conversion of our societies into Kingdom-like communities is a gradual process. There is always the danger that, when people try to take God or the Kingdom life seriously, they become elitist. We Christians, simply as Christians, can feel superior to people of other religions or those who adhere to no religion. As Catholics, we can talk disparagingly of Anglicans, Protestants, Evangelicals. Even among Catholics, members of charismatic groups, Legionaries, Knights, Bible study groups, social action groups, can see themselves as ‘superior’ to ‘ordinary’ Catholics who ‘only’ go to Mass on Sundays, or the attitude that weekly or daily mass-goers are a cut above those who only appear at the Christmas or Easter midnight Mass.
We all tend to believe ‘decently moral people’ are ahead of the ‘thugs’, ‘louts’ and other ‘undesirables’ in our society. ‘Thugs’ and ‘louts’ may be descriptive, but they are also words of intolerance. We sanctimoniously set ourselves up as judges of others. It is a trend that is increasingly being found in our daily media that reflect the interests and values of readers and viewers, including “good” Catholics.
Hence, today’s parable, far from being remote, touches us deeply. The parable is saying that people who are filled with the vision and the values of God and Jesus must learn to live side by side with a whole spectrum of people who, in varying degrees, do not yet share or live by our vision and values. We are, and always will be, a sinful Church. To pretend that we are anything else is a lie.
We can go even further. Each of us is a combination of wheat and weed. In each one of us there are elements of the Kingdom and elements that are deeply opposed to it. Paul recognized that struggle within himself (see Romans 7:21-25). Like Paul, we need to learn to be tolerant of our own weaknesses. God told Paul that it was precisely through his weaknesses that he could reveal God’s glory: “My power is made perfect in [your] weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).
The coming of the Kingdom, then, is not going to be a neat and tidy process. Experience again and again confirms that fact, whenever we try to bring out change and reforms in our communities.
The next two parables point to two other characteristics of the Kingdom. The parable of the mustard seed shows that the work of the Kingdom has tiny beginnings, whether we are talking of the fledgling Church that Christ established or any newly established Kingdom-inspired movement. Only when the vision of the Kingdom becomes truly rooted will it experience certain and inevitable growth.
Why? Because the vision of the Kingdom is not a narrow, religious one but an expression of the deepest aspirations of all human beings. At its beginnings, the church, as the instrument for the building of the Kingdom, must have felt like it faced a daunting task. Its tiny communities were scattered all over Asia, Africa, Greece and Italy. Waves of persecution and hostility followed in a determined effort to wipe them out. But they prevailed even as Truth, Love, and Justice must.
In the third parable, the Kingdom is compared to a small amount of yeast, even smaller than a mustard seed, in a large batch of dough. Its presence cannot be easily detected – for it is totally blended with and is part of its environment. A good Kingdom community should also be that way. At the same time, it has an energy of its own that produces a remarkable influence on growth in the whole. Perhaps part of our Christian problem is that we are too exclusively concerned with the growth (or even the survival) of the Church in general, or of our little corner of the Church, and not sufficiently focused on the growth and well-being of the whole community to which we belong.
To sum up, each of the three parables is saying something specific and different about the development of God’s Kingdom among us. It is going to be, on the whole, a messy business in which the good and the bad, the strong and the weak, the clean and the corrupt, will rub shoulder to shoulder both inside the Church and outside of it. To try to create islands of absolute integrity is not realistic and may even be self-defeating.
No matter how small the beginnings are, if we are faithful to the spirit and values of the Kingdom, we can be sure that difficult obstacles, threats, and even dangers can be overcome. A Kingdom community, even though small, can exert a real influence on the growth of the environment of which it is fully a part and be instrumental in spreading Kingdom values as the accepted values.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!