Well, our long journey this Summer through the Parables of Jesus has come to an end. Today I’d like to quickly touch on the major themes of the series, and how they are all brought together in the last set of parables recorded in Matthew.
We began the series by defining parables and exploring what Jesus had to say about why he started teaching in them. Then we looked at Matthew’s parables of the kingdom, a series of stories found in a single discourse in Matthew 13. As I summarized them:
The discourse begins with a warning: parables can work by enlightening, but they can also work by confounding. We may be fertile ground in which God’s message can grow, but we can just as easily be so hardened that it can bounce right off of us, or we can accept it only until it gets hard, or our existing commitments to things like money and status can keep it from growing and thriving in us. And the discourse ends with a confrontation: Have we truly understood? Are we the ‘good soil’ we think we are?
Intellectual humility is one of the most important things in the life of faith (and life in general). The moment we think we have God figured out is the moment we can be certain we haven’t. God’s ways are always mysterious, always subversive — they may even be found in things and people we think are insignificant, wicked, shameful, and gross. So we need the humility to set our judgments aside, to welcome everything and everyone with God’s indiscriminate love, and let God figure it all out in the end. But, being a part of it is worth everything we have and more.
Then we moved on to the parables of grace in Luke’s Gospel. These all focused in one way or another on God’s concern for “the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead.” God is like a shepherd on the hunt for one missing sheep, a woman looking everywhere for a lost coin, a father who runs out in joy to greet a returned wayward son, or a businessman who realizes there is more joy in being a benefactor than a miserly bookkeeper. And as those who have received this self-sacrificial grace from God, we are called to pay it forward to others: we who have been lost and have been found are called to go out and find others — and to rejoice when they come home, no matter how sorry their state may be. And, in this same vein, later, in Matthew’s Gospel, we saw the call not to be envious of the grace God shows to others, and instead, to pay forward the grace we have received to others. Indeed, the love of neighbour commanded to us in the Scriptures is nothing other than the love of enemy Jesus promoted in the Sermon on the Mount: the one on whom we are called to extend grace — and from whom we must receive grace — is precisely the person we’d least want it to be. This same concern for the last, the least, and the lost should be shown in our hospitality. For God’s kingdom is a big party and the only ones not invited are those among us who choose not to go or look down on the guest list.
Then we transitioned back to Matthew’s Gospel for his accounts of the parables of judgment. As Jesus entered Jerusalem and his ministry — and the conspiracy against it — came to a head, so too did the intensity of his teaching boil over in apocalyptic fervour. Indeed there, Luke’s parable about God’s radical hospitality becomes a warning to those who reject it. Jesus then reworks Isaiah’s famous parable of the vineyard as a prediction of his own rejection at the hands of ‘the kingdoms of this world’, including the religious authorities of his own people. Finally, in his last address to his disciples before his betrayal, Jesus warns them to stay vigilant and be ready for that time, whenever it may be, when they will face their moment of judgment. Then, he defines that readiness as a bold, unfearful investment in the life of faith. And finally, he further defines that investment as being in, for, and in solidarity with the poor, the sick, the immigrant or stranger, and the imprisoned — all those, who may look like weeds or something disgusting pulled up from the bottom of the sea yet pulled indiscriminately into God’s Kingdom, with whom he stands in solidarity, as one who is, like them, ultimately rejected by ‘the way the world works’. If the Kingdom of God works in the small, the rejected, and the gross, we now see that Jesus himself is small, rejected, and gross as far as this world is concerned.
And so, here at the end, “all of the themes of Jesus’ earlier parables come full circle” (Capon). The indiscriminate, mysterious, unrecognizable yet real, Kingdom is here present among us in the here and now. The ‘age that is coming’ unexpectedly overlaps with and clashes against the kingdoms of this world and their principalities and powers. And it demands a response.
Do we choose the way of grace, receiving it and passing it on indiscriminately to others, or do we reject it in the name of prudence, purity, and propriety? The choice, as always, is ours.
Matthew Root 