Hunger for the Kingdom: Mustard, Leaven, and Fish
Proper 12 year A; Matt 13:31-33, 44-52
Jesus’ teaching in and about parables weaves back and forth between the crowds and the disciples, as we saw two Sundays ago. So does the lectionary, offering pieces of Matthew 13 that leapfrog across each other last week and thus trying to avoid that awkwardness, as the framers try to create more sense than they see Matthew doing (hmm). This repeated change of audiences in the Gospel is however deliberate. It reflects the theme of discernment and division running through the whole parables discourse. This by the way should give pause to the glib use of “inclusion” as an all-pervasive principle in Christian life and practice, just as to notions of the parables as earthy common sense with readily-extractable moral lessons for daily life. The Gospel and the Reign (Kingdom) of God are all-encompassing and simple, but their arrival and effect is not a matter of neat or immediate universal welcome.
My suggestion this week is to read the Parables as though we were hungry.
The basic pattern is again of parables offered to the crowd, and interpretations offered to the disciples. Two Sundays ago we noted the confronting theme of incomprehension, as Jesus teaches the crowds in parables to allow their not understanding (vv.11-15), while the disciples are brought into the secret. This Gospel has more of the same: we have no fewer than five parables though, and still another commentary to the disciples, but this time one closing the whole discourse and chapter.
There are two pairs of parables, each closely parallel, and then a fifth. The Mustard-seed is found in Mark (and Luke), and both Matthew and Luke add the comparable Woman Leavening. The last three are all unique to Matthew. Every one of them has something to do with wealth and poverty, three of them via food production.
The first, the Mustard Seed, raises a problem. While mustard seeds are indeed small, and the resulting plants disproportionately large, they do not grow into the “greatest of shrubs” or become “a tree for the birds of the air.” This is not just an ancient version of “mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”
Remembering the political and economic realities of Jesus’ hearers and Matthew’s readers, the agricultural and domestic tasks described aren’t just instances of universal drudgery, but acts necessary for survival. So the unlikely mustard “tree” is not a common sense metaphor, but a promise of God’s plenty in a renewed world. This is not how things work, but how God’s Reign works.
With the parable of the Woman Leavening, we again have to imagine hearers literally yearning for what is promised in the image, since it conjures the food insecurity that marked the lives of many, rural peasantry and urban populations alike. Although the scenario here is quite plausible, these three measures of flour (cf. Gen 18:6) are not just typical domestic provisions, but enough for a feast.
The NRSV mistranslates one word and so creates a subtle misunderstanding; no-one in the ancient Mediterranean had “yeast,” but (as older translations get right) “leaven,” which is sourdough starter. This works by making everything in the dough itself “starter,” leaven, too. So in Greek, the words in the middle and at the end of v. 33 are the same: she look “leaven,” mixed it, and it became “leavened.” The metaphor is not one of invasion by a foreign substance, but of transformation and assimilation, since leaven is made of the same stuff (flour and water, but with the natural fungus and bacteria of traditional bread-making) as the bread itself. The whole of the dough then becomes what the leaven was, appetizing as well as plentiful. Like the Mustard Seed, the leaven expands and becomes its full self; the Reign of God will have its way, and humankind will be blessed.
These two are followed by an editorial summary passage from the evangelist (vv. 34-35) about Jesus’ teaching in parables, somewhat parallel to vv.10ff, but without the emphasis on incomprehension; now Jesus’ pedagogy is shaped this way to fulfill prophecy. However the earlier words about the relationship between this medium and rejection of him still apply; we cannot treat Jesus as a moral teacher independently of his person and mission, which are good news for some but not, it seems, for all.
The remaining three parables are unique to Matthew, and these are all spoken privately to the disciples. The second pair, Hidden Treasure and the Precious Pearl, have still more obvious economic content. Even today, ploughs and metal detectors still reveal hoards of coins and other precious metals in fields, from Wales to Afghanistan and beyond. Burial was often as good a means of protecting wealth as people knew, but as the parable suggests, not always really effective. Yet the proverbial hoard here is clearly beyond the normal experience of Jesus’ hearers. There is an ethical problem if this is taken at face value, since nothing is said about the origins of the hoard, and it is theoretically the property of the current owner of the field. It’s like quietly paying $5 for that Old Master painting you’ve gleefully identified at the estate sale.
This however isn’t the point. A parable is not a moral dilemma, but an image, of an exciting if unlikely prospect that galvanizes the imagination; the Reign of God is like this. The Reign of God is life-changing. So too with the Precious Pearl—the merchant probably isn’t such a relatable figure to begin with, and his actions don’t really make any sense (it really does say “sell all that he has,” not “liquidate his other investments”). The point is that the Reign of God turns things upside down. These parables are spoken to the disciples because they already left everything (4:18-22; cf. 19:27).
The last parable, the Net, has parallels with the Wheat and the Tares, heard last week. Now various fish are caught, useful and not, and the explanation is embedded in the parable. Like Wheat and Tares, this image is both tantalizing and frustrating for people used to recurrent periods of hunger. Like the Wheat and the Tares though it is ultimately an assurance of God’s good provision even when present circumstances are less promising. There are many points of contact here with Paul’s great vision of hope in Romans 8, both the section read last week, and then this week: “He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (8:32)
Last comes the final exchange between Jesus and the disciples containing a simple and striking concluding question: “have you understood this?” “Yes,” they say. And Jesus concludes with the intriguing observation that “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” This is a description of the disciples’ vocation, itself framed as a parable (of course).
The different conceptions that Matthew and the lectionary framers had in their respective ways of linking this material may become clearer now. The evangelist separated some content that seemed thematically related (like the parable of the Wheat and the Tares and its interpretation being placed separately from the parallel Net), because there was a point to make here that was more than just the content of each parable.
The parables discourse in chapter 13 is in fact a sort of micro-Gospel, a condensed version of the whole narrative of Matthew; its overall theme is the promise of God’s reign, in and despite rejection and apparent failure. The disciples in the end give their “yes” to Jesus, not because they have finally achieved an advanced certificate in parabolic interpretation, but because they are saying “yes” to him. They may still be hungry, but they have learned what they need most. The point was not folk wisdom; it was understanding how Jesus would be received, how he would be rejected, and that he would rise, not because seeds grow but because God can overcome the barren ground and the tares and all else to make life out of death. And now as then, some will hear the word of the Reign of God and so respond like the grain on fertile ground, like the mustard seed, like the generous leavened dough that feeds a multitude.