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I want to comment on last Sunday’s readings, Matthew chapter 13. I was struck by the parables in this single chapter. It is almost like Jesus is giving us a lecture or a teaching manual on how to live as a Christian in our current world. The parables he teaches are used by him to tell us what the expectations are for Christian's in a living reality. How appropriate for our current times, for Christian's and the Church.
Jesus comments here on why he uses parables. Parables are teaching using comparisons for those listening. In each section of this chapter, Jesus is speaking to crowds, gatherings, and ends in his hometown of Nazareth, where he will be rejected by his own. This chapter 13 has 8 parables in it, more than any other passage in the Bible. These 8 parables are an outline on living in community in our times. They are grouped in the chapter as if an outline on how to remain in Faith at any time, anywhere. Parables are used by Jesus for the people he is addressing. They are ordinary souls who live ordinary lives, so he chooses analogies and stories they can relate to and clearly understand the concepts he is presenting.
He speaks to us about how it is to live a Christian life. He enumerates the barriers to His message: not understanding, rootless hearts, material stuff, and obvious wealth that draws our attention to a temporal life. These types of souls do not grow or hear His message. Jesus talks about how Christians must live in a world surrounded by those who are bound up with distractions, celebrity, wealth, and power. .
Jesus was speaking some two thousand years ago. Yet is this not like our current world? Where corruption and disregard for the dignity of the human person have become the accepted present. Where wealth is the key sign of worth. Where selfishness and self-centered behavior are seen as necessary for human growth.
We are living in distressing times, where the truth and the clarity it brings have been discounted and have perverted our true growth as a person. Where material wealth has become the marker of what is not only successful but necessary if we want to be an accomplished and highly thought-of person in our society. Where the elderly and the child are not the focus of attention or concern. We live in a world that Jesus relates to us in chapter 13. He gives us a sermon on how, as a Christian, we can survive and focus as a human being bound for heaven.
The last several parables conclude His teaching. The parable of the Mustard Seed and the Leaven talk about the growth of the kingdom. He relates how small the mustard seed is, but how it grows into a large plant; this is slow. The kingdom will come, but it will take time. The parable relates to a treasure found in a field; the one who finds it goes and sells all to buy the field. He says this again in the parable about the pearl; the merchant gives all to buy it. The treasure of our Faith is worth our entire life. The last of the parables is about the dragnet thrown into the sea and the many different fish it brings up. A judgment scene comes into focus, and the good and the bad are sorted. I think this is God's way of saying that injustice and evil will be punished. God knows what each of us has lived, and He will judge who has kept the Faith.
The last part of Chapter 13 is a personal comment to us. Even Jesus, who was from Nazareth, his hometown, was teaching in the local synagogue. The locals took offense, because they knew Him and wondered where He got all this knowledge and wisdom. Christians in their daily lives, even in their own communities, will be isolated, scorned, and thought suspicious for their beliefs, as Jesus was in his own village.
The great message of Chapter 13, regardless of the weeds, the problems, the persecution and misjudgments, the Church will grow. The method of teaching is to use our lives and simple kindness to those around us. But we keep our Faith, marching forward. Do not leave the truth and love of God; it is worth any price one must pay in this life: persecution, exclusion, or isolation. In the end, we will enter heaven. Chapter 13 contains direct teachings on how to live as wheat in the world of weeds.
"Go and tell this people: 'Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.' Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed."( Isaiah 6:9-10)