What Is the Wisdom of the Kingdom of Heaven?

Lectionary Link

6 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 12, July 24, 2011

1 Kings 3:5-12 Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39   Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

  In the biblical tradition, who is regarded to be the wisest person in the Hebrew tradition?  It is King David’s son, King Solomon.  We have read the prayer request of Solomon before he ascended the throne to succeed his father David.  What did he ask for?  He asked for wisdom and God answered him by saying to him, “I will give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.”  Solomon became the inspiration for the wisdom school in the Hebrew religion and the wisdom teacher was to ancient Israel what the philosopher was to ancient Greece.  Some people have questioned Solomon’s wisdom though, because he is said to have had 700 wives and 300 concubines.  (How’s that for biblical family values?)   What is the wisdom in that?  Well, one woman once said that Solomon had a source for wisdom because he had 1000 counselors who gave him free advice.  How could he not be wise?

  Some Gospel scholars believe that the wisdom teacher was a model for the ministry of Jesus.  The words that seem to be most original to Jesus were teaching stories call parables.  A parable is a story that teaches through the attempt to get the listener to identify with a scenario.  It is an attempt to teach through appreciative participation.  But the parables of Jesus were also riddles; in them he required the listener to confront his counter logic.  How do the parables of Jesus that we’ve read today, represent counter logic?  And how does the counter logic of Jesus trick our literal minds into seeing things in a new way?

  Most people believe that civilizations are great because of the people who are heroes.  Kings and Warriors, philosophers, are normally thought to be the pillars of civilization.  Most of us understand history as the public record of why things have occurred because of the great people who attained fame in their public deeds.  These people are like the great oak trees of the forest.

"Not so", says wisdom teacher Jesus.  The kingdom of God, or the most embracing realm of life itself is known because of the little mustard seed deeds.  Heroes and heroic acts do not make a great society; rather it is the collection of all of the small deeds of kindness and caring that result in the success of any society.  If all of the deeds of kindness and caring ceased; society would come to a halt.  If moms did not care for their babies, and people did not do the millions of menial chores required to sustain communal life, societies would break down and fail.  When great disasters hit, the immediate goal is to return life to it normal sequence of the many rituals of care and mutual accountability.  These are the scaffold and telling reality of the kingdom that Jesus spoke about.  The kings and leaders get to prance on the stage held up by scaffolding of all the tiny mustard seed acts of care and kindness and mutual accountability that makes a society work.  No matter what the president or congress or governors or legislatures or captains of industry do; the people in this network of small acts of kindness and mutual care and accountability will still have to keep on, keeping on.  Parents will still have to do all the things they do for their children; dishes and clothes will have to be washed, traffic laws obeyed, shops opened, groceries sold, produce delivered.  We in the course of all of our little mustard seed deeds don’t have the luxury of worrying about whether we are doing big and important things.  But in the logic of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, it is in these every day micro-events of kindness, care and mutual accountability where the reality of God’s kingdom is found and known, and in fact this reality rules the world because we only survive because this micro-network magnified is the very infrastructure of human community.  We will still be a part of the scaffolding of the kingdom of heaven no matter what they decide or don’t decide in Washington.  How do you like the logic of Jesus?

  The parable of the leaven or yeast is like the parable of the mustard seed.  The kingdom of heaven is like a small portion sourdough culture.  You put it in the dough and this tiny substance infiltrates the dough and gives bread its very “breadiness.”  Jesus was saying, “You hero worshippers think that important people are really making life important and that is wrong.  It is each person exercising the moment by moment small deeds of kindness and mutual care and accountability that gives us abundant life.  Don’t be fooled by all those who tempt you to believe that the spot light of fame, power, and fortune are the key to survival in life.”

  The next parables of Jesus also have the counter logic of this wisdom teacher.  It’s is dishonesty to have discovered the abundance of minerals on a piece of property, and then buy the property without disclosing to its owner that the minerals are there.  What Jesus was indicating by this is that most people do not know the value of their own lives and therefore do not tap the native wealth that is accessible in human experience.  Why is it that two people can look like they are doing the same thing, but one person will express the experience of wonder and the sublime, while the other will be bored?  The kingdom of heaven is the experience of knowing another level of value in this “seemingly” ordinary life.

  The parable about the pearl of great price, is really about another stock market “no-no.”  We call it “insider trading.”  It is about having privileged information that others don’t have.  It’s like going to a rummage sale and offering a couple of dollars for old baseball cards that you know are worth thousands of dollars.  What Jesus is saying is that people can live this life in such a way to understand another level of value.  Within life, Jesus said that we can find abundant life.  And Jesus is inviting us to find that abundant life.  This parable is also about the purpose of human life. We are ever to be re-educating ourselves towards the discovery of higher values.  When we look at our lives, things that once were regarded as important now seem to be trivial.  How is it that our values change?  How is it that we discover new values?  We do so in the event of finding what is great and then we organize our lives around what we regard to be the highest inspiration in life.  The kingdom of heaven is the process of coming to higher values; that’s a problem since values are experienced as being relative to our own moral and spiritual progress.

  How do I tolerate myself for the higher values that I do not yet have nor have discovered?

Well, Jesus said the kingdom heaven is about patience, with ourselves, with each other and with our world.  The net is cast to catch all sorts of values in the mix of our life experience, and we need patience with the mix both in our own life and in our world.  We need to have the patience to wait for a more complete sorting out of the values in our lives and of the values in all human experience.  The kingdom of heaven is about having that kind of patience, but also having that kind of hope that justice amongst all values will someday attain.  The kingdom of heaven is about having patience with hope.

  St. Paul believed that we could have that kind of patience and hope in the midst of the extreme mixture of human experience, because we have God’s Spirit within us and because nothing can separate us from the love of God.

  Let us hear the Gospel today: We live in the kingdom of God’s love, a patient and hopeful love.  And this God of love is educating our values as we grow in wisdom in the art of living.  And may the Gospel also be this:  In the middle of the seeming ordinary, God has for us events of the sublime, events of such wonder that we feel a bit guilty about “having inside” information.  These events guide us upward in the values of our lives.  May God grant to each of us events of the extraordinary within our ordinary lives.  Amen.