Sermon Thoughts: The Kingdom of Heaven is Like…Jesus, Stop Talking

We’re knee-deep in parables if you’re following along in church these days.

This week the parables come rapid-fire, one right after the other in Matthew.  At the end of it all Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “Have you understood all that I’ve said?” to which the disciples say, “Yes.”

I have to wonder if that “yes” from the disciples was more of an invitation for Jesus to stop talking than an admission of comprehension.

Something to note: if someone asks you if you “understand a parable,” and they’re not just checking to see if you know the words used, the answer isn’t ever “yes.”

That’s like asking “What does purple taste like?”

It’s nonsensical.  We don’t “understand” parables in the traditional sense of understanding.  Parables aren’t to be decoded.  Parables decode us.

Peter Rollins says it best in his book Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales, “A parable does not primarily provide information about our world. Rather, if we allow it to do its work within us, it will change our world–breaking it open to ever-new possibilities by refusing to be held by the categories that currently exist in that world.  In this way the parable transforms the way we hold reality, and thus changes reality itself.”

He goes on, “The problem with so much religious communication is that it aims at changing our minds.  The result is that we can hear the message of the preacher without necessarily heeding the message; we can listen to the ‘truth’ and agree with it, yet not change in response to it.”

Rollins picks up on a central theme in this week’s string of parables: they’re all calls to awareness and reflection and action. “The parable facilitates genuine change at the level of action itself.  The message is thus hidden in the very words that express it, only to be found by the one who is wholly changed by it.”

There is some sort of impetus on our part, then, not to engage the parable like we would a story about Jesus.  The parable isn’t like Jesus healing the lepers (though the story about Jesus telling the parables would be).  But the parables themselves are an altogether different beast.  They are endlessly instructive.

Which, I guess if you’re going to get to the meat of it all, is the real problem with having the disciples say “yes” when they’re asked if they understood it.  Because that “yes” is really just an invitation to stop engaging it.

And I’ve read a few sermons this week on these parables, and so many go into decoding mode instead of allowing the parables to do the decoding, that I just want to shake these pastors and say, “Jesus, shut up!”

The silence is sometimes better than the sermon, because at least then everybody is able to learn from the text.

Parables are our teachers.  We come back to them for new and different wisdom every time.  A sermon that invites a different answer than the one the disciples gave is, perhaps, the best response.

“Do you understand all that has been said?”

“No.”

“Hear again, then, that the kingdom of God is like a weed, the mustard weed, from the smallest seed…”

And slowly, surely, the weed of the parable will vine around your life producing wisdom of such great price that you will throw out the old ways in deference for the new in the net of existence…