29 June 2008                               
Carolyn L Roberts
Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52

      When I was in middle school, our family lived in Moses Lake, Washington. At the time, the town had three stoplights, and at least 100 tumbleweeds per person. I swear the old song, They Call the Wind “Mariah,” was written just for that place. And hot?!? Temperatures over 100* were a given for at least a couple of weeks during the summer; the other weeks just simmered in the 90’s. But I loved living there. The lake provided endless entertainment: swimming, boating, waterskiing, ice skating, and fishing. And one summer, something that at least momentarily outranked it all: a bonafide treasure hunt, sponsored by a local radio station in a contest designed to increase their listening audience. I think the treasure was only a “golden” yellow pencilbox, good for a prize of $100, but it captured our imaginations.

      My brother and I listened to the radio multiple times each day for the next clues. We pieced them together and poured over the town map. We narrowed the location down to a couple of city blocks, and even furtively dug a couple small holes in a vacant lot. But we never found the treasure. Someone else beat us to it. Still, it was sort of gratifying to learn that we had been right about the basic location, even right about the vacant lot. Somehow it made us feel like we at least were competitive. It may not be the closest I’ve come to the kingdom of heaven—Matthew’s euphemism for the kingdom of God that avoids using that holy name—but it’s certainly the closest I’ve come to buried treasure.

      Jesus would have appreciated what that radio station managed to pull off. For a few brief days, that radio station got Barry and me to think of our whole town as the site of buried treasure. Even when our focus narrowed down to a couple of city blocks, those undeveloped parcels ceased to be rocky wastelands, because now we could see their potential. Those weedy lots could actually be the source of treasure….

      Only Jesus tosses in a twist. The treasure is a gift, but for the finder, it becomes a seduction. The person who finds the treasure doesn’t own the field. Instead, the finder hides the treasure and deceives the owner in order to buy the field and claim the treasure as his own. The finder’s behavior can hardly be called exemplary; deceit certainly doesn’t reflect practices we associate with God’s rule. And to underscore our discomfort, Jesus leaves the question open: we are left to ponder, what does this parable say to us about the realm of God? Various responses have been offered over the years, mostly avoiding the discomfort the parable raises, and focusing instead on the joy of the finder’s discovery.

       Bernard Scott offers another possibility. The parable of the treasure, the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the leaven are a package deal.[1] Mustard may taste great on hot-dogs. But as a plant in the garden, it’s a weed. Again, we tend to tidy up the parable, and interpret it as another way of saying big things come in small packages. John Dominic Crossan loves the sense of play Jesus introduces with this parable. The Hebrew scriptures of Daniel (4.12, 20-22) and Ezekiel (17.22-23) speak of the mighty cedar of Lebanon—an image that endures to this day in that country’s flag. But comparing an empire to a mighty cedar is commonplace. A cedar is big. Strong. Able to withstand the elements, to endure. The image is predictable and bor-r-i-n-n-g. Only Jesus doesn’t compare God’s empire, God’s realm to a mighty cedar, but to a tiny seed, a weed, something that pollutes the garden and makes it unclean.

       And the parable of the leaven? Think about what we know of leaven, or yeast. In Jewish tradition, it’s an unclean food. So every year in preparation for Passover, all leavening is removed from the house; only unleavened breads are eaten. Like many prohibitions against certain foods, the judgment that leaven is unclean may have its roots in health practices—although I suspect this one has more to do with mystery and the unknown. But it doesn’t really matter what concerns lay at the root of Jewish dietary laws; functionally, they define what is clean and holy. Or to put it another way, the laws classify the divine so that people “can know where the divine is.”[1] But the leaven is hidden in the fifty pounds of flour until all of the flour is leavened. In terms of the dietary laws, the clean is now thoroughly contaminated by the unclean. The line between clean and unclean is fuzzed up; people can no longer distinguish between the two.

       Each of these parables is a Kodak moment, a moment in which Jesus lifts up a different and discomforting vision of God’s realm, a vision different than the vision commonly practiced by most religious leaders. Jesus’ blessings of the hungry and the poor and the grieving fly in the face of the proverbial rewards for living the righteous life. Today’s parables function the same way: they turn our norms upside down; they refuse to buy into the carefully-defined framework that draws a line between clean and unclean. In these brief snapshots, Jesus tells us that God identifies not with the honorable and the righteous, but with the shamed and the sinners, with those on the margins.

       This identification is a message of radical welcome. It lifts us the vision that those on the margins and those outside the margins are welcomed in God’s realm just as they are. It isn’t necessary to become like those already inside the margins.

       It’s a lesson we struggle with in a variety of ways. On NPR yesterday, I listened to a mother’s poignant story of her daughter Sophie, a child born with Down’s Syndrome. Sophie had benefitted from early intervention services to the point that school testing put her intelligence over the cutoff line, which is an IQ of 70 or below. The mother then had the choice—did she accept the findings and have Sophie reclassified as someone with limited intelligence? That classification would mean that Sophie lost immediately the services that everyone believed had boosted her capacity. Or did the mother retain the old classification—and the services that classification allowed?

       In that Kodak moment, what do Jesus’ parables say to the mother? Maybe, just maybe that she will not be judged negatively for choosing to buy the land to have access to the treasure, and maintain Sophie’s services. Maybe, just maybe, these same parables call us to re-imagine, to re-vision how we live in God’s world, and to hear in the very core of our own beings that God’s grace is in fact not the pure, clean flour, but the yeast that contaminates the whole measure.

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 [1] Scott, Bernard Brandon, Re-Imagine the World, Polebridge Press, December 2001.