Text: Matthew 13: 31-34
(The Parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven)
In his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, columnist Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times chronicled his early experiences as a foreign affairs reporter for The Times in the Middle East. He recalled hearing, soon after arriving in Jerusalem, an oft-recounted story that was in circulation at the time. Two Jewish intellectuals meet on a Jerusalem street and begin a spirited debate about philosophy and politics. After a time, one of them turns to other and inquires, "Samuel, tell me, are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "Oh," exclaims Samuel, "I am an irrepressible optimist; I believe that today will invariably be better than tomorrow."
I suppose by that definition, most of us just about now could claim to be "irrepressible optimists." That appears to be especially relevant in recent weeks when we seem to be staggering under the weight of so much bad news. Israel is now engaged in fierce fighting on two fronts with—as usual—a tragic toll being borne by civilians, especially women and children, in Gaza, in northern Israel, and in Lebanon. A week ago militant extremists unleashed a savage attack against civilians aboard several trains in India, no doubt related to the dispute over Kashmir. A once-promising cooperative relationship between the United States and Russia seems now to be in disarray. The price of crude oil has soared to nearly $80.00 per barrel this past week, and the Dow is all over the place. Most of New Orleans still looks like a war zone, even as Gulf Coast residents brace themselves for a new hurricane season. And our efforts at creating a democratic showcase in Iraq appear to be rapidly deteriorating into a prolonged civil war between religious factions.
Wherever we look we find abundant evidence that things are just not going as well as we had hoped. In such a critical time, we even pause and wonder out loud:
does hope hold any significance for us at all? What is it that we look forward to any longer? For some of us the answer may be very personal. What we look forward to may be a restoration to health once again. For some it may be to regain a sense of purpose and vitality that has been snatched away by the loss of a loved one. For others it is to regain our equilibrium and sense of self after having been betrayed by another. Perhaps we look forward to more prosperity or happiness than we now enjoy, or to fulfillment in the lives of our children.
Many of us look forward to historical change, to a day in which our nation may once again be respected as a force for justice and human rights in the world. Many look forward to a political climate of collaboration to replace the destructive partisan wrangling that passes for political debate at present. Many of us still look forward to a time when military force is truly employed as a last resort, and never as a preemptive action based on hunches, or as a means of subjugating others. Many of us long for a time when racial injustice is a thing of the past, or when greed does not so dominate our social fabric that we leave more and more people to fend for themselves with fewer and fewer resources.
These are some of the things we long for. But is it fair to say that we live in a spirit of hope for such things? Or is it more accurate that most us have succumbed and become mere "irrepressible optimists," believing with all our hearts that today will invariably be better than tomorrow. What is the difference between longing for something and hope? What is the difference between wishing for something and hope?
Three weeks ago I began this meditation on the meaning of hope in a sermon whose title referred to a statement by the former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, who once wrote:
"Hope is not prognostication; it is an orientation of the heart."
In that sermon I made a strong effort to distinguish between optimism, in our usual sense of it, and hope. That was a beginning. Today I continue the exploration and invite you to meditate for a few moments with me on two very brief parables that Jesus once used to illustrate a central concept of his teaching, a concept he called "the kingdom of heaven."
i
Let us not forget that Israel at the beginning of the Common Era lived in a time at least as perplexing and fraught with danger as our own. The people of Israel also longed for something. They longed for a Messiah. They were filled with a messianic hope. During the years after their return from the exile in Babylon they had prospered for a time. But again and again they had been ravaged by other nations. By the time of Jesus' ministry, Israel was an occupied country, an outpost of the Roman Empire, governed by a petty and tyrannical king named Herod who ruled only as far as the Romans tolerated. Over a long time there grew a literature that dreamed of liberation. It spoke of a Messiah, the One promised by God who would deliver Israel from its enemies and restore her to the former glory she enjoyed during the reign of King David. As time passed this messianic hope grew more and more fantastic. Eventually it took shape around apocalyptic images of a world catastrophe in which all the enemies of Israel would be destroyed in one large cataclysm—a war, or a natural disaster, or something similar. As time wore on, the longing grew to be more and more intense, and the expectation more and more grandiose.
It was against this background that Jesus told these two brief parables of the mustard seed and the leaven that we heard earlier in the service. He told them in order to illustrate his deepest beliefs about the nature of the kingdom of heaven, the most common symbol of the messianic expectation of the Jews. And he told them, I believe, in order to instruct all of us about something extraordinary, about the nature of hope.
In the first parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed:
The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed
which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest
of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs
and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make
nests in its branches. (Matt. 13: 31-32)The first thing we must notice is that Jesus is dealing here in deliberate hyperbole. I do not know how many of you have ever had the opportunity to examine a mustard plant close at hand, but it does not literally possess the smallest seed. Nor does it grow into a magnificent tree. It is a scrubby little bush that is quite common in the Holy Land, and grows abundantly like a weed. So Jesus—as his original hearers would have understood—was bending reality just a bit. But his original hearers would also have understood the point, for they knew that the image he invokes is a messianic image. According to their Scripture, in fulfillment of the messianic hope, Israel would become like a great tree in whose branches all the other nations, like birds, would find refuge.
What is different about the way Jesus uses this image is the great contrast he draws between the apparent insignificance of the beginning and the enormity of the final fulfillment, between the infinitesimal smallness of the seed and the hugeness of the tree.
This would have been a strange and very new idea to his original hearers. For they had inherited an image, honed through several centuries, of a messianic age that would descend suddenly and cataclysmically from above, with a great flourish. What Jesus implies with this simple metaphor from agriculture is that the transformation that was so fervently longed for would most likely emerge slowly, almost imperceptibly, from below. It would be subversive, and arrive if at all, from a very unexpected, and probably a quite unpromising source. In other words, if you are looking for the signs of hope—whether in world affairs or in your own personal journey—you are most likely looking in all the wrong places. The signs of hope will not be found in large or dramatic movements. The seeds of hope are already there growing quietly, imperceptibly, and most likely in the places you would least likely to think to look for them. That is also perhaps what Jesus meant to imply when he said at another time "The kingdom of heaven is within you.
The second companion parable makes another similarly startling analogy:
The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman
took and hid in three measures of flour till it was
all leavened. (Matt: 13: 33-34)Think for a moment how that would have sounded to Jesus' original hearers. This is after all a very patriarchal culture, a culture not unlike our own that is dominated by very masculine images and assumptions about how things are done. Now picture this. Jesus comes across a gathering late at night where the fellows are planning the revolution. They are all hunched in saying things like, "Now here's my plan. . ." and "Who'll get the horses?" In the midst of all this frenetic energy in wanders this dude who pronounces, "Uhh, the kingdom of heaven is like—hmmmm—a woman in her kitchen." Now that's a real show-stopper! And the guys look around furtively and ask in utter disbelief, "What did he say?" Well wherever Jesus first uttered that metaphor it is not far-fetched to imagine it would have been received with just about that level of amazement and disbelief. It just sounds too dumb for words!
And notice another detail of this parable. This is no ordinary housewife. She places an infinitesimal amount of leaven into three measures of meal. That is about a hundred pounds of flour. When that dough finished rising it would have been enough to practically fill this entire space. Once again Jesus draws a sharp contrast between something that is small, imperceptible, relatively insignificant and contrasts it with the end product. Here the image focuses on a catalytic agent, something small that infuses the whole mass with life and generative power.
ii
Let me reiterate. I think Jesus is trying to tell us something quite profound in these two parables about the nature and dynamics of hope. As I reflect on these images, two themes begin to emerge. The first theme is this: hope requires a deep and abiding patience, sometimes an infinite patience. In the midst of a deeply patriarchal culture Jesus confronted his original listeners and us with two very feminine images. The seed growing silently, imperceptible, darkly, beneath the soil, and the leaven "hidden" within the dark moistness of dough are both images richly suggestive of the process of gestation. They are symbols of transformation that imply a long, patient process of unforced growth. And by choosing these more feminine images he means to imply, I believe, that to live in hope is to be something like pregnant with hope.
But that is the way of all forms of creativity and of renewal within individual persons and societies alike. Listen to these words addressed by the German writer Ranier Maria Rilke to a younger man who was struggling to understand the creative process:
Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development,
which, like all progress must come from deep within and cannot
be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then
bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling
come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible,
the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await
with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: That
alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.(Ranier Mariua Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet,
trans. By M.D.Herter Norton, (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 29-30)."Everything is gestation and then bringing forth." Or, King Lear: "The ripeness is all."
The second theme I perceive in these parables is this: hope must be nurtured by images, but not fixated on a cherished outcome. When we focus too eagerly on the content, when the outcome becomes more important than attending to the process of transformation, then we turn hope into mere wishing, and we are likely to miss altogether what is really happening. That was why I had to laugh some years ago during a period in my own life when I felt pretty down and hopeless and I came upon a car with a bumper sticker that proclaimed proudly: "When I gave up all hope I started to feel better."
It is also this truth that T.S. Eliot was probably trying to give voice to in his famous lines:
I said to my soul, wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.(T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets" in The Complete Poems of T.S.Eliot,
(NY: Harcourt, 1952) p. 126)Or as St Paul also famously put it put it:
Now by hope we are saved. But hope that is seen is not hope,
For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we
do not see, we wait for it in patience. (Romans 8: 24-25)iii
I am thinking this morning about the great movements in American history: the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth century, and women's suffrage movement and the civil rights struggle in the twentieth. I think too of those remarkable events that took place all over Eastern Europe in 1989 when country after country finally broke free from the chains of totalitarianism. Movements like these rarely happen because the movers and shakers initiate them. They are born of long, patient, persistent struggle by countless numbers of ordinary folk—folk like you and me—who nurture hope for a more just society throughout times of great despair and darkness. Anyone can hope when things are going well. It is when things look bleak and dark that hope, and the God of hope, can offer us anything.
Martin Luther King, Jr. paid great tribute to those nameless warriors for civil rights, those anonymous ordinary folk who refused to relinquish hope in his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in April of 1963. The letter was addressed to a group of local clergy who had reprimanded him for being an "outside agitator" and organizer of acts of civil disobedience that spring in the city of Birmingham. In the letter they praised the "restraint" of the Birmingham police force but said nothing about the restraint of those who protested without violence. King responded:
I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstratorsof Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, like the 72-year-old Montgomery woman who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided no longer to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel, and a host of their elders, courageously and non-violently sitting in lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy dug deep by the founding fathers and embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
The remarkable thing about Dr. King was that he always knew he was struggling not only for the rights and dignity of oppressed people in this country and elsewhere. He knew that he—and they—were always struggling for the soul of America, because this great nation could never be great as long as it treated so many of its people as second-class citizens.
Both Dr. King and Jesus knew that just as with nations, so it is with individuals as well: it is possible to become overcome by alien powers, to feel as if one is ruled by an occupying force. The powers of cynicism and despair are real. They do not disappear at a command or by putting on a cheery face of optimism. Both Jesus and Dr. King knew this because neither of them were strangers to cynicism and despair. But Jesus gave us these two splendid images for hope: the mustard seed and the leaven in the loaf. I believe he knew, and wanted us to know that hope does not need to look on the bright side of things to be powerful and effective. All hope requires is the recognition that something somewhere within us, or within our world is growing quietly, imperceptibly, is germinating. We may not yet have the eyes to recognize it. We may yet feel occupied by an alien power. Yet we trust that it is there, that it is growing, and that it is transforming us from within. Therefore, let us be alive and pregnant with hope. And let us wait for the new that is already happening with great patience and great attentiveness and anticipation. For that is the kingdom of heaven that Jesus said is already at work within you.
Let us pray: Grant us grace, O God, to wait patiently for the new within ourselves, within our world, that is already at work transforming and renewing. And grant us the courage to help bring it to birth when the time is ripe. Amen.