JESUS: RIDDLER OF THE KINGDOM
Text: Mark 4:26-34a
 

Jesus: Riddler of the kingdom. Riddles make us think. They tease our minds into action. So did Jesus’ parables, at least as he first told them. We’ve turned them into “nice stories.” Our minds go to sleep. Jesus was a Riddler of the kingdom of God. “The Riddler” may call to some of your minds the malevolent trickster of Batman fame. Jesus was a different kind.

His parables help us think through the most important things of our lives: What shall I do to inherit eternal life? What is God like and how do I relate to this God? What does it mean to enter the kingdom of God? Parables were as uniquely a characteristic of Jesus’ teaching as his use of Abba was of his way of praying. Indeed, Mark says: “He did not speak to them except in parables” (Mark 4:34).

Hebrew scripture uses the word mashal to describe riddles, stories, proverbs that teachers used to get their point across. The prophet, Nathan, went to King David and told him a mashal: There was in a certain city a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had many flocks and herds. The poor man had one little ewe lamb that he brought up like a member of the family. The rich man decided he wanted a lamb for a dinner. He did not choose one of his flock, but took the poor man’s lamb.
King David exploded in rage over the rich man’s action. Nathan said to David, who had taken Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, to be his own, “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:1-7).

Parables were one form of mashal. Jesus was an absolute master at it.

I

Definition. Parables are “short narrative fictions that serve as metaphors.”1 What’s a metaphor? A metaphor brings together two words or images not usually brought together and in so doing creates something new in our heads. Take the words “ship and state.” Put them together: “Ship of state.” “A mighty fortress is our God.” “God our Mother.”

Parable means to “throw alongside.” Jesus threw stories alongside life to help us imagine what the kingdom of God was like and what it might be like to enter it.

“The kingdom of God is like...” he’d say, and launch into a story.

The kingdom of God is a like a big party a king threw who invited all the important people in town, all the VIPS. But they all said no. So the king tells his servants to go out into the streets and invite anybody, everybody they can find.

The kingdom is like a woman who lost a precious coin in her house. She turned the house upside down to find it. And when she did she invited all her friends to the house for a party.
The kingdom is like a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds, Jesus said, but it grows to become this big tree where birds and animals come for shade.

Do you remember years ago the necklace with the little glass marble-sized ball with the mustard seed inside? It was a wonderful reminder of Jesus’ parable, that from tiny things, even tiny little us, big things can come. God does remarkable work with small things.

Our children have been studying the parables this past month. When they studied the mustard seed parable some of the older ones said, “But the mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds.” It was their first instance of being biblical scholars - - asking questions of the text.

They were right, of course. Jesus lived two thousand years ago, and his human mind could not have known what we know today. Besides, he was a storyteller, not a botanist.
As we’ve seen these past weeks with the James Frey/Million Little Pieces fiasco, it’s important to know what kind of story a person is telling. We need to know: Is this fiction, or non-fiction? If it’s some mixture of the two, how can we tell one from the other?
Jesus was spinning stories about the kingdom of God, not teaching a biology class.

II

Most of his parables had this strategy: He’d invite us into a familiar world, depicting the world as we know it and experience it. We would climb inside the story. Then there would come a surprise that turned the world as we know it upside down, or inside out, or finally right-side-up.

There were these day-laborers, he said, who went to work at 6 a.m. The boss promised a denarius as pay - - a fair day’s wage. They happily agreed and set to work. Another group came at 9 a.m., and another at 12 noon, another at 3 p.m., then a last group at 5 p.m., one hour before sundown.
When the boss came to pay the workers, he started with the ones hired last. And he paid them a denarius, a full day’s pay! The ones hired first grew angry. No fair! they said.

The boss said, “Is your eye evil because I am good? Do you begrudge me my generosity?”
This parable gets under our skin. We all want things to be fair. But at the end of the day, at the end of your life, would you rather God be fair or be generous?

Jesus’ parables get under our skin. They aim for the heart. The shepherd leaves the 99 and goes after the one who is lost. Are you among the 99 safe in the fold or are you the one out lost? Are you out-of-your-mind happy to see the shepherd coming over the hill? Or are you in the sheepfold grumbling about the dumb sheep who got lost and caused the shepherd all that trouble!
In Jesus’ parables there’s most always a surprise. Look for the surprise.

Take the mustard seed parable. Pliny’s ancient Natural History warned about the mustard plant’s wild growth. Once you plant it, it takes over. The Hebrew scripture warns about planting different things together and the Mishnah especially warns about mustard plants. Don’t plant mustard in a garden, it says. Mustard greens are great, and who doesn’t like mustard on hot dogs, but be careful where you plant it.

Jesus says the kingdom is like someone who plants mustard in a garden. It’s like saying, the kingdom is like a man who planted dandelions in his front lawn. God does things with plants we avoid or discard.

But look what happens, Jesus says: The mustard seed becomes a great bush. Luke and Matthew say, a great tree. Like the cedars of Lebanon, like our giant redwoods. And all the birds and animals come to it for rest.

Suddenly we have before our eyes an ancient Hebrew image of empire, good empire and bad empire: The great tree where animals and birds come to nest and feed and rest. It’s the way Babylon and Egypt and Israel were pictured in Hebrew scripture, pictured in their size and ambition and pride.

What kind of empire is God’s empire? It starts in the strangest places - - as mustard seeds.
In 1981, Jody Williams was working for a temporary employment agency in Washington, D.C. Someone on a subway handed her a leaflet about landmines, those antipersonal weapons buried in the ground during wartime. They kill indiscriminately anyone who steps on them, and they are left when war is over. There are over one hundred million buried in the ground over our globe.

In 1992, Jody Williams became founding coordinator of the International Campaign to End Land Mines. She got N. G. O.’s, nongovernmental agencies, working on it. By 1997, there were twelve hundred agencies in eighty countries.

In 1997, she received a Nobel Peace Prize. In December, 1997, at Ottawa, 121 countries signed the Mine Ban Treaty. It became International Law in 1999 (neither the Clinton nor the Bush Administration has led us to join).

The kingdom of God - - like a mustard seed....

The hope of the world is not the Babylonian Empire or the Roman Empire or the British Empire or the American Empire. The hope of the world is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God, because it is the kingdom of God and not the kingdoms we make, is a mystery. We can neither control it nor fully understand it.

III

Which brings us to the other parable for today:

The kingdom is like this: Someone goes and scatters seed on the ground, sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, though how he does not know. The earth produces of itself, on its own; first the shoot, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.

In the kingdom of God we plant seeds. We go to sleep, the plants grow. We don’t have to say to them all night long: Grow! Grow! Then look, there’s the tender shoot, then the head, then the full grain in the head. It’s a most amazing thing. But now, it’s harvest time again. Better get to work or the grain will spoil in the field. Sickle time!

Buechner says that we’ve approached Jesus’ parables with such solemn reverence that we’ve missed their antic, comic character. It’s like George Burns playing God in the movie Oh God! who said God is like a comedian playing to an audience who is afraid to laugh!

My friend, Paul Duke, has captured the mood of this parable perfectly
The parable before us is surely
something like a joke.... “God’s
reign is like this guy who throws seed
on the ground and goes to sleep and
gets up, night and day. The seed
sprouts and grows - - the guy doesn’t
have a clue. The dirt just
produces - - blade, ear, grain.
When the fruit allows, the guy goes
to work; it’s a harvest.”2

The holy joke’s on us. Yes, God’s kingdom needs people who plant. But they didn’t make the plant or cause it to grow. While they sleep it grows. How it all happens? We’re clueless.

Look at the plant as it grows. Is this splendid or what?

Beth Henry brought a chrysalis to church, the chrysalis of a monarch butterfly. I could never have guessed what it was. This perfect little, delicate, green object with what looked like gold decoration. It looked like a porcelain jewel decorated by Faberge. And inside it a life was growing, which would become a butterfly that would fly across the earth.

We did not, could not ever have made that. All we could do was wonder and cheer.

The parable is a holy joke on us know-it-all and do-it-all Christians who think we know exactly what the kingdom of God is and how to bring it in.

It’s a joke on us overly earnest Christians who worry that if we do not work night and day, the kingdom might not come!

Martin Luther caught the radical grace of the kingdom. “While I sit here drinking my pint of Wittenburg beer, the kingdom of God goes marching on!”

There’s planting time and harvest time for the kingdom of God, and God can use our help. But please can you take a break sometime?

Things can look dark at times, but do not despair. “Fret not,” as the psalmist says; God’s kingdom will prevail. “Though the wrong seems oft so strong. God is the ruler yet.”

Maybe some of your best work and some of God’s best work is done in you while you’re asleep or at rest. While you sleep, God does stuff you can’t do for yourself. Your body is replenished and at repair. Your conscious mind isn’t furiously at work trying to direct everything.

Observing weekly shabbat, sabbath rest, is the proof that you believe what you say you believe: That God is our provider, sustainer, redeemer, that God will provide even if we take a day off; that God is the savior of the world, not you; that the kingdom of God comes even as you sleep.
So, take a nap for God’s sake!

I have been so earnest about God’s kingdom at some times in my life that I’ve exhausted myself to the point of unhealth, one part dedication to lead and two parts neurosis. I have a pastor friend who quit the ministry mid-career, exhausted. The newspaper asked him why, and he said he was looking for a less meaningful life. Meaning had just about killed him.

That’s why Jesus told this parable. So you can whistle while you work. And while you sleep...the kingdom grows!


1 Bernard Brendon Scott, Re-Imagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, California: Polebridge Press, 2001), p. 13.
2 Paul Simpson Duke, The Parables (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), p. 24.