PROPER 12, YEAR A

Sunday 26 July 2026

Sts. Matthew & Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-49a

 

Today’s Gospel contains five parables, each beginning with the words “The Kingdom of heaven is like …” These parables are thus sometimes called “the parables of the Kingdom.”

 

Our Lord’s original audience would have heard the phrase “Kingdom of heaven” differently than we do. For first-century Jews, the Kingdom of heaven was not the place where good people go when they die. It wasn’t even really a place. Where Matthew used the term “Kingdom of heaven,” Mark and Luke used “Kingdom of God.” Some scholars think Matthew substituted “Kingdom of heaven” out of reverence, to avoid mentioning God’s name.

 

In any case, first-century Jews would have understood either term—Kingdom of God or Kingdom of heaven—as referring to a very this-worldly state of affairs or series of events. The coming of the Kingdom would involve God intervening in human history to put everything right that was wrong with the world. It would entail the total transformation of this world’s social, economic, and political orders, through the reign of God’s kingly Messiah, or Anointed One.

 

Jesus appears to have had such a transformation in mind when he taught us to pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

Among the crowds following Jesus, some perhaps wondered whether he was the Messiah, the Anointed One sent to inaugurate God’s Kingdom on earth. As Christians, we believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and that he did inaugurate God’s Kingdom, but in a way no one expected.

 

And so, the parables in today’s Gospel offer us five clues, five tantalizing hints, about what the Kingdom of heaven is like. According to one commentator, it’s as though Jesus holds the Kingdom up to the light, turns it as one turns a prism in the sun, and, in these stories, tells us what he sees.

 

The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which someone took and sowed in his field. That is, the Kingdom has tiny beginnings. To our Lord’s contemporaries, his itinerant ministry would have seemed a small-time operation indeed. How could anything world-changing ever come from this ragtag band of misfits, fishermen, and tax collectors, roaming the remote backwaters of Galilee? But then look at the great plant that grows from the tiny mustard seed, providing a haven even for the birds of the air. Small beginnings can have enormous consequences.

 

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened. To grasp the force of this image, it helps to know that “three measures” is roughly sixty pounds of flour, enough to bake bread for more than a hundred people. What’s being prepared is not just a family meal but a feast for an entire village. Moreover, this measurement carries rich biblical connotations that our Lord’s listeners would have recognized instantly. In Genesis 18, when God appears to Abraham and Sarah in the guise of three men, Sarah prepares cakes for the guests using three measures of choice flour. The three visitors, in turn, announce the forthcoming birth of a son, despite Sarah being well past childbearing years. Thus, the parable evokes the memory of this mysterious Old Testament encounter in which God does something totally unexpected, fulfilling his promises and bringing new life into the world.

 

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Although the text doesn’t say so, I like to imagine the man who discovers the treasure as a tenant farmer whose plow strikes a treasure chest while he’s plowing his landlord’s field. 

 

And again: The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. The point in both parables is that finding and gaining God’s Kingdom makes the loss of everything else completely worthwhile. Both parables challenge us to reflect on the question: What do we consider so valuable that we’d be willing to give up everything else to gain it?

 

The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. This parable hints at the Kingdom’s inclusiveness. Just as the net catches all kinds of sea creatures, so the kingdom gathers all sorts and conditions. Our job in the Church isn’t to decide who’s worthy to be here and who’s not. We don’t get to sort the good fish from the bad. God and his angels will do that on the Day of Judgment. In the meantime, our job is simply to gather in everyone we can.

 

Finally, the Lord’s saying about the householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old signifies that his disciples must draw on both the established teachings of the Old Testament and the new teachings Jesus has been imparting through his preaching and parables. Both are necessary to preach the Gospel in its fullness.

 

Together, these five parables show us that we discern the Kingdom not so much in the earth-shaking events of world history as in the ordinary activities of everyday people: a farmer scattering seed or plowing a field; a woman baking bread; a merchant examining pearls in a marketplace; fishermen casting nets into the sea.

 

I would suggest, then, that the first place to recognize the presence of God’s kingdom is right here, in this eucharistic assembly. We’re a ragtag bunch, a motley crew. Yet here we take the ordinary, everyday elements of bread and wine, offer them to God in solemn remembrance of his Son’s death and resurrection, and receive them back as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And when we finally arrive in heaven itself, I believe we’ll be able to look back and realize we were already experiencing it here all along.

 

Our calling as the Church is to work, pray, and give for the spread of God’s Kingdom – and to let that Kingdom take root in our hearts so that we may become its ambassadors in this world. In this way, we both learn and teach others to live in joyful anticipation of the Kingdom’s completion in the life of the world to come.