ONE DAY GOD’S CAUSES WILL TRIUMPH
Matthew 13:31-33
Sermon presented on July 27, 2008
Chekhov wrote: “Conciseness is the sister of talent.” Is there any passage in all of scripture as concise, as short and snappy and spot-on to-the-point, as the passage read today from the New Testament? In a mere three verses, fewer than 100 words, Jesus tells two parables – the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and the Parable of the Yeast. And these aren’t slight or inconsequential parables, which go by so quickly that we may dismiss them. Rather, here Jesus counsels us to resist any inclination toward discouragement or defeatism, or weary resignation to the idea that our day-to-day lives are pointless or senseless. Rather, in the words of Bible scholar Dr. Craig Blomberg, of Denver Seminary: these parables declare that “one day many will be astonished . . . [for] one day God’s causes will triumph.”
These brief parables go-together in several ways. First: as a pair they use symbols associated with typical male and female tasks of Jesus’ day. The image of the mustard seed is drawn from field work, which men typically did, and the image of yeast is associated with domestic routines, which was women’s work (I’m not saying that’s the way things should be now, only that it’s the way things were then!). This reflects Jesus’ concern to relate to everyone in his audience. In this way, they’re companion pieces. And second: they’re tied together by a common theme – that from something small, inconspicuous and ordinary (a mustard seed, yeast), from something that may not look like much to the world, incredible abundance comes forth.
The most immediate effect of these teachings is to transmit a great surge of encouragement to those who find themselves weary with work or worry, or burdened with brooding feelings of life’s futility. And who doesn’t feel this way, from time-to-time, anyway? The human spirit aspires for transcendence and significance. By transcendence, I mean the confidence that life counts for something worthier and sturdier than daily routine, something that rises above mere existence and endures forever. And by significance, I mean the wish that we actually may participate in this higher purpose, and our lives count for something that outlasts it, something significant. But though the human spirit aspires to transcendence and significance, the demands of daily duty may quench the spirit. Peter Drucker wrote that, “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Yesterday morning we went to the Ottawa County Fair, in time to see the final rounds of the Mule Pull. Do you know about Mule Pulls? Here’s how it works. Mules pull a sled that’s loaded with weights. If the mules succeed in doing this, their reward is not a word of encouragement: “Well done, good and faithful mule, you get the rest of the day off, you’ve earned it.” No, the reward is that they have to do it again, but with more weight! As long as they keep doing it, weights keep getting added. The last mule that fails, wins. I couldn’t help but wonder: what do the mules say to one another when they’re alone at night? “How in the world did we ever let ourselves get talked into this?!” But it also occurred to me how true-to-life this event is. Sometimes it seems as though no matter how hard we work, or how well, it simply leads to more, and more difficult, work. How on earth did we ever let our lives come down to this?
Over against these feelings of uselessness, and the pervasive malaise such feelings may bring-about, there stand Jesus’ twin parables of the mustard seed and yeast. These concise parables teach that the ordinary, the everyday, the routine, the commonplace are not distractions from the real purpose of living, but the particular activities through which goodness and mercy take form in the world, and the story of our lives is told. Christian writer Eugene Peterson suggests that any kind of “spirituality . . . that doesn’t have anything to do with doing the dishes and changing diapers or going to work” is “a cheap shortcut” to the real thing, which is to see the purpose of our lives, not as something holy and set-apart from family and work and making a living and keeping at it each day, but as the grace to recognize purpose in the particularities of everyday life.
These parables must have been especially encouraging to the audience to which the Book of Matthew seems to have been addressed originally. The Bible, in its entirety, is meant for all people, of course, in all times and places. But there are often contextual aspects that are instructive and useful to keep in mind, as well. Scholars propose that Matthew’s Gospel appears to presuppose a situation of hostility toward believers, hostility from families and friends, criticizing and taunting them for abandoning the old religious ways. To these beleaguered young Christians, struggling to keep the faith amid ridicule and rejection, it would have come as a surge of encouragement to be reminded that Jesus had spoken these parables, as though he foresaw their predicament: that just as a mustard seed and yeast, appearing as nothing important in this world, yet bring-about abundance, so the humble, faithful, inconspicuous witness of a few believers will be used by God for great purposes. One day God’s causes will triumph.
The cause for encouragement is the confidence that God is actually at work in the processes of seedtime and harvest, and in the baking of bread. God is actually at work in the unheralded, even unnoticed, service of ordinary people.
We often talk in the church about bigger-than-life, heroic figures of faith. And that’s not only all right, but actually a good thing to do, because we need models and mentors of faithfulness, examples of men and women who have done great things in the name and for the cause of Jesus Christ. Stories of courage and conviction arouse and sustain our own courage and conviction.
But we are also well-served to honor the teaching of these parables, calling to mind those of whose faithfulness few know, but through whom God has worked mustard-seed-like, yeast-like, in our lives.
John Wooden, the celebrated basketball coach at UCLA, whose teams won ten national championships in twelve years, says that, first day of practice each year, he’d gather the team together, and teach them how to put on their socks. He believed that socks, improperly put-on, eventually start to bunch-up, causing discomfort, and in the final minutes of a close game, that discomfort can be the difference between winning and losing. He recalls that this lesson caused unrest among first-year players, who’d all been high school superstars, recruited to play for mighty UCLA, and who now, first day, wanted to get onto the court and strut their stuff, being taught instead how to put on their socks. But there’s no overstating the importance of doing the little things excellently.
Let me ask you this: who showed you how to put-on your spiritual socks? Who planted in your spirit tiny seeds of grace which have matured now and flourished? Who mixed-in some godly yeast? And how might God be calling you or me, in our apparent ordinariness, to be agents of God’s love for others? Mother Teresa said: “I don’t do big things. I do small things with big love.” May we embrace this as our calling: in the service of Christ, and in Christ-shaped relationships with others, we shall do small things in great love.
There’s a final point to be made in regard to these parables, I think. If God can be trusted to bring great good from the small good that we do, then we ought to do everything with faithful focus, integrity and commitment.
Franz Rosenzweig was a great Jewish philosopher and theologian. He died in 1929 of ALS, of which little was known at the time. Toward the end of his life Rosenzweig had lost all muscle control other than his eyelids. His wife Edith would sit by his bedside each day, and go through the alphabet until she got to the letter he wanted, at which point he’d blink his eyes, and she would write that letter. In this way he translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into modern German, getting to Isaiah Chapter 53 when he died. Rosenzweig wrote: “Every act should be performed as though all eternity depended on it.” Every blink of the eye, even? Well, that may be an impossible ideal. But the ideal lifts-up the truth of things: that ordinary life is not to be lived as though God is disinterested or uninvolved in its ordinariness, and now-and-then, from time-to-time, we take a break and turn to God — on Sunday morning, say, when we go to church; or each evening, if we say a prayer before bed, or read a chapter from the Bible. Rather, God is present all the time, in all of life – seed and yeast in our choices and decisions, our comings and goings, our thinking and feeling, our talking and listening, our dealings and relations. “Seek the Lord and his strength,” Psalm 105 counsels, verse 4; “seek God’s presence continually.” “Every act should be performed as though all eternity depended on it.”
Hudson Taylor, a great 19th-century pioneer missionary to China, used to teach: “A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in a little thing is a big thing.” Let this be our resolve today: that, remembering the lesson of the seeds and the yeast, we shall be faithful in little things, and so used by God to bring about the great ends He has promised and purposed.
