Hospitality and Wisdom for All the Ages
Hospitality and Wisdom for All the Ages
Chapter 13 is Matthew’s greatest hits of Jesus’s parables, not a transcript of a single speech. So he deliberately goes goes back and forth between the crowds and disciples. The first two parables in today’s gospel of the mustard seed and yeast are addressed to the crowds who would have seen the mustard plant Jesus was talking about. Too many scholars have debated whether the mustard seed was really the smallest seed, or the mustard plant the biggest in that area. The point of the parable is the many birds that find shelter in its branches — all from one small seed. And the yeast that was “mixed” (the Greek word is “hid”) in several pounds of flour would make enough bread to feed 100 people.
I think Jesus hoped that the people listening to him would be struck by the abundance of food and shelter and recognize the hospitality of the kingdom of Heaven. Perhaps, Jesus hoped, they might also recognize that their small seeds, their small amount of yeast, together might make that kingdom-hospitality a visible reality. The practical question of how to make the kingdom of Heaven a visible reality seems to have been one that Jesus left hanging with the crowds. But there are still the disciples, to whom Jesus speaks of treasures — treasure hidden in a field, one pearl of great value, a household full of treasures new and old. Treasures so valuable that no-thing was as valuable.
Even the “merchant” — basically a salesman, as mistrusted in the Bible as they often are today — was prepared to dump everything he had tried to sell others for one pearl. No jewels were more valuable than those pearls so rare, only found where a grain of sand had gotten inside an oyster shell and in its suffering the secretions that made the oyster’s shell wrapped around that grain of sand. Even in suffering, the kingdom of Heaven can be found, in relief from suffering but also in the wisdom which as Robert Kennedy quoted the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, comes through the awful grace of God.
For those who weren’t around, Kennedy said this to the people of Indianapolis waiting for him at the airport during his presidential campaign in 1968, on April 4th. With no internet, they didn’t know that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and it fell to Bobby to tell them. He spoke of his own suffering. And while he didn’t use the analogy of a pearl, his suffering did produce a pearl of wisdom, which helped prevent in Indianapolis the mass rioting that occurred in Washington and other cities.
I guess that was an old treasure I just brought out. But there are newer treasures as well that newer generations can and should bring out, so that all the masters in God’s household can share with each other and learn from each other. In Jesus’s time, his Jewish and gentile disciples understood the old and new treasures to be the Old Covenant with God and the New Covenant, which really is just the completion of the Old and not a replacement.
As each generation of disciples has moved in and moved on from the house, much wisdom of the kingdom of heaven has accumulated. Some treasures of wisdom have been moved up to the attic, then brought back down. Other treasures of wisdom have been brought in. But no one group or generation owns the household. For it is God’s house, and we are all stewards of treasures that were first deposited in these strange stories called parables: a Sower. seeds, soils, yeast, flour, pearls from oyster shells and pearls of wisdom and understanding, old and new.
We do understand what Jesus has taught us about a kingdom far more valuable and enduring than any temporary earthly kingdom. We are stewards of what we have saved and what God the homeowner deposited when we weren’t looking, the old and the new. We are the stewards showing hospitality to the crowds outside this household needing shelter and food for their bodies and souls. How? We are disciples, scribes trained for the kingdom of Heaven. We can figure it out.
July 19th, 2026
The 8th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 12, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick