Small Beginnings, Sure Endings
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
This week we’ve had our seventh Prime Minister of the decade. It’s tempting to feel that we live in an ever-changing, destabilised world; as if the ground keeps shifting under our feet, and there’s plenty to worry about without adding “who’s in charge of HM Government” to the list.
Summer brings its own kind of change. The fields that have been quietly growing all these months are suddenly being harvested: combines and tractors carting grain to and fro. It’s caused great excitement in our house, as George runs to the window every time he hears one rumble past.
Our reading this week can feel a little strange on first hearing: five short parables stitched together, easy to nod along to but hard to actually take in. But underneath them all is one steady claim: the kingdom of heaven doesn’t change with the world around it. It’s not one more shifting thing to keep track of. It’s the one constant on offer.
A mustard seed (the smallest seed a farmer would sow) becomes, almost absurdly, the biggest shrub in the garden, big enough for birds to nest in its branches. A pinch of yeast, hidden away in a huge tub of flour, works right through the whole batch until all of it rises. Neither image is showy, and neither depends on anything happening around it. The seed doesn’t need good government or a stable economy to become a tree. It just needs time, and it grows regardless; quietly, inevitably, on its own terms. That’s the first thing these parables want us to trust: however unstable everything else looks, what God is building is not subject to the same instability.
Then the parables turn from what the kingdom is like to what it’s worth. A man finds treasure buried in a field and sells everything he owns to buy it. A merchant finds one pearl worth more than his whole stock, and does the same. Neither of them does this reluctantly; Matthew tells us the man sells everything “in his joy” (13:44). They’ve both seen, suddenly, exactly what they’re looking at, and once they’ve seen it, giving up everything else isn’t a sacrifice; it’s obviously worth it.
That’s really the crux of the passage, and I think it’s the crux of faith more generally: God doesn’t change, and what he’s offering doesn’t change, but we do. We’re the ones who have to grow into being the kind of person who sees the field or the pearl for what it actually is. That takes time. It isn’t instant. And most of us won’t get there by simply being told the theory; we get there slowly, through the same unglamorous, repetitive process the mustard seed goes through underground before anything shows above the soil.
I’m reminded of this while watching Wilfrid learn to move. It started as a slow, frustrated slither across the floor until suddenly it wasn’t slow at all, and he was outpacing the grass snake that lives in Little Harrowden churchyard. Now he’s working on getting up onto his knees, and we’re back to slow and frustrated again. We’ll go through this cycle again when he starts walking, and again after that, until eventually he’s a fully-fledged little boy we have to tell to get down from the windowsill, just like his brother. He isn’t changing what he’s aiming at. He’s slowly becoming someone capable of reaching it.
Faith works the same way. The kingdom itself never moves and never needs to catch up with the times; it’s the same treasure whether the field belongs to a stable nation or a chaotic one, whether harvests are good or thin, whether we happen to feel close to God this week or a long way off. What changes is us: whether we keep growing towards recognising its worth, or whether we stay sitting on the floor while everyone else moves on. Jesus closes this run of parables by asking the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13:51), not “has the world settled down enough for you to believe this,” but simply, have you seen it yet. My hope, for myself and for all of us, is that this unchanging promise is enough to keep us growing towards it, even slowly, even through the frustrating stretches. And when it isn’t quite enough on its own, that the people we meet on the way, the friends who gather around us, carry us further than we could get alone, until we find ourselves walking a little taller, trusting that the God who does not change is with us through every bit of the change around us.