Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Good things come in small packages.  If you don’t believe me, ask any married woman in the congregation, “Which would you rather get for your birthday: a great big box with a new vacuum cleaner in it from City Target, or a little bright blue box tied with a white ribbon, from Tiffany’s?”  Gentlemen husbands, it would behoove you to remember the ancient Latin adage “caveat emptor,” let the buyer beware. 

Today’s scriptures are about small packages, and what comes in them. In his most characteristic teaching style, Jesus gives us important truths is homespun little stories, packages that we can easily carry away with us, images that strike home because they are speak to reality, not to philosophy or theology.

Today we hear three parables about the kingdom of God: two very simple, one more complex; all three helping us to understand how we, who are small and simple, can be part of something as large and complex as the reign of God, that mysterious kingdom that is already and not yet at the same time,  a kingdom that has come, and is yet to come.

I come from northern California; for many years there was a mustard festival in the Napa Valley every January. After the vines had been trimmed and were sleeping, after the late autumn and early winter rains, the vineyards exploded in clouds of bright yellow flowers, as the self-seeded mustard plants burst into life. From tiny seeds that had lain dormant throughout the summer, great shrubs appeared, as tall as your armpits.  Hard to imagine how something so lush, so bright, so beautiful could come from something so small—500 to a teaspoon full.  Yet that’s what the kingdom of God is like.  A word sown into human hearts bursts into life.

When we were little, my sister and I spent a lot of time with our grandparents, and if we were really good, sometimes my grandmother would make fresh bread for us. It seemed like a miracle: a little packet of yeast, a tablespoon-full, dissolved in a cup of warm water, kneaded into pounds of flour, with a little salt; resting, rising, punched down, rising again, baked and cut still hot, with butter melting into the warm slices.  Is there anything in the world that smells better.? Without that tablespoon of yeast a block of cement would come out of the oven; with it, lightness, flavor, substance.  A microscopic, one celled fungus can transform flour into bread, and as the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians discovered to everyone’s delight, grain into beer. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened.”

The message is clear and simple: it doesn’t take a lot to bring about the kingdom of God:  a word sown into a heart can produce other words of kindness, grace and healing; a good person or two mixed into the crowd can lighten the mass, can bring liveliness and joy and creativity.

Yet Jesus wasn’t naïve either. He recognized that amid the wheat sometimes there are weeds; some inadvertently spread by the wind and birds, others perhaps sown by an enemy to choke out the field. Here, once again, the practicality of the message comes through loud and clear. The solution isn’t to tear up all that’s been planted, pour Round-up on the field and sterilize the ground, but rather to wait until the harvest, and let the harvesters sort out the weeds from the wheat; to understand that we grow in a world where wheat and weeds grow side by side, and not to give up being wheat because of our neighboring weeds.

What these simple images give us is a message of hope: that we can be leaven in our world, can bring the lightness and savor of the kingdom of God to others; that coming from nothing, we can spread our branches and flower like a beautiful mustard plant, so graceful that “the birds of the sky can come and dwell in our branches.”

It’s no accident that Jesus chose bread, the bread we place on this table, as the sacrament, the outward sign of his ongoing presence among us; bread made of wheat that grows among the weeds, whose grains are crushed in the mill of life and death, seasoned by tears and leavened with the spirit. This is our food for the journey, our strength and our hope.

Thomas M. Lucas, SJ