The Kingdom of Heaven is Like a Weed

This Sunday's gospel gives us two one-line parables that get read so fast in church we usually miss what's actually in them: "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed... The kingdom of heaven is like yeast" (Matthew 13:31-33).

Here's what usually gets preached: small things grow into big things. A tiny seed becomes a tree. A little yeast leavens the whole loaf. Nice. Tidy. Inspirational calendar material.

The part that usually gets left out: a mustard plant, in Jesus's world, wasn't a stately, welcome thing to find in your field. It was a weed. The kind that spreads where it isn't invited and refuses to stay in the row you planted it in. And yeast wasn't a wholesome kitchen staple in most of the biblical imagination. It was shorthand for corruption, for the thing that works its way through and changes what it touches, quietly, from the inside.

So when Jesus reaches for a comparison to describe the kingdom of God, he doesn't reach for a cedar or a harvest or anything that would have sounded impressive to his listeners. He reaches for the weed. The contaminant. The thing nobody wanted in their field or their flour.

I think that's on purpose, and it matters for anyone who has ever felt like the messy, complicated parts of their life or their story made them a poor candidate for church, like you'd need to get yourself cleaned up before you could belong somewhere like this.

These two verses suggest something different: that God's kingdom doesn't wait for you to have it together. It shows up in the very stuff we're taught to be ashamed of, and works from there.

There's more in this Sunday's readings that goes even further with this: a king who prays for exactly the right thing and still causes harm, a parable about sorting people out that isn't as simple as it first appears, and a promise in Romans 8 that nothing gets to have the last word over you. We'll get into all of it Sunday.