Matthew 13:1-58

Chapter 58

Review of the Thirteenth Chapter

The subject of this chapter is the kingdom of heaven. Connect this circumstance with the fact that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and ask yourselves what is the connection between a kingdom and salvation. The kingdom of heaven has a great part to play in the work of evangelising the nations. A purpose that goes out to take hold of kingdoms must itself be a kingdom. You cannot lay hold of worlds with a weak hand. You may affect the immediately surrounding by trifling circumstances, but if you are going to lay your grasp upon all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them you must have a force equal to the occasion. Jesus Christ proposes to take hold of all kingdoms and to transform them into his own excellence, and fill them with the glory of his own excellent name. The kingdom of heaven, therefore, is a royal truth; it is a royal power; it is not one among many competitors, it stands alone and must absorb and sanctify all rivalries. Do not lower the occasion; realise its grandeur and rise to its appeal.

In this chapter Jesus Christ gives the word "kingdom" a new meaning and application. Up to this time it was an imperial term only or a geographical expression. Kingdom was a quantity bounded and named by the consent of other powers or held against them by superior force. It was a mere term in geography, in government, in statesmanship; in Jesus Christ's hands it becomes a heavenly claim, a divine power, a sacred sovereignty of impulses, thoughts, and purposes, so that all that is merely geographical drops off, and all that is heavenly clothes the royal word.

So far I could go well. I am stopped just there by an unusual punctuation, the discrepancy between the speaker and the subject. A peasant talking about a kingdom the rhyme is broken! A homeless wanderer using the highest terms in human speech who can account for the discrepancy? I am not troubled by the discrepancy which the critics find in dates and places and small incidents, but a discrepancy like this may well take the rest out of my heart, and fill that heart with a grievous discontent. The world was too big for the speaker: he did not, from a human point of view, look a king until he was looked at the second time, and watched the clock round, and the year round, and not until the spirit was instructed in the mysteries of his truth did this personality take upon it its wondrous visage and colour. Why, really, it is no discrepancy at all: the discrepancy was in me and not in Christ. I find that this is an eternal truth; that evermore the speaker is to be nothing, and the subject is to fill the heavens. Why, herein is the very glory of Christianity that it absorbs all other little piping eloquence in the infinite redundance of its own thunder, and that our personality as revealers of the kingdom is nothing as compared with the majesty and glory of the thing that is revealed. Unhappily, even Jesus Christ himself, as you see at the end of the chapter, was not able so to control the thinking of the people who heard him as to fix it upon the subject. They, little creatures, could rise no higher than the speaker, and they mocked him because of the discrepancy that was in reality an argument and a vindication.

In reading this chapter as a whole I am struck with four things. First of all, from the nature of the kingdom of heaven you may learn, without a single word being said upon the subject, the nature of the kingdom of darkness. It is not necessary to describe the kingdom of darkness: what you and I, as Christian teachers, have to do, is to describe the kingdom of light. This was Christ's most wise and subtle method of teaching not to paint hell to refer to it in great graphic sentences as if in haste to be done with it, but with great elaboration and pomp of simplicity to reveal the infinite kingdom of God's truth and light and purity. Every parable that is spoken here admits of being turned in the directly opposite quarter, so as to reveal that about which it says nothing. Thus the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man who sowed good seed. Then the kingdom of darkness is like unto a man who sowed bad seed, seeds of death, seeds of unhealthiness, seeds of disease, seeds of error. Learn thus from the kingdom of heaven what the opposing kingdom is.

Again the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure. Then the kingdom of darkness is like unto a bubble in the air: it is just the opposite of the kingdom of heaven: if the kingdom of heaven is treasure, the kingdom of darkness is an empty though gilded bubble, floating on the quiet breeze. Snatched, it is destroyed; there is nothing in it. It is wanting in substance, in positive and applicable value, it does not enrich life, it is weight without gravity, a burden without value, a kingdom truly, but a kingdom of disappointment.

Again the kingdom of heaven is as leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal. Then the kingdom of darkness is as poison which a man took and secretly injected into the veins of a sleeper until the whole was poisoned. The kingdom of heaven is a great force that secretly and silently works out the soul's regeneration: the kingdom of darkness is as the sting of the tsetse fly; the tsetse fly seizes the ox, stings the noble brute, and in course of time the flesh swells and discolours, the skin falls off, and the strong one is thrown down in weakness and in death. The kingdom of darkness, therefore, is not a weak power, it is not an ineffective ministry: it also works, often silently and secretly, but it is working out the soul's destruction.

Or thus the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net cast into the sea and gathers of every kind. The kingdom of darkness is as a net thrown into the sea and gathers its own kind only a narrow kingdom, debasing whatever it touches, catching for the purpose of holding in vile captivity, netting and ensnaring that it may slay. Thus the parable is more than it seems to be. It teaches by contrast; it has a far-spreading edge of meaning. In describing truth you need not describe falsehood: in so far as your description of truth is correct, you are really, in the most suggestive and graphic manner, describing that which is false.

This subtle influence of colour was often felt in Christ's ministry. He used sometimes to speak as if he were addressing an absent congregation. Subtle speaker, wise assailant, he was addressing the absentees, they thought, till they thought again, and then suddenly they said, "He means us." He told them about a man who had a property in the distance, and sent his servant to gather the fruits or the revenues, and the servant was not received well, and another servant was sent, and another, and last of all he sent his son also, and then he said, "What will he do to those husbandmen;" and they, thinking that the husbandmen were a thousand miles away, said, "He will slay them," and suddenly it burst upon their obtuse minds that all the while he was talking about them That is the best use to make of the absentees.

On another occasion he was speaking his great truth, letting it fall where it might be applicable, and a man at the other end of the table said, "Take care: in speaking thus thou revilest us also," and the man having seized the hot iron, had more of it than he covenanted. It was thrust into him, for Christ turned and said, "Woe unto you also, ye lawyers," and in that also he stretched a band and caught another set of offenders within its righteous captivity.

Let us learn from our great Prototype, our divine Master. We shall fall into some kind of dislike and criticism mayhap, still let us diligently and lovingly put our feet into his footsteps, and we shall come to the same desirable ends as to our great spiritual mission and teaching.

The next thing that strikes me in reading this chapter is that the great teacher did good rather by revelation than by criticism. He did not spend his time merely in denunciation. You must have a higher kingdom to offer, if you want to make a profound and permanent impression upon the age. It is not enough to provoke mere antagonism: I do not go out to deny any man's propositions or contentions, and rest myself in so doing: if I cannot reveal as well as criticise, I am as a bird with one wing. Christianity is a revelation, a surprise, a great offer. If any man have a gift at argument, and be blest or burdened with the genius of contradiction or debate, and have a keen desire to meet people whom it would be well to avoid, so far as mere social contact is concerned, then let him go out with his denials and contentions and continue his debate night after night. He is a greater teacher who has a kingdom to reveal, a positive and distinct offer of grace to make to men. Wo shall be unjust to the genius of Christianity if we treat Christian doctrine as a mere denial of some other doctrine rather than as a positive and grand doctrine of itself.

As a Church what have we to offer? With what do you seek to lure and satisfy human nature? It is the glory of Christ that he makes the largest offer ever made to the nature of man. His offer goes furthest, addresses more faculties, satisfies more aspirations, promises greater assistance, than any competitive doctrine known to men. Consider the wholeness of his kingdom, how it spreads itself over all the life, leaving no part or day untouched and unblest. He begins with childhood and writes "Kingdom of Heaven" on the fair brow of the little one. He follows the wanderer out, though the night be ever so dark. I never knew darkness keep him at home, or wildness of weather, depth of snow, or keenness of frosty wind. The moment the front door opened, and the prodigal vanished, he says, "I must leave you and go out after that which is lost, till I find it," and when that door opens again, it will open to let in two men, the Seeker and the man who was found.

Christ comes into the house when the sickness is there; be the sickness ever so vile; nothing keeps him away. Though the poor family be all crowded, ten in number, in one room, he comes in to make the eleventh, and though the room be high up on the roof yonder, he finds his way into the solitude and secrecy of poverty. He comes in the market-place and writes codes of laws for merchantmen: he stands behind the counter and writes with that wondrous finger the great laws of the best economy. When it becomes a question of the last wrestle, the challenge to the final conflict, he says, "Fear thou not, for I am with thee."

This is the offer which Christ makes to us all; the largest, most ample, minute, detailed, comprehensive, that ever was made. Other creeds meet me here and there, other kingdoms are partial in their revelations and applications, clever men address my intellect merely, sentimental men address my heart, nearly every teacher has some little thing to offer, a chain of two links to put into my hand, but Jesus Christ alone has undertaken to deal with every part, section, phase, and issue of my being, and I am bound to respect the grandeur of his challenge and to respond to the magnificence of his kingdom, though it be a kingdom at present but in word and in high poetry. Entering it, accepting it, living in it a life of citizenship, I come to understand that it is indeed poetry, because it is truth, without which there can be no poetry.

In the third place, see how with all this enchanting and startling originality of form, Jesus Christ declared eternal truth. These are no hot-house plants; these are not mushrooms a night old. Hear Jesus Christ's explanation of the parables. He spake unto the multitude in parables that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world. These are no new lights, these are no new inventions: the form is new, the doctrine is old. This is not the favourite of a transient age; it begins with the unbeginning, it covers the infinite spaces, it antedates and postdates all human history, Alpha, Omega, the first, the last, which is and was and is to come, lifting up all time into a burning present. This is the secret and the glory of Christ's teaching; flowers are grown upon earth under which are the everlasting rocks.

So with every great and true deliverance and revelation of truth: it must be old as well as new. Make as many parables as you please, but do not trifle with the kingdom. The parables reveal the kingdom, the kingdom is older than the parables, and admits of all kinds of pictorial illustration and graphic description, and to the end of the ages the forms under which we present the truth will change, but the truth itself, like its living Lord, is the same yesterday, today, and for ever.

Might I speak a word on behalf of the rising ministry, and of men who do not put the truth in its old forms, and may I ask you to believe that it is possible to change the parable without changing the integrity of the kingdom? We do not preach as Goodwin and Baxter and Bunyan and Owen and Howe preached, as to mere form, but we try, with another accent and with another range of illustration, not better than theirs, but simply other, to set forth the same truth, the same sin, the same cross, the same blood. The ministry is one, the parables are a million in number multiplied by ten, but the kingdom remains, illustrated by the advancing culture and the quickened genius of ages, itself venerable as eternity, its manifestations new, glittering, and gleaming as the dew of the morning. Do not, therefore, be harsh with your young men who are rising to preach the gospel in new forms and in new words that may look to you new-fangled and eccentric. The great fact is, the kingdom is the same, and the illustrations show not that we are divided about it, but that we are simply bewildered by the infinite fertility of its suggestion.

You know what all this means in the lower walks of progress. The steam-engine was in the world from the very moment of the world's existing not mechanically, but elementally and the elements lay there age after age, until a man combined them and made a parable of them, and that parable was reduced, from an invention and a flash of genius, into a fast-flying locomotive. The iron was in Eden, and the water was in Eden, and the fire was in Eden, but the combination and inter-relation of these had to be realised long ages after Eden was lost. So with the telegraph and the telephone and all your modern and yesterday inventions; elementally they were all there when God laid the foundation of the earth and looked upon the little globe, and said in heaven concerning it, "It is very good." The ages have come and perused the writing, searched into the treasure, found the operation of the leaven, and now the ages are rich; the inventions are new, but the elements which they apply and combine are as old as the ribs of the earth and the central fire of the planet.

So with all your music. You remember that John Stuart Mill was afraid that the time would come by-and-by when there would be no more music in the world, that the seven sisters would have done all they could for the world; but the wondrous seven still go on; there is no end to the permutation of which they are capable as to number and variety. Yet they are but seven; so they might sing with Wordsworth's little girl only they never part company, they never die, they suit themselves to all the suggestions of the fertile brain of the musician. They are but seven, yet they stretch themselves around the whole sky, and sing night and day, and will shut themselves up in the prison of any instrument, to be liberated by any Moses sent of God to emancipate them from their silence and secrecy. The tune is new, the notes are very old; they were heard in the plash of the first rain, in the concussion of the first lightning and thunder-storm, and in the song of the first bird that sung. So they come on and on, a gospel infinite and endless in adaptation, and so is the kingdom of heaven typified by all these parables. The kingdom, let me repeat, is eternal, it is the parable only that is changed.

And now, in the fourth place, observe how the most astounding revelation of wisdom and power cannot save the revealer from the sneers of vulgar critics. My friend, there is no protection for thee; no angel can hide himself from the strife of tongues. There is no pavilion upon the earth in which thou canst hide thyself from the vulgarity of those who are determined to misrepresent and abuse you. You cannot fight with prejudice, you cannot answer a whim; no argument can get itself thoroughly round a merely personal dislike. If you have made up your minds not to receive a revelation from a man, if that man be God himself incarnate, it lies within the compass of human malignity to nail him to the cross. If you, therefore, are speaking for human applause, you will be wounded in the house of your friends. If you suppose that the grandeur of your subject will protect you from the meanness of your assailants, you have made a most unwise and unfounded calculation. Is a servant more than a master? If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more they that are of his household? Why, in little and insignificant ways we are ourselves subject to all these misrepresentations, and are the victims of all these unreasoning and cruel prejudices. There cannot be any one of you who has a message and an individuality of his own that is not put to such torture as lies within the power of such critics to inflict. What did Jesus do? He went straight on with his work, he spake not a parable the less, did not a good deed the fewer, patiently went the round of his ministry, taking with him life, light, bread, water, comfort, hope, redemption, making his great grand offer in broad, human, divine language to the sons of men.

I close this chapter with regret; I entered it with great misgiving. I feared these parables, but as I entered into the cloud I heard a voice saying, "Fear not; this is my beloved Son, hear ye him." I leave it now as a man might leave good company and high fellowship. It is a gallery of divinely painted pictures, it is a panorama of infinite wonders, it is intellectual as the fifteenth chapter of Luke is moral. I feel as if we were coming down a mountain; and whoever left a mountain-top but with reluctance? "It is good for us to be here; let us build three tabernacles;" but he says, "No, this is not the place to build; if you have caught the oxygen, if it has got into your blood and reddened it, if you feel the mountain air stirring your pulses and lifting up your life to a new vigour, go down into the valleys and use your new life for the good of others."