Verse 33
Chapter 56
A Double Aspect of the Kingdom
Let me try to reveal the kingdom of heaven today under two aspects. It has already come before us under the image of the sower, the parable of the tares, the grain of mustard seed, the treasure hid in a field, the pearl of great price by this time surely we ought to be well acquainted with this kingdom of heaven, yet it is the eternal mystery as surely as it is the eternal revelation. Jesus Christ now gives us two more opportunities of knowing still more clearly what his great kingdom is. He condescends to paint two more pictures, a woman hiding leaven in three measures of meal, and a man casting a net into the sea.
"The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." It follows then that the kingdom of heaven, like all other truth, is penetrating in its influence. It goes forward to its work little by little: it never rests it cannot rest until it has covered the whole space of its opportunity. It can never give in all things must go down before it, not violently, but certainly. No great or true idea can be in the human mind without penetrating that mind through and through, and passing on to other minds and completing the same subduing process there.
Not only is it penetrating, but it is gradual in its process and advancement. Great ideas do not seize the mind all at once and rule it with undisputed domination. One by one, little by little, a man here and a man there such is the rule of this gradualness. But it never goes back, though appearances may seem sometimes to indicate the contrary. The movement of truth is always forward. The truth was never so fully, broadly, and benignly established in the human mind as it is this day. You can quote a thousand instances to indicate the badness of the race, its love of error and its pursuit of corruption, and every instance that is quoted may be perfectly right, within its own limits. Nevertheless the kingdom moves, the penetrating influence gradually asserts itself. How long will it continue to assert itself? Till the whole is leavened. The time is fixed in the parable, the date is here marked down in plain figures, if we have eyes to read it. This is a dated promise, and the date is "till the whole is leavened."
Have we any parallels in our own life that will enable us to seize, more completely, the gracious and generous meaning of this parable? We have a parallel, certainly, in the education of the mind. No mind is educated in one day: education is not something thrust upon a man which he can seize in a moment and make his own without a long transaction. You cannot tell how you were educated: there is no specific day in our human life upon which we can say we were then educated, in any complete or final sense of the term. We may have vivid memories of certain days, but education is not a day's work, it is not a time work, it is an eternal process. How the light came upon the mind, how the new idea seemed to strike us with instancy and startling suddenness yet when we came carefully to look into it we found that it was the culminating point of a long process, and that but for the process the culmination never could have supervened. Watch your child's progress in letters, and it will be impossible for you to indicate any time at which he became a scholar. Jesus Christ says, "Just the same in my kingdom: it is not one sermon, one book, one act of prayer, but the repetition of many a process through the whole space of the lifetime. It is not one shower that makes the summer, it is shower upon shower, baptism following baptism in gracious intermission and yet in gracious persistency." It is thus we grow.
We have a parallel not only in education, but in the deepening and ripening of all great convictions. If you will search into the history of your mind, you will find that some of your convictions have taken a long time to form: there were prejudices to be overcome, there were defects to be made up, there was information to be gained, there were experiments to be conducted for a long time you wondered and hesitated, you oscillated between two opposite points, you knew not to which point you would at last gravitate and where you would "finally" settle, and yet there did come a point in your thinking and deliberation at which you said, "This is right, I see it at length, and for ever I will take my stand here."
It was so in your appreciation of character, it was so in your decisions of a literary and commercial kind, it was so in the election of your companionships, it was so in the change of your most profound and solemn opinions; it was so, too, in that grandest act of life for which there is no better term than the old word conversion. You remember your being converted, turned round, set in a homeward direction, taken from the wrong road, and placed in the right one: without cant or whine or mocking pretence, you are not ashamed to say that you were converted.
You have a parallel also in the formation of character. No man makes a character in a day. He may destroy a character in a moment, but it takes a lifetime to build one. Many of you are in the time of blossom and of promise, but not of character. Many who now hear me are young, and they, as we say, shape well, but we do not pronounce anything like a final judgment upon them at this time. No young man can have such a character as is possible to old age if that old age has been reached by the right processes. It would be impertinence for thirty to compare itself with sixty or with seventy, if on the part of the elder there has been a lifelong endeavour after truth and purity and perfectness.
"Till the whole was leavened." Do not say that the right leaven is not in us because the end has not been reached. Judge nothing before the time. You complain of the unripeness and unmellowness, the superficiality of many a young character, and the incompleteness and imperfectness of many a young career. Consider and see how foolish you are in pronouncing such judgment. The leaven may just have been hid in the three measures of meal: the leaven has not yet had time to work: the leaven has been in you for half a century, but it has only been in your son for half a month or half a year it would therefore be unwise on your part to condemn the young because of their imperfectness, incompleteness, immaturity. It is right for youth to be imperfect, but for you at your ripe seventy to be as childish, foolish, worldly as the youth of twenty, that would be double crime, redoubled, multiplied by many an aggravation, and carried up to a point of black blasphemy against every law of growth and right and divinity.
Whilst I thus speak a word on your behalf, young hearers and young Christians, understand that you owe my defensive advocacy wholly to the fact that you are young. That which applies to you today will have no application whatever in twenty years. Then some other preacher must defend some other generation. Do not interrupt the working of this good ministry in your hearts: do not imagine that that ministry has completed itself in your life; you will expose yourself to just and bitter taunting if you give your elders the idea that the leaven of the gospel has worked out its whole influence in your spirit and career at a time when it has just begun to move in penetrating and subduing influence.
The kingdom of heaven is not only penetrating and gradual, it is silent in its ministry. The leaven makes no noise, it works quietly. Do not measure progress by violence: the kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation. There is a subtle as well as an ostentatious working. You have got to learn the full scope and value of this most simple fact. A vulgar age talks as if aggressiveness had but one form and one method only as we are making a noise, organising great bodies and forces, publishing programmes in blood-red ink and beating a thousand drums; it is thought that we are making no announcement. My symbol of progress is neither a hammer nor a sword, it is the shining light, the growing seed, the coming summer: no crash of wheels, no blare of trumpets, no fluttering of banners driven by the wind, but silent, solemn, irresistible day, spreading its conquering light over all the spaces of darkness, awaking all living things to labour and to song, and leaving behind it a benediction that shall be no burden. Fussy, fussing little man, trumpeter and drummer, and gifted with making nothing but noises, learn from thy great parabolical Master this day that the kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened a penetrating, gradual, secret, silent process, but a process that never ended till the work was done.
On the other hand, let no man mistake the parable, and by a mischievous perversion of its teaching cover his own indifference and neglect. Do not say that you are silent because there is no virtue in silence itself; you must not be silent only, but penetrating, progressive. Not only is the figure negative, it is positive; quietness may be taken as the negative side, but penetration is the active and positive aspect.
What about your kingdom of heaven is it a thing locked up in a safe, well shut in, deposited within an inner door, on which you turn twenty cunningly-formed keys? It is a kingdom, mayhap, but it is not the kingdom of heaven, it is not the divine thought, it is not the life that cometh down from heaven; that life is not demonstrative, ostentatious, aggressive in any offensive sense of the term, but it is penetrating, subtle in its influence, always moving, always conquering, never resting till the whole is leavened. Be such influence yours and mine.
Take the next parable for one moment: "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind." There was nothing discriminating in the net itself. The Church is a net that holds all sorts of people. Have we no parallels to this idea in our own courses of imperial, civil, and social action? Truly we have a thousand parallels. The kingdom of patriotism is like unto a net that was cast into the sea and gathered of every kind. Do you suppose that all who have gathered themselves together in the people's House of Parliament are patriots of the divine sort, men who have no ulterior object of a selfish kind, men who have spent thousands upon thousands of pounds to go into Parliament, that they might die as pure martyrs on the altar of their country? Are you no further advanced in your study of human nature than to believe such to be the case? The House of Commons is as a net cast into the sea that has gathered of every kind. There are in all Houses of Parliament, all over the world, noble men, high-spirited patriots, incorruptible spirits that devote themselves to the noblest interests of their country; there are others who, perhaps, were never moved by a noble impulse in any direction, and to whom the country is nothing but a gigantic money-producing machine. Shall we, therefore, revile patriotism, and run down great national institutions, and hurl indiscriminating epithets against forms of civilisation to which we owe so much? It would be not only unwise and rash, but unjust and inexcusable.
The kingdom of philanthropy is also like a net cast into the sea, and which gathered of every kind. Do you suppose that all persons who wear the name of philanthropists are philanthropic in heart? There are men who make a trade of philanthropy; there are those who live upon the charitable dispositions of others; there are men who coin the tears of sympathy into wealth for their own using. On the other hand, there are philanthropists without whom the world would be poor, who have great, broad, soft hands that lay upon the world's weakness a grip that helps it, and that give to the world's poverty donations which make it forget its destitution. But because there are all sorts of persons in the kingdom of philanthropy shall we say that there is no philanthropy of a pure and noble sort? He would be a foolish and an unjust man who would bring any such wild accusation against the philanthropic spirit of the age.
Then, again, the kingdom of general society is like a net cast into the sea, which gathered of every kind. When your house-parties gather, do you suppose that every man in the little crowd is a friend of yours, sincere, true, genuine, disinterested? You are not so weak. Do you judge men wholly by their clothes because they have respectable coats, have they therefore respectable characters? Because they have had good schooling in the head, have they had a thorough education in the heart? You know the answer to these searching inquiries. Shall we, therefore; go round and condemn society, and regard all fellowship and communion as an organised lie? We shall stoop to no such folly.
It was inevitable that the kingdom of heaven should draw within itself every kind. The Church has its bad members as well as its good ones. I do not wonder the Church is an excellent lodging. To be in the Church is to look well; to have a pew in church is to begin on the right list; to make a profession of the most popular religion is, at all events, to have a card of introduction to very large sections of honourable society. Shall we, therefore, say there is no kingdom of heaven because of the insincere, the unworthy, and the hypocritical? You would not allow me to say so about patriotism, philanthropy, and social institutions, and therefore, faithful to your own wise reasoning, I must protest against any man's arising to bring a wild and indiscriminating accusation against what is known as the Christian Church.
Observe, Christ does not hide the fact of a mixture. Christ never hides any ugly facts; Christ makes more of his own failures than any other man could make of them. He cries over them, he drenches them with tears, he lifts up his voice and fills the whole space of the firmament with his moan. He acknowledges that he would, but the cities would not. You will observe, also, that the bad is a testimony and compliment to the good. The children of this world are not unwise in their generation. They know where to cross the stream, they know the best form and attitude to assume in order to attract the friendly attention of the world; they are learned men in their own policies and methods, and if some of them have counterfeited the metal, it was because it was the metal of heaven that it was counterfeited.
And observe that the bad do not succeed in hiding themselves. There is no impenetrable secrecy in character. Every bad fish was found in the net and cast out. We may be in the visible church and not in the invisible. The Church is a mystical body. Not who was baptized with water, but who has been baptized with fire, is the deciding question. Not who preached with infinite eloquence, but who lived with blameless consistency, is the determining, penetrating question. Not who professed, but who carried out, will be the rule of judgment. But observe and here with a sharp knife I cut off the pleasures of a thousand clitics it was the angels that had to perform the work of discrimination and separation, and not the fellow-members of the Church. It was not the good fish that expelled the bad; the angels came forth and severed the wicked from among the just. So shall it be at the end of the age, so shall it be with the tares and the wheat. The question was, "Shall we go and root out the tares?" and the answer was, "No, lest in pulling up the tares ye pull up the wheat also." It is not my business to find out your badness; it is not your business to find out my corruption. When one or the other becomes so exposed and evident and mischievous as to admit of no dispute and no palliation, I say not that action may not be taken under such conclusive circumstances; but when the question is one of difficulty the decision should be one of charity. I would expel no man unless driven to it by evidence that not only convinced me, but that blinded me by its dazzling light. And why not expel any human soul? Because the good may be larger than the bad in that very soul. It would be easy for me to condemn any man who practises a sin for which I have no liking but what of my own sin? Who are we that we shall judge one another, except nobly and hopefully? We shall be much deceived and disappointed in so doing; still it may be better to be disappointed and deceived in large applications of charitable criticism than to be confirmed, and to have our judgment approved, by some narrow, selfish, unworthy judgment.
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