The Kingdom of Heaven

Texts: 1 Kings 3:5-12; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

I have to say that I struggle with some of the so-called kingdom parables, such as the ones we have in our gospel reading this morning.  Some of the difficulties they give me are cultural; no doubt, they made connections for the people of their time, but not all of them translate very well into our modern times and culture.  We can cope with the example of a small seed growing into a big tree (although, I'm not sure that "mustard" is a good example of this!); and we can cope with bread-making, the image of a small amount of yeast affecting the whole dough.  And I think I follow the point about the sorting out of various fish all caught in the same net.

But the recovering lawyer in me has difficulty with the fellow who finds treasure in a field, hides it, and then goes away to buy the field.  How come he is digging up things in the field if it isn't his in the first place?  Admittedly, a legal friend of mine pointed out that he could have been a tenant, in which case he was, perhaps, lawfully in the field when he found the treasure.  But this in turn raises the moral or ethical question: is he not ethically obliged to reveal the find to the owner/landlord?

And then there's an economic problem that this parable shares with the next one, the one about the merchant who sells everything to buy that glorious pearl.  This guy, and the one who sells everything to buy the field, are destined for hungry times, aren't they?  Try getting credit at the supermarket, guys!  Try nibbling your pearl!

I think why these parables don't work for me so well as many of the others is that they are rather abstract.  They try to paint a picture of the kingdom of God as a thing, something to grasp and hold onto – like treasure found in a field or a pearl of great beauty.  My interest is more readily engaged with actions, not things; to see the kingdom of God in action is easier than to see it as if it could be shown to me in a painting or a photo.

And this was brought home to me this week in some reading I have been doing for a friend.  I've mentioned before that he is writing a book on theology – thinking and talking about God – after the Holocaust; and he has asked a few of us to read his drafts as he writes them and give him feedback.  The latest instalment is particularly interesting, because it looks at Jewish, rather than Christian, thought on the subject.  For any of us to think about the Holocaust at all is pretty awful, but for Jews it must be even more agonising, particularly for believing Jews.  At a distance of several hundred years, it may be easy to explain the exile in terms of the infidelity of God's people; God tired of them, turned his face from them, and allowed the Babylonians to cart them off to exile in captivity.

That is the characteristically Jewish view of God revealed in history.  If God is in charge of history, and if Israel is God's beloved people, then somehow God must be responsible for the exile, and for any other national disaster to befall his people.  But is that how we are to think of the Holocaust?  That God turned his face away from his people, and allowed Hitler to punish them for their sins?  Well, believe it or not, some Jewish theologians have taken that position – as horrible as it seems to us.  But others have tried to find other ways of "explaining" what happened, in theological terms.

To me the most helpful approach comes from a teacher and thinker called Rabbi Halvini.  Taking Auschwitz as the epitome of the Holocaust, he asks an interesting question: he asks, what would be an appropriate prayer for a faithful Jew to have prayed to the God of Israel in Auschwitz?  His answer is very short and simple: O God, may your sovereignty be extended over us.  May your sovereignty be extended over us.

What I like about that prayer is that it does two things that often seem irreconcilable.  First it acknowledges that God is sovereign; and secondly, it acknowledges that that sovereignty is not yet in force everywhere.  It was obviously not in force in Auschwitz; and yet, while Auschwitz was going on in all its terrible evil, God was sovereign.  I'll explore that a bit more in a moment, but here's a question for us who are Christians rather than Jews.  Halvini's prayer was for Jews; what would be an appropriate prayer for we Christians?

And the answer is in the Lord's Prayer, isn't it?  "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven?"  That's our equivalent of Rabbi Halvini's prayer.  Every time we pray that prayer we are asking that God's sovereignty be extended over us.  But how could that happen except by all those of us who pray that prayer answering it for ourselves?  The more we submit ourselves to God's will, so his will is done on earth as in heaven, so his kingdom comes.

One of the most moving sections in my friend's draft chapter addresses the issue of God's presence or absence in Auschwitz.  Was there any evidence of God's presence in that terrible place?  That's the question, and the tentative answer he offers is yes.  He says that whenever any person in Auschwitz chose to go on believing in God, and chose to act ethically in accordance with that belief, to the extent possible in those dreadful circumstances, God was present in that person.  We might think of some of the giants of the faith at this point.  An obvious example would be the Franciscan priest, Fr Maximilian Kolbe, who swapped places with a condemned inmate and died a terrible death in his place.

But perhaps even more moving for me were the stories of "ordinary" women who did their best to comfort the terrified children as they were being shepherded into the gas chambers.  Those women knew what was going on; yet many of them were able to suppress their own fears to comfort the children – not their own, but strangers – and do whatever they could to comfort the children, to hold their hands, to hug them, to wipe their faces, even in that horrible and hopeless situation.  Those little acts of selfless love were, it is argued, signs of God's presence even in Auschwitz.  In those little ways, where those women refused to surrender to the sheer evil and hopelessness of their personal situation, God's sovereignty was displayed in their lives.  Those children still died, those women still died, but evil did not triumph over love.

So if we want a modern parable to help us see what the kingdom of heaven is like we might say: the kingdom of heaven is like a woman who, seeing a stranger's child distressed, comforts that child even though she knows she is about to die with the child.  And if we want to get some sort of handle on St Paul's astonishing thought this morning, this may be the place to get it.  "In all these things (and he's talking about persecution, suffering, and so on), we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."  There's a real sense, it seems to me, in which those amazing words apply to those amazing women.  Nothing, not even Auschwitz, could separate them from the love of God.

I want to finish this morning with one comment on our first lesson.  It is a very common reading, and it is one that I must have read and heard many times.  Yet this time, one little line jumped out at me.  You remember that Solomon had emerged from the intrigues and bloodletting that followed David's death to be the new king.  God asks Solomon what he wants and Solomon famously asks for wisdom.  God is so pleased with Solomon's choice that he throws in riches and honour as well.  Great stuff!  Then comes this line: Then Solomon awoke – and he realised it had all been a dream.

What would we mean by that if we said it today?  We would mean that it was all fantasy, that it hadn't really happened; that God had not really appeared or spoken to Solomon; that it was time to stop dreaming and get back to the real world.  But that isn't how Solomon behaved, is it?  Solomon chose to believe in it, even though he knew it was a dream.

And that is perhaps another way in which we can think about the kingdom of God.  God has put before us his dream of what the world could be like if only we would let it be.  We have to decide if we will believe in this dream and help to bring it about.  Next time we pray the Lord's prayer perhaps we could change it slightly: Your dream come true, on earth as in heaven.