I’d like us to consider a phrase we often use in church. Perhaps or those outside of the church it might not be so familiar. That phrase is the Kingdom of Heaven.
When I first became a Christian and started going to church it almost felt like I was learning a whole new language. So think for a moment. If you were to define the Kingdom of heaven for someone who is not a Christian, what would you say it is? What comes to mind when you think of the words The Kingdom of Heaven
It’s a bit of an old-fashioned sounding phrase. We don’t talk about kingdoms a lot in Wales outside of the church. It’s kind of a Christianesey-sounding phrase. It’s one we throw around a lot in church on a Sunday, but what does it really mean for when you walk out of church after the service is over?
Understanding the Kingdom of Heaven is important, but it can also bring up all kinds of issues. In the Church, we talk about the kingdom of heaven coming to earth, and seeing it spread, and doing “Kingdom Work.” Yet at the same time, many of us have been trained to think about the Kingdom of Heaven as a place we go when we die.
Many people think of Heaven as some otherworldly destination, somewhere else. Not here. In the clouds maybe – with pearly gates and St. Peter deciding who’s in and who’s out. People have different pictures of what heaven will be like, and for many who go to church and back again each week, praying the words: “Your Kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is as far as it goes. We pray those words and then we wait, holding out for heaven which will come later – which will be somewhere else.
The good news of Jesus was so much bigger than that, and the phrase that Jesus used to talk about his good news was the “Kingdom of God,” or the “Kingdom of Heaven.” They were one and the same. He talked about the Kingdom all through the Gospels more than anything else – more than money, or faith, or prayer, and when he talked about the Kingdom, people got excited. People left behind everything else in their lives to be a part of it.
So what is this good news that Jesus made such a big deal out of? What is the Kingdom of Heaven? When Matthew writes his story about Jesus, one of the main topics to come up is Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom. It happens here more than in any other gospel. It’s like the heartbeat of the book – the heartbeat of Jesus’ teaching. The Jews had long waited for a Messiah to come to save them, so when John the Baptist came saying: “The time promised by God has come at last! The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!,” this phrase – the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven – captured everything they hoped for and everything they believed God had promised them.
In Jewish tradition, they believed that there would come a day when God would rule his Kingdom here on earth – when heaven and earth would be one place – when everything here would be restored to the way God intended it to be all along.
In Jesus’ world, no one talked about Heaven being somewhere else or something for later on after you die, because what they anticipated was a day in which God would redeem, restore, and renew this world to the way it was meant to be. For them, the Kingdom of Heaven was whenever and wherever God was King – where God’s will was done. So Jesus was saying: “Hey, you know that thing you’ve been waiting for forever? You know how you’ve been waiting for God to establish his kingdom on earth? Well, it’s about to happen with me.”
I’m sure the crowds standing around him would have thought: “Could this be it? Could this be the one we’ve been waiting for – the one who will fix everything?” And I imagine that behind that question is the longing that so many of us have also felt at some point – a longing for something different, for something better.
I imagine that like so many of us, those crowds that day were longing for healing, for rescue, for that key moment that would change everything. So in Matthew 13, Jesus looks at the crowd, and he makes another grand announcement about the greatness of his Kingdom. “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds.”
On hearing this, they must have thought: “What kind of kingdom is that?” They were expecting magnificence and glory. They were expecting the kind of kingdom that would take over everything in a great display of majesty and power.
Likewise in our world, small things are not always considered to be valuable. We don’t always tend to give them much attention. Instead, we like the Big Moments. We make a big deal about the big game, or the final performance, or the wedding day. We remember that big moment when Wales beat England in rugby, or when we finally got our dream job.
Big things are often good things, but in so many ways, we treat them like they’re the only things that matter. However, this story is about a different kind of God who establishes a different kind of kingdom. He doesn’t work the way most of us would work if we were gods – all at once with billboards and a press release and lots of noise. More often than not, God works through the little things – through burning bushes, stubborn donkeys, widows’ mites, little kids, shepherds, fishermen, prostitutes, and prodigals. Greatest of all, He establishes his Kingdom through a baby in a manger who would grow up to die on a cross.
So often, we are so busy looking, waiting, and watching for the big and the powerful that we miss experiencing the kingdom that’s right in front of us. How often does this happen in our lives? How often is God tapping on our shoulder with some mustard seed idea, but we ignore it because it seems so insignificant and we’re waiting for God to do something big? That small idea you had to phone someone you know living on their own to see if you could help in any way … That thought that maybe someone you know could use some encouragement today, or an invitation to be part of something you’re doing, … Maybe I can go and cut my neighbour’s grass, … But instead of paying attention to those ideas that we think are too small for God to bless, we convince ourselves that it won’t really make much of a difference anyway. We either put it off or we ignore it. Yet that little mustard seed
could have been significant.
On other occasions, we miss the opportunity to make an impact not because the ideas are small, but because we think we are too small or too insignificant. That impulse – that dream to reach out to a certain group of people who have practical needs, who seem lonely or not thought of, … But you think: “I can’t really do much for them. I don’t really know enough. I’m not trained enough. God would surely prefer to use somebody else.” But God says: “No, that’s actually my kingdom breaking in, because I wanted to plant my kingdom there, and I couldn’t because it was full of all these other things you didn’t want to hand over to me.”
In this parable, Jesus is guiding us to pay attention to the small but significant impulses of the Spirit, because that’s what the Kingdom is like. The seed ideas – the dreams you have that just seem too insignificant – might be God’s Kingdom breaking in. If we’re waiting around for the big things – if we’re holding out for Heaven later on and somewhere else, we might miss the Kingdom that’s actually growing here and now right in front of us.