The Presence of God is the Kingdom
Introduction
God’s love made his people as close to God as a loincloth is close to the human body. Jeremiah’s symbolic action tells the people that by embracing the idolatry of Babylonia, they have given up God’s tenderness and become rotten.
A tiny seed becomes a tree. At the beginning when one hears it and accepts it, the word of God is only a tiny seed, and when it is contested and contradicted, as it was in the early Church and is often again today, it looks insignificant, negligible. What is it, in comparison with the powerful media? But it is meant to grow and to become little by little a kingdom of love and justice that overcomes all contradiction and hatred.
1 Reading Jeremiah 13:1-11
The LORD said to me: Go buy yourself a linen loincloth;
wear it on your loins, but do not put it in water.
I bought the loincloth, as the LORD commanded, and put it on.
A second time the word of the LORD came to me thus:
Take the loincloth which you bought and are wearing,
and go now to the Parath;
there hide it in a cleft of the rock.
Obedient to the LORD’s command, I went to the Parath
and buried the loincloth.
After a long interval, the LORD said to me:
Go now to the Parath and fetch the loincloth
which I told you to hide there.
Again I went to the Parath, sought out and took the loincloth
from the place where I had hid it.
But it was rotted, good for nothing!
Then the message came to me from the LORD:
Thus says the LORD:
So also I will allow the pride of Judah to rot,
the great pride of Jerusalem.
This wicked people who refuse to obey my words,
who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts,
and follow strange gods to serve and adore them,
shall be like this loincloth which is good for nothing.
For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty.
But they did not listen.
Responsorial Psalm Deuteronomy 32:18-19, 20, 21
R. (see 18a) You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you,
You forgot the God who gave you birth.
When the LORD saw this, he was filled with loathing
and anger toward his sons and daughters.
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“I will hide my face from them,” he said,
“and see what will then become of them.
What a fickle race they are,
sons with no loyalty in them!”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“Since they have provoked me with their ‘no-god’
and angered me with their vain idols,
I will provoke them with a ‘no-people’;
with a foolish nation I will anger them.”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
Alleluia James 1:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel Matthew 13:31-35
Jesus proposed a parable to the crowds.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
It becomes a large bush,
and the ‘birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.'”
He spoke to them another parable.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened.”
All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables.
He spoke to them only in parables,
to fulfil what had been said through the prophet:
I will open my mouth in parables,
I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation
of the world.
Commentary
The Kingdom of Heaven is like…. ‘Kingship’, the scholars say, would be a better translation. Jesus was not talking about some place, but about an attribute of God: God’s presence, influence, power…. He was talking about the Father, not about geography. Matthew, being a Jew, didn’t like to mention the name ‘God’; this was out of reverence for the divine name. Instead he said, Kingdom of Heaven. But he too was talking about God, not about celestial geography! So the phrase ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ could be translated Presence of God, or Power or Influence of God – phrases that are not so concrete as Kingdom of Heaven; but perhaps we sometimes concretize the Kingdom too much, and we need to open it up again! Read these parables again, translating the phrase. “The Presence of God is like a mustard seed…. The Presence of God is like the yeast a woman took and mixed in with flour till it was leavened all through…. Try to personalize the parables and appreciate Jesus’ message of life.
Blessing
All growth is slow, so slow that it is almost invisible. All that grows needs time. That is the way the word of God in which we believe has to grow among us and to become a kingdom where people respond to God’s fidelity and work out God’s plans. May almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen!