Crisis and Growth

Elders’ Conference, Western Cape Circuit, Cape-Orange Diocese,
ELCSA - 2009-08-22 in Laingsburg


CRISIS AND GROWTH: PARABLES OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS TOLD BY JESUS


ONE

From the idea that we as a church and as responsible leaders in the church must build and rebuild and that we have to do that on the only sure foundation, I want to talk on two central themes in some of the teaching of Jesus. The two themes are crisis and growth. We will see how the one theme is dependant on the other.
However as an introduction I like to put ourselves in focus. The idea must be that we ourselves become equipped in such a way that we are able to serve the kingdom. We will therefore begin with a parable that is very challenging for us as individuals as well for us as church. It is the parable of the talents and you can read it in Mt 25.14-30.
What here attracts our interest the most is the servant that came back with the one talent which he had buried and kept meticulously for his master. Why was he rebuffed in such a brutal way and why was his talent given to him who had made another ten?
One could say that this “parable of the Money in Trust was used to illustrate the maxim that a man who possesses spiritual capacity will enlarge that capacity by experience, while a man who has none will decline into a worse condition as time goes on.” (C H Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom. London, 1961, p. 110)
Jesus could have thought of the pious Jew “who comes in for so much criticism in the gospels. He seeks personal security in a meticulous observance of the Law…: ‘all these things I have observed from my youth’” (112).
But we could just as well see how this parable could be applied in our own life and in the life of the church. In order to get a better insight we will look at two aspects of human nature.
First we must talk about the so-called P/PC balance. P is production and PC is production capacity. There has to be a balance between the two. To explain this balance one can tell the story of the goose with the golden eggs. The farmer had a goose who one day produced one egg of pure gold. To his amazement this happened again, and again. He took the eggs for evaluation and it was clear he was already a rich man. But he wanted more, he could in fact become superrich. One day he therefore cut open the goose, in other words slaughtered the goose, in order to get out all the golden eggs that were there. But inside the goose there was not even one egg. She produced it, one by one.
The meaning is of course that you have to look after your PC, the goose, very nicely, in order to achieve P, which is production. Another very simple example is my lawn mower. I needed to mow the lawn but I did not have time to maintain and service the machine, not even change oil. The oil became very dirty and the rotating knives underneath were not only blunt but also bent. In two years its capacity to mow had sunk more than fifty percent and soon it was rendered useless. What is said here is also applicable regarding human beings as individuals as well as groups, in a family, at a work place or in church.
Secondly we must also go into the relationship between being reactive and being proactive. This is another huge part of human behaviour which we only can touch upon briefly. Many of us in fact complain about our environment and say that due to those and those circumstances we are not able to do what we wanted to do. The truth is that there is almost always a level were we are able to influence our own fate. We are in fact (even if we would be put in prison, and there is this incredible story about Victor Frankl in the Nazi prison in Germany) able to influence what happens to us; we are able to take decisions that nobody else could do about our fate. Only when this is understood could we find a way of understanding the meaning of this parable in our lives and that of the church.
What we find is that every human being is something in him or herself. There is no clean slate. We have to start with ourselves and we have to build on our resources and we have to acquire resources in a consistent way. That goes for the physical life (clothes and shoes etc), for economical life as well as the actual human resources. So in that sense we can see how the parable is a story about ourselves and the fact that we have to use those resources we have in some kind of engagement with others. The bitter truth is that in the end “from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (v 29b).


TWO

In all these parables the kingdom of God is portrayed in different ways. A parable often begins with words like, “the kingdom of God is like…”. Jesus uses this expression very frequently and yet it is often very difficult to find out exactly what it is. What one could have however as a kind of starting point is that the kingdom is intimately linked to the power and ministry of Jesus Christ, in his earthly life as well as in his glorified life.
One could here refer to an expression that Paul has given us. Whatever we do we have to make sure that we have a firm foundation and he says in 1 Cor. 3.11: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ”.
Before dealing explicitly with the four different parables, two on the crises of life and two on growth, I want to give a few preliminary remarks in order to direct us in our interpretation.
First of all there is an understanding of the kingdom of God and of its realisation that is called realized eschatology (see C H Dodd). In short it is to say that the kingdom that also in Israel was expected at the end of times (éschatos, the last things) had already come through Jesus Christ, at least to quite some extent. The kingdom was realized in and with Jesus Christ. And yet there is still an end-of-times situation for which we also must prepare. We should thus remember that however wise a particular understanding is, we will not have emptied all the meaning through just one interpretation. Scholars can easily stifle (onderdruk) other interpretations. As we should know, the parables are open to different interpretations and so it will be. A major question however is whether realized eschatology will have any impact on or could speed up the advent of the final coming of the kingdom of God (the parousia).
Secondly there are two different levels of interpretation as a result of what just has been said. First there is the interpretation of the church, since the early days of St Paul etc. Here, naturally, the church would find itself in between the coming of the kingdom through Jesus’ ministry on earth and the end of times, the final judgment. But originally there is secondly the interpretation as it came from Jesus himself in his environment which was not the church of course but his fellow Jews, the synagogue and the temple in Jerusalem etc.
Thirdly we should also note that there are two understandings of what is a crisis. First, a crisis comes about because of the divine intervention that is felt. The appearance of Jesus Christ was such a decisive divine intervention. But there is a follow up of this intervention in the church or should be. One could recall what happened during the first Pentecost when people realised that they were confronted with the Holy Spirit, which of course was another way of describing the presence of Jesus: “Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins;” (Acts 2.37-38).
Secondly a crisis is simply the personal situation of need, which is a very common everyday experience for those who are honest with themselves.
Fourthly one should be aware that in a theology of realized eschatology the interpretation of the parables will have to start where Jesus is in his earthly ministry. The understanding is namely that the kingdom of God is present there and then, not only in some uncertain and perhaps distant future. The result is that the focus in the first instance is not on how Christians and church people behave but the focus is on people in Jesus surrounding. We will see this as we go through the various parables.

Parables of crisis
First there is the Parable of the Faithful and Unfaithful Servants; we find it in Mt 24.45-51.
The question here is who these unfaithful servants were. If it is in Jesus environment it could perhaps be the chief priests and scribes who “sit on Moses’ seat, so practise and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do”. (Mt 23.2-3)
But we can also think about the church and why not also on a more personal level, on how trustworthy we are as servants when nobody sees us?
One could also say that the basic insight here is that life is a kind of continuous crisis and the next text is the Parable of the Ten Virgins, to be found in Mt 25.1-12.
Is this parable about the final judgment only or could it also be about us now today? One interpretation says that it is about being prepared all the time, it is about “the folly of unpreparedness and the wisdom of preparedness” (128), but how does one become prepared??
One could also say that a presupposition of any talk about growth has to be about crisis; that is our point of departure. So now follows growth.

Parables of growth
Also here we first have to accept an interpretation that is in the time of Jesus and his world. Here also follows a very thought provoking understanding. That is that growth has taken a long time and when the kingdom appears in and with Jesus Christ and his ministry, it is already a time of harvest. That is vividly described in John 4.35-38, (“lift up your eyes and observe the fields, that they are white for harvest…”). One could also refer to Jesus’ words in Mt 9.38: “The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few”.
The result of this is that a disciple of Jesus also has to think in these terms. It is basically not a matter of sowing the seed so that a harvest ultimately can be brought in thanks to this. Discipleship in effect means that there is a harvest already present and there are others, most of them completely unknown to us, who have sowed, tended and watered that which started to grow.
The first of the parables is the Parable of the Weeds in the Field, Mt 13.24-30. In addition also here we must ask, what is the interpretation of this parable for us as a church and as individual Christians (a discussion on whether you can weed out evil in the church)?
The second parable about growth that we are going to discuss is the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Mk 4.30-32. When Jesus talks about this parable, is the kingdom of God that is with him then like a seed (the smallest of all according to Mark) or is it the full grown tree where the birds can come and roost? One interpretation is that it is a full grown tree and that the kingdom has grown through the centuries thanks to God guiding his people Israel and thanks to his prophets and other servants through the ages. In addition this full grown tree is a symbol of “great empires offering political protection to its subject states” (142).
My question is, is the Lutheran church ELCSA a small nest in the great kingdom tree hanging like those built by the weaver birds, in isolation from the rest of this great tree? Or how should we understand ourselves? Is our church rather a part of some strong branches in the tree, responsible for giving nurture from the roots in terms of sound theology, also reaching out in a mission of new relations and possibilities? Our interpretations must not be stifled and yet our point of departure must the kingdom of God as portrayed by Jesus Christ; no other foundation is to be found than him.
To end: in all these parables we could test ourselves as to how our P/PC works and to what extent we are just reactive instead of being proactive.
There are also other aspects that should be part of our discussions. Let me mention the following and let me do it in the following two points.
First we have to learn that realized eschatology is closely linked to an understanding of the church as a body of Word and Sacrament, which is indeed a doctrinal position of the Lutheran church. Taking the Word seriously also leads to taking the sacraments seriously. In a special way this can be seen in the Holy Eucharist (Holy Communion). Here we meet this Jesus Christ, who was born, who ministered, who suffered, who died and who on the third day was raised from the dead. This reality is portrayed in the Eucharist and in a real sense. As Lutherans we tend to follow Luther’s understanding of the real presence of Christ in and with the bread and the wine.
Secondly, in all the parables there is a mission dimension. We should seek that dimension all the time. Are we doing that? A church that does not live in mission, and mission then must be understood as going out into the unknown in some way, not just resuscitate “dooie lede”, a church that does not live in the mission dimension is like a person who is reactive; proactivity has died.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and will be for ever. Amen.


(Hans S A Engdahl 2009-08-22, e-mail: hengdahl@uwc.ac.za, blog: http://hansengdahl.blogspot.com)