Fields of Perfection [part four] ...

Some journey’s have unintended consequences, and some unexpected benefits.  Imagine yourself planning a first-time trip to London England for your family.  None of you have ever traveled oversees, but you go about all the normal things we would expect to do.  We arrange a passport for everyone.  We make airline reservations, and hotel accommodations.  We arrange for local transport, though expect to take taxi’s and the tube for the most part.  These are the things we expect to have to do, in order to take a journey to London.  But then something unexpected happens, an Ambassador from France arrives at your doorstep the eve before your trip.  They knock on your door and tell you that historians in France have been working on tracing the ancestors of King Louis and believe you may be the last living direct descendant.  They want you to come to France (courtesy of the French government), for an all-expenses-paid first-class trip to explore your heritage.

Surprised would hardly be the word for it.  You agree to go.  You are taken on a supersonic plane that arrives in 2 hours, much less than you expected, and you ride first-class all the way.  You are taken to the Palace of Versailles outside of Paris where Louis spent much of his life.  But not to tour it.  To stay in it.  You are to sleep in a bed made of down feathers that measures about 15 feet across.  Every room in this huge castle now belongs to you.  Beyond this, the Hope Diamond which once belonged to your ancestor is now laid out upon your neck.  The historical wealth of France is transferred to you.  This does not happen because you planned for it.  It did not happen because you deserved it.  It happens because of something outside of your control entirely, it happens because of your ancestry, and happens because of something inside of you that you were entirely unaware might be there.   You did not know you were an heir to a throne, but you come to discover it by the hard work of somebody else.

Most of us do not dream of becoming an heir to a long expired French throne.  It did not work out that well for King Louis after all.  The unexpected consequence of power is not something uplifting to human nature, it is something that tends to tear what is important in us down.  But it turns out, you, and each member of your family, are in fact heirs to a different throne, and direct descendants of the King who still sits on it.  And the journey of discovery, or reconciliation with that throne, is what that ambassador knocking at your door, wants you to begin.  This journey, like the imaginary one we described above, will happen not because you plan for it.  There is nothing you can do to get ready for it.  You are only asked if you will go, or not.  What happens then is in the hands of the King who desperately wishes to meet you in person; and show you what He has in store for you.  He wants so much to put a crown upon your head.  Not one made of silly hope diamonds that twinkle only when light hits it, but one made of stars which themselves shine brighter than our sun from within. 

This journey does not happen because you deserve it.  You cannot earn it.  It is the gift of the King, to you, His long-lost child.  And your prince-ship (or princess) was something buried in you, that your mortal mind can scarcely imagine, let alone comprehend.  How do I know?  Because the perspective of the farmer is always greater than the perspective of the seed.  Jesus Himself reminded us of this.  Matthew continues a series of journey-related parables told by Christ in chapter 13 of his gospel.  As discussed so far these journeys are not quick, or instant.  They are told in the growth process of a Farmer and His seeds.  But progression, or rather transformation, is what occurs in each of them.  This one picks up in verse 31 with Jesus saying … “Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: [verse 32] Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”

A short story as stories go.  But the point is revealing.  The farmer once again is Jesus Christ, as it has been in all the parables that precede it.  The field is the world.  The seed is us, that is, anyone who would choose to accept being the seed of the Farmer.  The farmer does the planting, and in this case, the seed hardly recognizes what it will become.  From the perspective of the seed, they are the tiniest of all their peers, the least of seeds in fact.  This seed looks at other seeds to determine its own value, but has no idea what it would become.  You can imagine other herb seeds laughing at the tiny little grain of mustard seed; other seeds imagine themselves bigger because they begin the journey bigger already.  They think themselves ahead on this journey because of how big they are today.  But not so.  Seeds are ALL tiny, especially in the hand of the farmer.  But after the transformation, the tiny grain of mustard seed becomes a great tree.  It gets so large other species like birds, can actually make a home in its branches.  Hard to do that in a basil herb, or perhaps oregano, or garlic.

The point of this parable is that the seed does not really know who it is.  The seed has no idea what it is intended to become.  Only the farmer knows that.  And ONLY the farmer can see to it, that destination is what occurs, guiding the transformation from seed to tree – faithfully watering, fertilizing, providing sunlight, etc..  Our farmer does the work.  The journey is not ours because we deserve it.  And as these parables reveal, not even because we can imagine it.  Our imagination is stunted by our past, and the diversion of our focus away from our farmer.  We start looking at who we are today, and see only the least of all seeds (in or out of the church).  Looking at self does not make the journey happen.  Looking to the light of the farmer does.  But the great news is that, it does not matter if you can grasp who you really are.  It does not change a thing.  You are heir to a throne whether you believe it or not.  The journey will reveal it.  All you need do is begin.

Jesus decides to make another analogy to bring home the point in a way perhaps his female audience will also understand better.  He continues in verse 33 saying … “Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.”  The dough has no idea what leaven will do to it.  The dough had no plans to go anywhere or be anything greater than it already was.  But introduce the transformative power of the Kingdom of Heaven into the dough, and rise it will do.  The dough will never understand that process, neither will we.  It was not the work of the dough to make itself rise, it was the introduction of the leaven of the Kingdom of Heaven that made that happen.  Only Jesus understands the work He is doing, and what results it will have.  We do not.  But the rising is guaranteed. 

Transformative love, that is love, not content to leave us in our sin, with our pain, and the death we embrace because of it.  That love of God, instead removes our pain, our sin, and even our death.  It grants life eternal.  Not just eternal “existence”, but eternal “life”.  Real life.  And it begins the moment it is introduced.  The end of the journey does not arrive in an instant, but the benefits of the journey begin to be seen immediately and throughout, ever growing towards the fields of perfection He has in mind.  Perfection is not just intended for one or two, it will in fact be seen throughout all of heaven, in each and every one of us, its residents.  So if all will see it.  Then all need not wait to see it develop within them in the here-and-now.  It can begin today.  These stories were designed to illustrate these things to us.  But have they?

Matthew makes a commentary on these parables of Jesus, now four of them on the same theme, as he states in verse 34 saying … “All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: [verse 35] That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”  The Truth is here revealed.  The beauty of the gospel, kept secret from the foundation of the world is here revealed.  This is the battle plan Jesus had when Satan will still Lucifer.  These are the plans Jesus had to keep hidden from Lucifer, asking Lucifer to trust Him rather than grow envy and break trust, resulting the in invention of sin and evil and death and war.

That our Savior and Lord would provide a way of our escape from the addiction of sin, was the plans for our transformation, created before we were.  Man was created in spite of knowing what Love would cost.  Man was created with free will, our God desperately hoping we would not break trust with Him, as Lucifer had done – even though we chose it as well.  But with our fall, was already created a way for us to reconcile, and learn to trust in our God once again.  To re-establish trust on our part in our God to truly save us – to do what He has promised to do.  Each of us face the same challenge and tests Lucifer did, and Adam did, and Jesus did.  We are all asked whether we will trust God, in spite of what we think or feel or believe.  As we learn to have that kind of trust, we learn to make a life where sin will never enter in to it again, not in the eons of time we will face in eternal life.  Our trust in God will be so great, sin will have no vehicle for entry ever again.

These were the secrets revealed to us in a series of parables.  And Satan must have wept at the beauty of how great the love of God is, for us, and once for himself before he abandoned it completely.  The seed does not have to understand everything, not even who it is.  The seed has only to look to the farmer, and watch what the farmer has in store for it, letting the transformation truly begin.