The Kingdom of God is Like . . .

Chapter 8

by Fr. Thomas Keating

The Parable of the Leaven - III

 He told them another parable: "The kingdom of God is like yeast which a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."  (Matthew 13:33)

   How can the kingdom be like leaven? The teaching of Jesus challenges our attempts to discern what is good or evil on the basis of the accepted norms of the sacred in our cultures. In the Israelite society, leavened bread represented the unholy, the everyday, while unleavened bread represented the sacred, the feast day. Jesus implies that the kingdom of God may appear under any guise including corruption. Thus Jesus ate with outcasts, sinners, and the marginalized. In fact, he ate more meals with them than with the religious authorities of his time. By sitting down to table with sinners, which in his culture was a statement of identification with their community, Jesus forfeited his own moral purity. Did that significant gesture mean that he approved of extortion, prostitution, and the various forms of misbehavior of public sinners? Obviously his table fellowship with them did not mean approval of sinful behavior. What his conduct did reveal was that reaching out in love, reconciliation, and forgiveness are vastly more important in God's eyes than moral incorruption.

    What forms might monumental corruption take for us today? It could be an accident resulting in a serious physical or mental disability. It could be what we regard as moral reprobation in someone dear to us, as in the case of the two sons in the previous chapter, or it could be a problem in our own conscience. In the eyes of the beholder the situation looks like a disaster. In reality, it can be a great blessing, an opportunity for God to hear us at the deepest level.

    An extraordinary example of monumental corruption of a physical kind is exemplified for me in the life of the daughter of one of our neighbors. This child was injured early in life and for the past twenty-two years has been completely helpless, requiring twenty-four hour a day care on the part of her parents. She cannot feed, dress, or do anything for herself. She just is. These parents have shown this child so much love and caring that she seems to enjoy a sense of complete security. When you look into the eyes of this girl, you have the sense of looking into the eyes of someone who has no fear; of one who, because of the heroic devotion of her parents, has been able to remain a child all her life retaining all the delightful qualities of childhood. She cannot walk, speak, or move her body; but she looks at you with utter simplicity, and the depth of acceptance in her eyes is like looking into the eyes of God. The acceptance of this tragedy and their response to it has enabled her parents to connect with God's love in an extraordinary way.

    In the light of this example, I venture to suggest that our attitude toward what we regard as monumental corruption has to be changed, not the corrupting situation itself. Our tendency of course is to want to change the painful or shameful situation right away. But some situations are designed to change us, and our acceptance of them marks the place where our personal redemption really begins.

    This parable of the leaven sounds the same chord that will later reverberate fully in Jesus' own personal experience of monumental corruption. When God's Son dies on the cross, not a single angel or human comes to his aid. The Father of this Son, as far as external evidence goes, could not care less about what happens to him. Jesus is rejected by the civil and religious authorities and by his own people, and abandoned by his disciples. From the cross he witnesses his life and teaching destroyed before his eyes.

    Our experience of abandonment, the seeming absence of God on the spiritual journey, together with our temptations and the tendency to moral failure that frightens us, may actually be a powerful manifestation of the kingdom, according to the extraordinary reversal of values that Jesus proposes as the path to perfect joy and freedom.

    Few people have understood this teaching. Saint Francis of Assisi was one. There is story in which a favorite disciple, Brother Leo, asks him what perfect happiness is. Saint Francis answers, "Suppose you arrive cold and hungry at the gate of a monastery on a snowy night, and the porter slams the door in your face. Standing in the snow, shivering, you plead for mercy. He comes out and beats you with a stick. Ah! Brother Leo, that is perfect happiness!"

    The kingdom of God does not operate on the level of appearances, and rarely on the level of signs and wonders, but God's apparent absence in daily life does not mean that the divine intervention is not present. On the contrary, it is present in a very real but hidden way. The kingdom manifests its incomparable power by changing our inner dispositions and attitudes. There may be no great deliverance, no sensational conversion; just small changes for the better in the way we react to the same old routines and our customary failures.

    God is not limited by our ideas of where the kingdom may or may not be functioning. As we saw in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, it is clearly not limited to sacred places. It is focused in everyday life. More precisely, it is present in the apparent corrupting situations of everyday life. Indeed, the parable implies that the power of the kingdom is more active there than anywhere else.

    God reserves the right to appear under any guise. But because or self-centeredness is so deeply ingrained, it may take monumental corruption of some kind for us to begin to question our attitudes and motivation. There are what have to be changed, not necessarily the situation.

    Who is this God whose chief command is that we forgive and show love for one another? If God loves us infinitely, God must be totally involved in our moral melodrama. We believe, in fact, that God has taken upon and into Godself in the person of Jesus Christ, all our sinfulness--that is, our whole experience of monumental corruption in ourselves and its consequences in our lives. In other words, God expects us to go on trusting God implicitly even in the face of our own monumental moral corruption. In a poem by Thomas Merton, the question is raised, "Who is God?" The response is, "Mercy, within mercy, within mercy."