[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]
How the Holy Spirit actually works upon the Church and upon disciples of Christ is a major question. It is a point of disagreement, for example, between wheat and weed parishes; that is, between orthodox and heterodox Christian communities. It is a common thing to hear from those advocating changes to doctrine that “The Holy Spirit is doing a new thing.” But is He? What seems clear is that in order to receive the power of the Holy Spirit, we need to know how the Holy Spirit gives His power, so that we are able to distinguish His power from the power of the Devil, within the Christian life.
I will be continuing with the line of interpretation I have been following for the previous two Sundays: interpreting the parable of the sower and the parable of the wheat and tares from the perspective of a parish. They are usually interpreted as applying to individual souls; yet as I have pointed out, Scripture gives us license to interpret the one as signifying the many: for we are one body in Christ, and in this parish, and any parish in the sacramental tradition of Christianity, we are all one. And, so, the Holy Spirit seeks to give HIs power upon the heart of a parish.
Today’s preaching begins by sharing with you a key. A key opens a lock; a key opens a door; a key gets you into a house, into a mansion; a key gets you into a private field or property that, without the key, you would never know about. And the key is this: when Jesus is speaking about the Kingdom of Heaven and about the Kingdom of God, He is speaking about the Holy Spirit. And the correspondence really is that one to one.
We get this from teaching from Our Lord Jesus and from the Apostle Paul. Jesus teaches (in Luke 17:21) that “The kingdom of God is within you.” And Saint Paul teaches (in 1 Cor 6:19) that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God.” Putting these teachings together, we have the Kingdom of God (of heaven) is within you, and this Kingdom is the Holy Spirit. This is attested elsewhere Scripture, such as in Job 33:4 “The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life”; in Psalm 104: “When thou lettest Thy breath (Thy Spirit) go forth, they shall be made.” Many other verses could be cited; but what we have from Jesus and Paul are plenty.
And so this is a key to understanding what all of these parables are fundamentally about. We have the parables of the mustard seed, of leaven, of the treasure in a field, of the pearl of great price, and of a net. These five parables appear to be about five different things. But that is not the case. Note how Our Lord Jesus introduces each of the parables: He says, “The kingdom of heaven is like …” And so with the key, we know that the five parables are all descriptions or images of the Holy Spirit: descriptions about what life in the Holy Spirit is like; images of what it means to experience the Holy Spirit, and how we can have a sense of His presence and His activity.
Firstly we have the experience of the Holy Spirit as like a grain of mustard seed. The Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father through the Son, Who fills all things with His blessing, Who is beyond time and space, makes Himself known as like a mustard seed: personal, small-scale, almost private, almost our very own: and at the scale of any parish: whether a parish consecrated yesterday or one centuries old, and no matter how large or small their average Sunday attendance. And as a mustard seed slowly grows into a tree, the Holy Spirit slowly grows in a parish such that within the heart of a parish grows the Tree of Life, which bears fruit of ever-lasting life: namely, the Sacraments, which feed us with heavenly grace.
We have the experience of the Holy Spirit as leaven. And so, again, the Holy Spirit works slowly, almost invisibly in a parish, to bring forth life. As leaven transforms a bowl of water, salt, and flour into dough ready to become bread, the Holy Spirit transforms a group of people into the Body of Christ, into He Who calls Himself the Heavenly Bread, for as Saint Paul wrote to the Ephesians, we are being transformed “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” – the fullness of Bread.
What is more, the experience of life in the Holy Spirit is true treasure. The Holy Spirit is treasure found in a field when we are not looking for it, not searching for it, but the treasure finds us. And the Holy Spirit is treasure as a pearl that can be found by those looking for Him, those who are searching for truth. In either case, we are to treat what we have of the Holy Spirit as treasure more valuable than anything in the world.
Finally, our Lord Jesus tells us that the life of the Holy Spirit is as a net thrown into the sea to gather fish of every kind. The Holy Spirit, in other words, is for all people. God shows no partiality, and the Holy Spirit does not discriminate between persons based on social, economic status, origin of birth, old, young, man, woman, skin color, or level of intelligence. A parish truly in possession of the Holy Spirit is group of people that could come together in no other way except by God, except by the Holy Spirit drawing people in from diverse backgrounds, that by common prayer and the grace of God, we can understand each other beyond any differences born of flesh, that is, born of the world — because we are born of the Spirit.
My dear brothers and sisters, all parables are intended by our Lord for deeply thinking about, and for prayer. Parables are for contemplation, that the mysteries hidden since the foundation of the world may be revealed through them. And these parables He gives that we know what the experience of the Holy Spirit is like, and how He works: in small, personal ways of growth and transformation, as a treasure that we find and which finds us, and that His power is available to all members of a parish. He gives us these parables of the Holy Spirit, that we know how to discern the power of the Holy Spirit from that of the Devil: all to draw us into wonder, into awe, into trembling – in other words, into Holy Fear. Knowing the key to these parables, may God’s Kingdom come, and continue to come upon his parish richly. Amen.
On the Parables of the Holy Spirit