Training for the Kingdom

By The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver, Ph.D.

Jesus asked: “Have you understood all this?”

In each of Jesus’ parables he provides teaching using agricultural pictures to give us a glimpse into the nature of God and his Kingdom. And quite consciously, Jesus asks multiple times whether we have understood. Sometimes he phrases the question in a more oblique way: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” he says at various times. But today, near the end of the passage, Jesus is very direct: “Have you understood all this?” (v 51). This is nearly the last thing we hear from Jesus, but I think it might be the most important for us today. 

The question “Have you understood all this?” first assumes something quite natural to the way our mind works. How many times have you had a book in front of you, presumably reading, only to realize that you’re not quite sure when you stopped taking in anything from the page? There are many reasons why this might happen, but the point is that it’s not unusual for us to hear and not understand, to read but not comprehend. The challenge comes to us just as much with learning the teachings of Jesus and the words of Scripture as with the worship of God in the liturgy. The liturgy is so great a gift that we speak of the “Divine Liturgy” or the “Sacred Liturgy.” Among other things, it is through this liturgy that we have received the means by which we are able to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,” as we are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “for our God is a consuming fire” (12:28-29). 

But, as I’m sure you know, it’s not too difficult to offer God worship that is not acceptable, worship with neither reverence nor awe, with neither our will nor our minds engaged. The measure of whether we have learned anything, or more properly, the measure of whether we have been changed by God, cannot be discerned after one or two sermons or liturgies. We have to view things a bit more in the long-term. Our faith is not one principally about the intellect. Many holy persons were what people of past generations might have called “simple.” In fact, I remember talking to a man whose son David had basically no brain stem above his neck and whose brain function was quite minimal. And yet, David was a Christian and had, as far as anyone could tell, about as basic a sense of Christianity as is possible. He could not speak or feed himself. But many people described being with David and having the very opposite experience one might expect. Instead of wondering why God let this person who in their 30s had a life of complete dependence on everyone around him, people described a profound sense of the love of God when they were with David. David knew God in a demonstrably and inexplicably deep way.

This question of whether we “understand” is not a neutral or theoretical question. The answer has real and substantial consequences. It is tied directly to what Jesus describes just before he asks the question.

We don’t like passages like this, and I don’t think there is any way to make them mean something other than precisely what they say. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) wrote: “these plain words more need belief and consideration than exposition.” 

Jesus connects our “understanding” to how things will go for us at the great judgment seat at the end of the age. What we must remember is that “understanding” here needs to be understood the way that “faith” should be understood when we read St. Paul. Faith and understanding include the intellect to some degree. But the essential part is some degree of intellectual belief that is joined to transformation of the person. Why else would Jesus speak multiple times about the mixed reality of the church? Jesus makes very clear that in the church, there are those who will be set on his right hand and brought into the Kingdom of Light, and there will be those who, while seemingly followers of Christ, are not and will be separated from him into darkness. 

The dividing line can be seen in a phrase from one of Thomas Cranmer’s wonderful collects—Cranmer being the compiler and composer of the first Books of Common Prayer in England in the sixteenth century. In the collect, we ask God to, “increase in us true religion.” True religion. If there can be true religion, there can most certainly be false religion. And what is very likely is that the differences between them, at least on the outside, might be difficult to discern. True and false religion might look similar: both go to church, of course, and serve on committees. Both likely serve at the soup kitchen and know when to bow and when to make the sign of the cross. But there is something that separates them, divides them infinitely, in fact. That divide is the union of love and humility. The two necessarily go together. 

This real divide may be demonstrated in visible ways, but very likely it will be more subtle, quieter. This kind of love and humility will be noticeable, but somewhat covertly. It will often be the kind of thing that people notice but can’t quite put their finger on. This difference looks something like the man Jesus points out to his disciples, described for us in Luke 18: 

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you,” said Jesus, “this man went down to his house justified rather than the other (Luke 18:13-14). 

One nineteenth-century bishop said boldly, “The beginning of the way to heaven, is to feel that we are on the way to hell, and to be willing to be taught of the Spirit.” Listen to how theologian John Henry Newman (1801-1890)  ruminates on this question:

… how is our devotion to Christ shown? Ordinarily, not in great matters, not in giving up house and lands for His sake, but in making little sacrifices which the world would ridicule, if it knew of them; in abridging ourselves of comforts for the sake of the poor, in sacrificing our private likings to religious objects, in going to Church at a personal inconvenience, in taking pleasure in the [company of those] not rich, or noble, or accomplished, or gifted, or entertaining…

How is self-denial shown? Not in literally bearing Christ's Cross, and living on locusts and wild honey, but in such light abstinences as come in our way, in some poor efforts at fasting and the like, in desiring to be poor rather than rich, solitary or lowly rather than well-connected, in living within our income, in avoiding display, in being suspicious of comforts and luxuries; all of which are too [small] for the person observing them to think about, yet have their use in proving and improving his heart.

How is Christian valour shown? Not in resisting unto blood, but in withstanding mistaken kindness, in enduring [insults], in not shrinking from surprising and hurting those we love, in undergoing little losses, inconveniences, censures, slights, rather than betray what we believe to be God's Truth, be it ever so small a portion of it.

How do we do this? I’ll be honest and say it’s not easy; Jesus tells us the way is, in fact, quite narrow. One beginning in real humility—which arises out of real love for God—is to ask for both of these things. We must ask God to give us grace to love Him and we must ask God to give us humility, to even give us a desire to be humble. Honestly ask yourself: do you really wish to be humble? do you wish that others would increase and you would decrease? My mind doesn’t naturally think this way, which is why I must ask God again and again that he would put it in my heart. 

A second way we can seek out true religion, a faith that rests on humility and love, is to offer to God our “rights” to things. This language is common all over the place: we have a right to happiness and a right to privacy. We cannot separate this from being an American. But do we really have a right to such things? Listen to how Newman turns around this notion of having “rights” to things on its head and shows us where this leads (and I’ll change the example from a Brit to an American):

We have “a strange notion that it is an [American’s] right to think what he will, and do what he will... 

Nay, it is the right of the whole world, not ours alone; it is the attribute of all rational beings to have a right to do wrong, if they will. Yet, after all, there is but one right way, and there [are] a hundred wrong ways. You may do as you will; but the first who exercised that right was the devil when he fell; and every one of us, when he does this or that in matters between himself and his God, merely because he wills it, and not for conscience' sake, is (so far) following the devil's pattern.

What we need, then, is God to work in us. But God will not force surgery on us. We must come freely to the Physician. We must beg him for what only He can give, to do what only he can do, to grace us as only God can act. Before my daughter’s heart surgery, her godparents sent a beautiful icon of Jesus’ heart of love with these few lines from an anonymous, fourteenth-century poem:

Jesus, thou hast me dearly bought;

    Write now ghostly in my thought

    That I may with devotion deep

    My thoughts on your dear Passion keep:

    For though my heart is hard as stone,

    Yet may you ghostly write thereon—

    Re-write with nail and spear so keen

    So that your Letter may be seen.

The Rev. Dr. Matthew S. C. Olver is assistant professor of liturgics and pastoral theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.