Description
Lectionary reflections - Year A
Ordinary Time
Proper 12
1 Kings 3.5–12
Romans 8.26–39
Matthew 13.31–33, 44–52
With this piling up of images of the kingdom, I think you need first of all to listen to them and get an overall feel, and then to start trying to tease out some of the puzzles. After all, those who heard the stories in the first place could not have sat down and read and reread them, but a good story makes you go on thinking for ages afterwards. Clearly, the crowds who followed Jesus everywhere he went did so at
least partly for the stories. Who knows how they told and retold them, for years afterwards, as we still do?
So, first impressions? Unpredictability and excitement. Small things, that only one or two people know about, that suddenly swell and take over the world. Beautiful and incredibly valuable things that you come across by accident and can’t live without.
The two sets of parables seem initially to lead in slightly different directions. The mustard seed and the yeast are everyday miracles. Everyone knows how they work, and how extraordinary it is that something so small can have such an effect...
Taken from Lectionary reflections year A by Jane Williams - Published by SPCK