“I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” -Matthew 13:35

Observe with astuteness that Christ is always saying “the kingdom of heaven is like…” and not “the kingdom of heaven is…” 

“… like a mustard seed.”

“…Like leaven in bread.”

“…like a seed being sown.” 

Every time we remove the word ‘like’ from our minds, when we cease to meditate on that one simple word, we make the kingdom smaller. We are often limiting the story to only being one story and not the whole of all stories. Christ is the all in all.

“The kingdom of god is…”

Is what? 

Many metaphors are used in scripture to describe the likeness of Christ and his Good News. 

A legal metaphor.

A familial metaphor.

A warring metaphor.

Such is the Gospel compared to.

A lion.

A lamb.

Such is Christ imagined as.

But let us remember that by saying Christ is a lamb that we are implicitly stating that He is NOT a lamb. He shares a certain likeness, a higher reality that unites Himself to a certain spirit represented in and by the lamb, but not the lamb itself. Heaven and Earth meet in the marriage of the God-Man, Second Triune Person, the All in All, and the lamb. Likewise, the Gospel could be likened to the court drama (often we are forgetting this one is a metaphor and not the whole story, or even really the story at all), a war, or a romance. We cannot stoop to saying such trite things as “just metaphor” or calling spiritual truths “watered down from the literal.” Watered down? Do you see the demeaning? Can you understand the leveling of value into nothingness by such statements? The heavenly truth is above and the earthly truth below. It is not as if Christ did not say “my kingdom is not of this world.” If it is not of this world then we cannot expect the words of this world to contain Him. Imagine if all the world clamored for a nuclear physicist to use “plain English.” If our exemplary scientist were asked to use only math and terms of a high-school level to explain all that he is doing. He would soon be explaining something that was not at all nuclear physics. He would be explaining something approximating nuclear physics to a less intelligent and less educated audience. Now imagine he were forced to talk and act like this all the time, that he were even asked to never think at a level beyond this. He would demean his craft and the very nature of his skill until it was destroyed. This is happening to us all around. At some point religion requires religious language. We cannot think we can use nonreligious words at all times and arrive at the same place religion asks us to go, for our words affect our thoughts and shape them. In the same vein, the genre or story which we choose to think of the Gospel as, affects the very nature of our participation in the Gospel. So let us imagine the story as grand as possible, as enormous as comprehendible, as spectacular, heroic, inspiring, as the greatest of storytellers could ever create. Christ is asking us to go beyond worlds, let us not restrict Him by thinking we have figured him out with mere words.

When Christ speaks to us of not living by bread alone what he meant was not that we “just” needed to add fish and grapes and figs to our diet. No, he wished us to eat of the heavenly bread. If anything, it is to water down the scriptures when we read them only “literally”. For the truth is higher than forensic facts or causal history. Do not separate meaning from matter. It is not to water down the scriptures by seeking meaning, it is indeed the holy purpose of all that is earthly to find the heavenly.

The words of scripture must be spiritual truth and not bread alone. Christ and his Gospel must not be confined to one small sort of story that we could tell in twenty minutes or even two hours. Indeed it took Him three and a half and even then He was still explaining and revealing it to His disciples in hidden rooms and on long journeys after His death and resurrection. We would do well to imagine ourselves always as the bewildered ones on the road to Emaus and in doing so not become the murdering pharisees.

Imagine I were to tell a mystery story. I plot out the twists and the turns. I give you a murder victim and multiple suspects. If in the end the story is resolved not by the solving of the murder but by a marriage as in the comedies of Shakespeare, you would be sorely disappointed. But so often we are disappointed by the marriage of the Gospel because we are looking for our own smaller stories. When we tell The Story we often choose to do so by reducing it down to its parts and thinking that is enough. Like dissecting and taking apart the whole bloody thing, and thinking we can stitch up together the truth when in reality we have only created a Frankenstein’s Monster of the truth. We are walking around telling the story of a zombie, not the Logos become flesh! Indeed, it is unsurprising one such man and many after him declared “God is dead” we told a story in which he was!

We must with dire reverence remember that a people perish without vision. I would venture that there is no vision with story. When exiles wander in the wilderness they find guidance from Moses and Elijah and Christ Himself. They find vision in the patterns of realities which tell them burning bushes do exist. That ravens do bring food in times of need. That temptations can be won and that exile is not eternal.

So let us tell the true myth, the story that contains all other facts and histories and myths. And let us remember that there is something beyond it which no container can quite comprehend.

Christ has revealed to us through his story the mysteries of the cosmos, not merely a punch card to heaven or a moral truth. Or else why is the divine radiance revealed not in another Ten Commandments? Because we have received a truth better than stone: a living truth of flesh. The logos become flesh. A story become history become myth.

“Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth.” - C.S. Lewis