If you are an archaeologist what people throw away is often the most interesting thing you can dig up. Walls and temples are all very well, but people’s rubbish tells you how people lived. Now, there is no rubbish,of course in the Bible, but there are many throwaway remarks, and they can be really illuminating too. Our Gospel reading today begins with one such throwaway remark ‘Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying ‘The Kingdom of heaven may be compared to a King’. This introduction tells us so much. It tells us how Jesus habitually taught, that it was by telling stories or parables, and it tells us what the content of these stories usually was, what was the theme of most of Jesus’ teaching, the Kingdom of God. If we look at the Gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew we can see that Jesus parables are, again and again, little illustrations of what the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven is like. In St John’s Gospel the emphasis is different - Jesus teaches about himself, and his mission from God his Father, but in the other three Gospels, not so. Jesus avoids talking about himself as far as he can, even using the mysterious phrase ‘Son of Man’ about himself. Instead Jesus teaches about the kingdom, the Kingdom of God. 

In our minds kingdoms have territory and borders and flags and royal families and histories. You can point at a kingdom on a map and say ‘there it is’. With the Kingdom of God you can’t do that. Yet the parable we heard this morning tells us that the stakes are high. An invitation to the Kingdom has gone out from God and we have been invited. We need to know where we have been invited and by who, so that we don’t miss the opportunity, so that we don’t miss the party God is calling us to. So we need to understand what Jesus means by the Kingdom of God as he teaches his listeners. And we need to do some detective work. The writer and journalist Rudyard Kipling once wrote:

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

And apparently that’s just how Kipling worked as a journalist. He kept asking ‘but what...but why… when, how, where and who? Until he got the answers he was looking for. He wore out the people he was asking with his questions. We can’t do much better than ask the same questions of Jesus as he speaks about God’s Kingdom. But we are going to change the order a bit. 

The first question we need to ask is ‘What is the Kingdom, and where?’ We’ve already seen that it isn’t territory you can look at on a map or in a guide book. It doesn’t have a flag, or a capital city, or a gross domestic product like lands and countries have. The Kingdom of God is God’s rule, any place and any time where the rule of God is recognised as the most important thing, the thing from which everything else flows. That can be the laws a country is governed by, or the authority of elected presidents and prime-ministers  hold, or the set of values that we each of us try to live by day by day. Jesus’ parables often show people in conflict with the rule of God, keen to ignore it, like the guests invited to the wedding feast because it is uncomfortably different from their own interests. So too the tenants in the vineyard reject the demand of the owner for his rent, they beat up everyone who comes to collect his dues and finally plot together to kill the owner’s son who will inherit the vineyard. It’s not hard to hear the story of the whole Bible in that little parable - God sends the prophets, in wave after wave, and they are not listened to, they are abused, beaten and killed. Finally God has sent his Son Jesus. Rather than coming smartly to their senses at this astonishing gift for the sake of the world, the God’s people, who should know better, will abuse and kill him. Jesus comes to bring us back into the embrace of God, back to obedience to his laws, back to his Kingdom, but it’s at great risk. High stakes again. Will we accept him or reject him?

The next question we might ask is ‘Who is the Kingdom?’ - Bit of a strange question that, but we need to ask it. At the beginning of Mark’s Gospel Jesus stands up and proclaims ‘The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God has drawn near, repent and believe the Good News’. When he says that the Kingdom of God has drawn near the word Jesus uses is so odd that it would be better if we translated it ‘has drawn near, and already is here’.  St Paul is making the same point in the reading we heard from Philippians ‘The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything.’ Because Jesus is here, the Kingdom of God has dawned. Everywhere where Jesus has yet to come, the Kingdom is still on its way. Jesus embodies the Kingdom, and just as we can say that to look at Jesus is to understand God, so to learn from him and to copy him is to live in the Kingdom. Now, not just in the future, not just when we get to Heaven. St Matthew, whose Gospel we are listening to this year says the same thing in a slightly different way. For him Jesus is to be compared with Moses. Just as Moses brought down the tablets of stone from the mountain with the words of the Law written on them, so Jesus delivers to us the new law, the new covenant or new testament. If we follow the law that he brings and teaches we will be living in the Kingdom of God, or as Matthew calls it, the Kingdom of Heaven. Like Jewish writers of the time he doesn’t want to use or misuse God’s name, so he writes about the Kingdom of Heaven. But it is the same thing.

Then we ought to ask ‘When and how is the Kingdom?’ and it's these two questions that probably take up most of Jesus’ parables. You see, the Kingdom grows by little increments, like a seed growing in a field. You can’t necessarily look at it and see what has changed since you last looked at it. Jesus wasn’t talking, it seems about bamboo. Some species of bamboo can grow more than 1ft in 24 hours. You’d notice the change with bamboo. But the way the Kingdom draws on is imperceptible and it happens in small acts of kindness, little proofs of obedience to God, small demonstrations of changed hearts and minds that we are surrounded by day by day. In Luke 17 Jesus warns us against people who come pointing at signs or omens that the Kingdom has come. They have missed the real presence of the Kingdom:

Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is, or ‘There it is. For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst.’ So the Kingdom’s coming that we pray for every time we pray the Lord’s prayer is not dramatic though it is longed for. Go out into the world, into the community and look for yourselves for the Kingdom coming. You may even be part of the way it comes.

And then we need to ask ‘Why is the kingdom?’ God’s world is a good world, but it is corrupted by the intentions of human beings. Human beings are part of that good world, but their abuse of the freedom that God has given has made them cruel and exploiting, careless and heartless. Even the best of us struggle with our desire to be noticed and praised when we do good ’Look at me’ is a very understandable, very human, and very sinful thing to think, and we think it all the time.  No human empire, kingdom or political philosophy has ever come near to the perfect peace, mercy and justice that God requires of us. Lots of empires, kingdoms and systems have been declared in the name of God, but all too soon the real agenda of great wealth and great power has become evident. Human life needs to be redeemed, just as much as each of us as individual human beings needs to be redeemed. The Kingdom of God breaks into our lives and our society to challenge, judge, replace and  sometimes, just sometimes to reinforce what we think and hold to be important.

Once we have asked these questions What, Where, Who, when, how and why we realise the high stakes of the game we are invited to play as members (and we can be) of the Kingdom of God. Our Gospel reading today speaks of those who don’t recognise the stakes, the importance of what they are invited to. In one way their negligence creates opportunities for others - God turns from those who he has always invited to be with him, his people of old, and turns instead to instead to the poor, unlovely, the lost. He turns to us, in other words, and invites us to be part of the party, part of the Kingdom. But, just as God’s people of old couldn’t take his favour for granted, nor can we. One guest who came to the wedding feast from the last trawl through the streets and hedges comes, but without a wedding garment. ‘Of course’, you’ll say, ‘he wasn’t expecting to be invited, it would be unfair to expect him to be washed, dressed and ready to come in a moment’ That guest is meant to represent us, and our need to be  ready. The season of Trinity is drawing to its close and it will soon be Advent, a season which is all about being ready to welcome Christ when he comes. Are we ready and expectant to be welcomed into his Kingdom which is coming and is already here, if he is here. For he is here, in scripture, in us his body, in gifts of bread and wine, as we shall celebrate once again in this wonderful sacrament of the Mass.  Amen