What Do You Expect? 6/1/25

My name is Steve, and I’ve been a member here for several years. I’m happy to go through these three parables with you.

When I was a kid, Saturday morning cartoons were a thing. Now I know they’re not a thing today, when you can have pretty much every cartoon ever made in your pocket and carry it around with you. But when I was kid, it was a Saturday morning ritual: you’d sit down for a couple hours and watch cartoons. I especially liked the Bugs Bunny cartoons. There you go. I admired the writing. I actually did. There’s one clip that stuck with me. Bugs and Daffy are competing against each other in an early version of a reality TV contest. Whoever makes it to the TV station downtown first will get what they expect to be a valuable prize. After some literal bumps and bruises, Bugs and Daffy race neck-and-neck in the final stretch. Take a look.

They expect a million “bucks,” but it turns out it’s a “million box,” which seems pretty worthless— until they find that it is, after all, a million dollars. They’re whipsawed back and forth by their expectations. They expect one thing, and they get another, and then another.

When I was a kid (maybe it was during the commercials from some of those cartoons), sometimes I’d find a cup on the kitchen counter that had in it what looked to me like chocolate milk. I’d drink it and immediately know that it was my mother’s coffee with cream from the day before. I was expecting chocolate milk, but that’s not what I got.

When you expect one thing and get another, we call it irony. Irony is something you learn about in literature class because a lot of authors use irony. But it’s more than just a literary device.

A couple of weeks ago, Peter said that we need to see the world through “kingdom eyes.” But to see a world with kingdom eyes, you have to know what the kingdom looks like, and it may not be what you expect. There’s an irony to the kingdom of God.

Several years ago, the author, Os Guinness, wrote a book talking about how the church interacts with the world, and in it he said:

“Irony, in short, is not merely a subject for writers or cultural commentators; it is a key part of the Christian understanding of life.”

We need this sense of kingdom irony to find out what really matters in our lives as believers. Without it, we may be fooled into thinking that the great prize of the kingdom is just a bunch of empty promises, and we’ll miss the real treasure inside.

In the three short parables in our passage today, and really in all of Matthew 13, Jesus tells his followers what to expect in the Kingdom of God. In fact, you could say that the entire book of Matthew, by showing what Jesus says and what he does, is setting our expectations for the kingdom. Jesus wants his followers to know what to expect.

Let’s take a look at these three parables in Matthew 13:44-50, and see how they teach us what to expect as we follow Jesus in the kingdom.

Jesus begins the parable in verse 44, the same way he begins many of the parables in Matthew 13.

“The kingdom of heaven is like…”

So the first thing we need to talk about is, what is the Kingdom of Heaven?

First, the Kingdom of Heaven is just another way of saying the Kingdom of God. They’re the same idea. Either way, “the Kingdom of God” is something that sounds sort of mystical to us, like something from a fantasy novel. But I think these parables are written in such a way to get us to see the kingdom as something more immediate and real.

Peter and Andy defined the Kingdom of God as the “multi-dimensional reign of God through Jesus.” And that’s a good definition. It gets at some of the subtleties of the way the “Kingdom of God” is used in Scripture. But I’m going to give you an even shorter definition that you can keep in your hip pocket and pull out whenever this topic comes up:

The Kingdom of God is where what God wants gets done.

Think of how Jesus taught us to pray back in Matthew 6.

“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

The Kingdom of God is God’s working out his will on earth over time through Jesus. In these parables in chapter 13, Jesus is telling us what God wants and how he works so we know what to expect in the Kingdom of God.

These three parables near the end of Matthew 13 are a part of a set of eight parables that Matthew arranges in chapter 13 to tell us what to expect when the kingdom breaks through into the world.

The parable of the sower introduces the whole chapter, and then there are three pairs of similar parables. The first pair is broken up: the wheat and the weeds near the start, and the net near the end. The other two pairs are together. The mustard seed and the leaven that Andy talked about last week, and then the hidden treasure and the pearl that we’ll talk about this week, along with the net. So let’s look at our first parable for today, the hidden treasure.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44a).

This is a simple little parable. A man happens to find hidden treasure in a field and sells all that he has to buy the field and the treasure hidden in it.

The parable is simple, and we should keep the lesson of the parable simple too. In other words, we shouldn’t try to read too much into it. Like, did the seller know that the treasure was in the field? And if not, should the buyer have told him about it? When it comes to understanding a parable, it’s best to stick with the big ideas.

So in this parable, what are the big ideas about the Kingdom of Heaven?

First, it’s a treasure — something valuable. In fact, it is so valuable that the man cleans out his accounts to buy it. In other words, what God wants is more valuable than anything we want. In fact, what God wants is more valuable than everything we have and do and hold dear.

But in this parable, the kingdom is not just a treasure, it’s also hidden. Not everyone sees it. That’s important. Because Jesus could have compared the kingdom to something big and obviously valuable. For us, it would be like the crown jewels or Fort Knox. But he tells us this treasure is hidden.

One commentator explains that,

“Something of tremendous worth can be present and yet not known to others who may have frequently traversed the same field. Similarly, the kingdom can be present and yet not perceived, because its present form does not overwhelm the world or overcome resistance to it” (Donald Hagner).

So there are two ideas here that stand in tension with each other in this story — and that’s the irony. The Kingdom of Heaven is worth everything, but it’s hidden, not obvious. Most people would walk right past it. What God wants is not a grand overpowering display, at least as far as the way we see it.

Let’s keep going and see how these lessons come out in the parable of the pearl, which is the twin parable to the hidden treasure.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Matthew 13:45).

In this parable, Jesus compares the kingdom to a merchant looking for pearls. When he finds just one, not a bag full, but just one pearl of exceptional value, he too sells everything he has to buy it.

This parable has the same big ideas as the hidden treasure. The kingdom is more valuable than anything else. And, although not hidden in this story, the kingdom is small, easily overlooked, unless you’re searching for it and recognize its value. So again, the kingdom is smaller but priceless.

Think about these two parables for a minute. The Kingdom of God — that is, what God does and how he works — may not announce itself with a trumpet fanfare and fireworks. God’s work may go unnoticed. This is the irony: that something so great would be found in something so small.

This is what Andy showed us last week when he talked about the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven: these small things are hidden or veiled, yet they grow big and bring big results and visible results.

Let’s look at the third parable for our passage today: the net.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw the bad away. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 13:47-50).

This parable is different from the hidden treasure of the pearl, but it should sound familiar because it has many of the same elements as the wheat and the weeds that Peter talked about a couple of weeks ago. In that parable, the wheat and the weeds (the good and the bad) grew together until they were sorted out at the harvest.

In this story, fishermen use a large dragnet to catch all the fish they can. Some are good to eat, but others aren’t. They’re all caught together until the fishermen sit down and sort their catch. They toss the valuable fish into a basket and toss the bad into the garbage.

Jesus’s explanation of this parable is pretty much the same as the wheat and the weeds. The sorting of the fish, like the harvest of the wheat in the weeds, is God’s final judgment. Angels will separate the righteous from the evil and will throw the evil into the fire.

What are the big ideas of this parable? Although the valuable fish aren’t hidden in this parable, they’re not obvious until they’re sorted out. The good and the bad, the worthy and the worthless, the righteous and the evil all swim together until the final sorting. The differences may not be obvious today, but God will make them plain. In other words, if you expect what God wants to completely overtake all evil right away, you’ll be disappointed. We can be sure of God’s judgment, yes, that he’ll sort out the evil from the righteous, but today, the good and evil all swim together in the same world. And it may be confusing to see how God works.

In these three short stories, Jesus is telling us what to expect when we follow him. Doing what God wants is more valuable than anything else, but it will not always look the way we expect. It may not always be obvious. The Kingdom of God may not appear as pure and pristine as we expect. There may not be grand signs and neon arrows pointing us to what’s really valuable. But if we listen humbly to what Jesus says, and if we follow closely in his footsteps, we will find the treasure of his kingdom.

If you think about it, the irony of God’s kingdom and the unexpected ways he works are not something we haven’t heard before. God teaches us this lesson over and over again throughout Scripture.

Think of Joseph. Joseph’s jealous brothers sold him into slavery, but God used him to save his family from a famine.

The Philistine’s great champion, Goliath of Gath, was felled by a spindly, harp-playing shepherd boy with five stones and a homemade sling.

When Naaman, the mighty Syrian general, sought a cure for his leprosy from God’s prophet Elisha, he was at first put off by Elisha’s instruction to bathe seven times in the muddy Jordan River. There were so many bigger and cleaner rivers back in Syria. But when he did as Elisha instructed,

“his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean” (2 Kings 5:14).

Over and over again in the Old Testament, through stories like these and through his prophets, God repeats the blessed irony that his kingdom comes

“not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

Then, in the New Testament, when we come to Matthew’s gospel. Jesus’ inaugural Sermon on the Mount begins with an ironic prologue:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are meek, … those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, … the merciful, … the pure in heart, … the peacemakers, … the persecuted…” (Matthew 5:3–12).

Things that seem small and weak in this world are blessed in the Kingdom of God.

Later in that same sermon, Jesus lays out the ironic paths to death and life:

“The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those that find it are few” (Matthew 7:13–1).

But wait. There’s more irony in Matthew.

“Whoever would save his life will lose it—”

Think of it this way.

“Whoever [expects to] save his life will lose it, but whoever [expects to lose] his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

“Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18: 4).

“Whoever [expects to] be great among you must be your servant, and whoever [expects to] be first among you must be your slave” (Matthew 20:26–27).

Paul picks up these ideas and continues with them.

“Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; … what is weak … to shame the strong; … what is low and despised …, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:26–28).

Paul says

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

“For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).

By the wonder of this blessed irony, the Scriptures teach us that the kingdom is weak but strong, small but large, lost but found, hidden but valuable, old but new, priceless yet not for sale, already but not yet.

We can see the irony in these parables and throughout Scripture. But why do we need to have this sense of irony ourselves? Go back to the quotation from Os Guinness that we looked at at the beginning.

“Irony, in short, is not merely a subject for writers or cultural commentators; it is a key part of the Christian understanding of life” (Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil).

Why is irony a key part of a Christian understanding of life? I can think of a couple of big reasons.

First, we need this sense of irony because we’re easily distracted by big, shiny objects and can end up missing the hidden treasures of God’s kingdom. To put it another way, what God wants is not necessarily the big and the bold and the popular. We may be tempted to substitute grand, but empty displays for kingdom work. We need to know that the kingdom of God is often in little things and small actions.

The harvest in the parable of the wheat and the weeds and the sorting of the fish in the parable of the net both represent the final judgment that Jesus talks about more in Matthew 25. There Jesus describes the judgment as separating the sheep from the goats, that is the righteous from the unrighteous. He welcomes the righteous into his kingdom, which at that time will be a physical kingdom that you can see. Jesus tells the righteous that their citizenship in the kingdom has already been proven by what they had done.

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35-36).

Now the righteous aren’t exactly sure what the King is talking about here.

“Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:37-40).

Here again is the irony of the hidden kingdom, because not even God’s own children always know when they’re doing kingdom work. The things that God wants are so small, so routine, so mundane that we often don’t think they’re worth remembering. But they are the stuff of God’s eternal kingdom.

We need a sense of irony to keep from being distracted by big things, but we also need this sense of irony to see the importance of small things because we are small.

I know a young woman—a sincere, thoughtful young woman—who years ago had as part of her social media handle the name “God-follower.” She was committed to God and his service, but she suffered disappointments and betrayals and turned away from her faith. Now, part of her social media handle is “speck on a speck.”

I’ve never talked to her about that name, but I think to her it points to an almost comforting insignificance. Since we’re no more than a speck of life on a speck of a planet in a speck of a galaxy, we really don’t mean much, and we shouldn’t bother convincing ourselves that we matter.

But God loves specks like us. Jesus died for us specks. And what’s more, the Kingdom of God is made up of specks like us, and it’s built by the little speck movements we make each day. A small and hidden kingdom is for small and hidden people. The irony of the kingdom is made up of two truths that appear to contradict each other.

First, the Kingdom of Heaven is more important than anything else.

But second, the kingdom doesn’t always look more important than everything else.

To say it another way, what God wants is the most important thing for us, but what God wants may not look so important to us.

If we don’t hold on to both these truths at the same time, we may end up missing what’s important to God. If we latch onto the first truth (that the kingdom is important) and forget the second (that the Kingdom appears small), we’ll be disappointed when we discover that the kingdom lacks the grandeur we expected.

We may reject the kingdom outright as a cosmic bait-and-switch. Or we may try to remake it into something more like what we expected, something befitting a king. We may try to gussy up the kingdom and make it look all rich and powerful, even though God blesses the poor and the meek.

If we remember only the second truth, that the kingdom is small, and forget that it’s most important, we’ll treat it as a trifle, an option, or an inconvenience. We’ll miss the opportunity to do kingdom work in our smallest chores.

Think back to the cartoon clip that we watched at the beginning. Daffy Duck was expecting a million bucks — something big, important, and valuable. But when he saw that it was a million box, he gave it away because he thought it was worthless. But even though it looked unimportant to him, it was in fact the prize he had been chasing. We need to remember this irony of the kingdom so we don’t miss the prize God has for us.

Given the parables and all that we’ve seen, what should we expect from the kingdom of God? I can give you six things to expect, and you can mull them over and talk about them.

First, expect the long game, not immediate results. The stories of the wheat and the weeds and the fishing net tell us that right now, the good and evil are mixed up side by side. It’s hard to see the kingdom of God, but judgment will come. God is still at work. We must be patient, as Peter said a couple of weeks ago.

Now patience is hard for everyone, but for us Americans who expect fast food and fast fashion delivered fast to our front door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free, waiting can be hard. It’s hard to wait for God to set things right. We ask, “Why do the wicked prosper?” And “why do bad things happen to good people?” “Look at all the evil fish swimming around in the world.” But God’s work is still going on, though we may not see it. As we saw in Psalm 37:10 two weeks ago,

“In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.”

The seeds of grace that you plant in the kingdom today will in just a little while (counted in kingdom time) bear much fruit, like the little mustard seed. And in just a little while the investments of mercy that you make today will yield a prosperous return.

So in the Kingdom of God, we should expect the long game, and we should also expect humility. Because the kingdom works in ways we don’t expect and we don’t understand, there’s a lot about it we don’t know. So a sense of kingdom irony should make us humble. We should be humble because,

just “as [we] do not know the way the Spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so [we] do not know the work of God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5).

We should be humble because we don’t know which of our simple efforts God will use to build his kingdom. We should be humble because whatever fruit comes from the little seeds we plant comes not from our efforts but by the grace of God.

Expect the long game, expect humility, and expect a mess. Sometimes the kingdom of God can look pretty messy. Last week Andy showed us how the kingdom of God is growing, but sometimes it doesn’t look like a direct straight line up and to the right. Just ask the apostle Paul. He had to deal with a lot of messes.

“…danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from other people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers” (2 Corinthians 11:26).

In the kingdom, there will be setbacks and reversals, splits and shutdowns, opposition and defections, and maybe a few misfits and weirdos thrown in for good measure. God is building his kingdom in spite of all of that, and maybe through all of them.

Maybe the mess is something you made yourself. You blew something up and don’t see anything good left in the rubble. God is working through that.

Expect the long game, humility, a mess, but also expect more. We can expect that God is always doing something more. More than we see, more than we understand, and more than can hope for.

My daughter, Molly, wrote about this in one of her updates from Poland a few years ago when she was teaching there. What she wrote stuck with me. She said,

“I want to highlight one thought that I’ve kept with me for the last few years, since I worked at Woodlands camp in 2012. I remember it was the first week of junior camp and the speaker talked about how God is always doing something more than we can see. I don’t remember the text or really anything else about the sermon, but I just remember that one phrase— God is always doing something more. God is doing something even when we don’t understand the circumstances in our lives. He is doing something more when we feel stale, unusable, and tired. He is even doing something more when we choose our own way instead of his. Despite what we feel or what we can see, he is doing something more. He sees the big picture, and he is ordering it according to his perfect plan.”

We should also expect surprises because God is always doing something more. Despite our messes and our impatience, we can expect him to surprise us sometimes with glimpses of his kingdom.

The 18th-century poet and hymn writer William Cowper wrote about it this way:

“Sometimes a light surprises
God’s children when they sing;
It is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings;
When comforts are declining,
He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining
To cheer it after rain.”

I can think of one final thing we should expect in the kingdom of God, and it will most likely sound odd and unsettling to you. In the kingdom of God, we should expect death. That sounds wrong. That’s not what we would expect. But in John’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

Jesus is talking about the greatest irony of the kingdom: God sending his only Son to die.

Both Peter and Andy told us in the last couple of weeks that the Jews expected the Messiah to come as a mighty king, with all the majestic trappings, but he came as a baby in a working-class family from the wrong side of the tracks, born with livestock and straw.

“He had no form or majesty that we should look on him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2).

When Jesus began to preach the message of the kingdom, it was not aimed against the Roman occupiers as some Jews expected, nor did he teach the strict religious rules that the conservatives expected.

“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

And then he died, willingly.

“Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter … although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7, 9).

The holy and mighty King died so that we might live.

“Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities” (Isaiah 53:11).

And when he died, as Andy pointed out last week, his disciples must have felt like they were stuck with a worthless pile of empty boxes. But God’s irony grew even deeper because, the very next day, Jesus rose from the dead to bring death to death itself.

They expected a glorious King, but they got a baby who grew and died. They thought they had nothing, when in fact they had everything. The king who died and rose again is the irony we must always remember.

Jesus himself gave us a simple tradition to help us remember this irony. On the night before Jesus died, he had dinner with his disciples and he took a simple piece of bread and compared it to his body broken for us and a cup of common wine and compared to his blood shed for us.

In a few moments, some folks are going to come up here and pass out some small pieces of bread and small cups of juice to commemorate Jesus’ last supper with his disciples.

As they pass out the bread and the juice, if you’ve accepted God’s gift of life through Jesus’ death, then we encourage you to take the bread and the juice with us together once you all have them. If you’ve not received Jesus’ gift of life, then just pass them by. No one will think ill of you.

Jesus told us to repeat this simple ceremony to help us remember the greatest irony of all: that the King of Kings died for us, to teach us small, weak, and humble creatures to expect God’s kingdom in the smallest parts of our lives.