Open Your Eyes And See
Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.
Matthew 13:12
One sad thing I see in the interpretation of Matthew 13 is a large branch of thinking that rationalizes that Jesus was saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is somehow corrupt, not holy, or not pure. Because of lack of understanding, or partial revelation (which we all must deal with — 1 Corinthians 13:9), many have assumed the Jesus meant somehow that the Kingdom of Heaven was itself divided.
In the case of Matthew 13, most of the parables start with the phrase “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”. The Kingdom is likened to 7 things. Some see believe that because they cannot find a species of mustard plant that grows from a very small seed into a large tree, that Jesus must have been implying some abnormal growth. In addition, with parables such as the leaven which a woman hid, they assume that because in MOST of the references to the leaven in the Old Covenant are a reference to sin, and that sin was outlawed in most of the sacrifices, that Jesus obviously couldn’t be saying that the Kingdom was like leaven. However, Jesus also plainly said in John’s gospel that unless you ate His flesh and drank His blood, you would have no life in you (John 6:53), a highly detestable practice in Jewish custom. In the course of Jesus’ teachings, the fact that the image was abhorrent because of misunderstanding did not seem to matter to Jesus.
