Waiting (Just Waiting?) for the Kingdom

Matthew 13:33

He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 1)

Jesus wanted his followers to live with the tension of believing that the kingdom was indeed arriving in and through his own work, and that this kingdom would come, would fully arrive, not all in a bang but through a process like the slow growth of a plant or the steady leavening of a loaf.

When today we long for God to act, to put the world to rights, we must remind ourselves that he has already done so, and that what we are now awaiting is the full outworking of those events. We wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come with a lighted candle, but like people in early morning who know that the sun has arisen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday (170).

A. Orendorff

Tom Petty was right, “The waiting is the hardest part.” Like leaven, wheat or a mustard seed, the kingdom of God advances slowly, methodically and at times imperceptibly. Yet for all of its lethargy, the kingdom is, as Jesus’ stresses here in Matthew 13, irrepressible. It advances with a power far out of proportion to its speed.

Our “tension,” as citizens of this kingdom, is found in recognizing that we are a people fundamentally “in-between”—in-between, as Wright so eloquently puts it, the dawn and noonday sun. The kingdom is here . . . the kingdom is coming. The kingdom is now . . . the kingdom is not yet. We are a people caught between two worlds—the first, which pressing in on us with relentless force and potency, is (in John's words) “passing away”; the other, which breaks in with fits and starts, is only now coming into being. We are (despite the discomfort) a waiting people.

Yet we are not to wait as others do. Our waiting is to be marked by a joyful anxiety that acts out in tangible forms God’s impending future in the here-and-now.