As I look back over my life, I have had dealings with several groups of twins.  From grade school even into my adult life, I have known well either one or both members of a set of twins.  For the most part, they’re just like you or me with the exception of a known doppelganger when it comes to identical twins.  What’s been funny to note in all my dealings with twins is how similar, or dissimilar twins can be at any given time.  Of course, there are identical twins which look exactly like one another and fraternal twins, twins that aren’t spitting images of the other. 

  The reason I open with reflecting on twins a bit is that this morning we’re going to look at twin parables.  Well, these aren’t so much parables although they’re considered such as they are extended analogies.  That is to say that there’s no story in this particular set of parables, like there has been with the parable of the sower or the parable of the prodigal son, for example.  But these extended analogies do a lot to advance our understanding of the Kingdom of God.  That’s an important thing to us and we shouldn’t miss the immediacy with which we talk about the Kingdom.  Some of us may wrongly assume that the Kingdom of God exists somewhere off over the horizon, in some far-off time which we likely won’t see while we’re alive.  For lack of better words, they think of the Kingdom as heaven, which it will be, but that necessarily omits the immediacy that the Kingdom presents itself here and now.  That’s the fullness of the Kingdom but the declaration the Bible makes is that the Kingdom arrived in the person of Jesus Christ and is now here, albeit in a small and growing fashion.  Jesus Christ brought the Kingdom, in a way, IS the kingdom and it is here with us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  This isn’t the only time the Bible uses multiple parables in order to extend a point.  There are the parables of the treasure and the pearl which we did in one of the early weeks in this series on the parables.  Those are another example of stacking parables which help illuminate something deep for us.  In the Old Testament, we see something similar in the dreams of the cupbearer and beadmaker dealing with fat and skinny cows.   That is to say that this is a Biblical convention, stacking short stories or analogies to help fully develop points that are being made.  In order to fully understand these parables intent, it helps to look backwards in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew and locate the parables within the original material. 

  The chapter opens with the parable of the sower.  We talked about that particular parable a few weeks ago so I’ll assume that it’s fresh in your mind.  There, we talked about how the seed is sowed but the growth depends on the soil type.  Remember, we talked about what your soil type may presently be?  If you’re really living for Jesus, it might be the best soil ever but if you’re distracted by the cares of the world, the Word may not be so fruitful.  But think about that particular parable.  Only one in four is going to understand what Jesus is talking about according to the parable.

  The next thing that’s talked about in the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew is the parable of the weeds and the tares.  I haven’t done that one nor, considering this is the final week I’ll be in the parables, is it likely that I’ll do so in this go-round.  But in that parable, what Jesus tells us is that right alongside the wheat, Satan has come and planted weeds.  But, interestingly, we ourselves are not to pull up the weeds, lest we accidentally get some wheat by mistake.  That God will sort out the wheat from the chaff in the end of days, that’s what we’re told.  And while both of these parables make some positive points, they also can be kind of depressing.  After all, no matter what, only 25% are going to get it.  Further, that amid the growing wheat will be weeds and we are not supposed to mess with them.  Taken negatively, these parables suggest hard and oftentimes fruitless work ahead for the disciples of Jesus Christ.  I guess a .250 average is okay in baseball but generally not what we’re shooting for on a success percentage.  Neither is it particularly invigorating to know that, on occasions, we will be hampered in our progress by those meddlesome weeds.

  So, Jesus tells these next parables and they’re meant to be comforting in light of the present circumstances.  The first of our “twin” analogies reads like this – “He put another parable before them, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.  It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’”  While technically not the world’s smallest seed, the mustard seed would’ve been the smallest seed known in the ancient near east at the time.  How small are mustard seeds?  Well, it takes about 21,000 mustard seeds to weigh just one ounce, that’s how small they are.  But why is Jesus talking about mustard seeds.