The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
The approach of the Kingdom is to throw a net a broadly and with as little discrimination as possible. We don't follow this paradigm as often as we should. We prefer to all but wait until fish swim into our hands. We try to sort out the good from the bad long before we catch them and then only try to go after those who seem good to us. Our way strategic spearfishing tends to leave many fish that are actually good uncaught and delays us with those which only seemed superficially appealing. As with weeds and wheat, where the growth period was not the appropriate time to discern the good from the bad, so too here, where the time when the fish are still beneath the surface is the water is not the time for us to be making ultimate judgments about them. So too with life. We ought never consider anyone so holy and righteous as to be a sure thing for the Kingdom nor anyone so foul and rancorous as to be certainly lost. We ought not assume that only those fish that seem very close to cleanliness might turn out to be good after all. Nor is it the case that those who just barely seem good enough are the only ones that might turn out rotten in the final analysis. Our judgments are superficial and the what really matters is mostly below the surface in this life. This means our cautious and limiting approach to fishing must be tossed overboard in favor of the big net method recommended by Jesus. Jesus himself said, "whoever comes to me I will never cast out" (see John 6:37). This is the attitude we must learn to share.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
We tend to try to clean the fish before they are caught, to encourage moral perfection in others even before they are gathered into the Kingdom. But this is a flawed strategy. We do it because we think it makes things easier for us, make fishing less risky by making it less likely that we encounter smelling, rotting, or otherwise shocking samples among the many kinds we catch. But it actually deprives the Kingdom of many fish that might have turned out to be good, covered, perhaps, with a layer of the grime of the sea, but which could have been cleaned by the chief fisherman himself once they were safely ashore. Cleaning fish still swimming in the world is emphatically a doomed endeavor. And if we insist on attempting it many good fish will remain uncaught.
every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom
both the new and the old.
Jesus was training his disciples and is training us in order to bring forth things of value, treasures about which we learn in both the Old and the New Testament. He showed us how the Old points ahead toward what he himself came to reveal and how the New was prefigured by what was present in the old. The Old, for instance, set strict limits and barriers designed to isolate the people of Israel from the nations. But this was not as an end in itself. The purpose was to prepare a people for the coming of the Messiah through whom all nations would be blessed. Seeing this fulfilled in Jesus we can now bring forth nets that welcome "Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free" (see Galatians 3:28). This is at once something old, that being the Kingdom of Israel, but also made new in Jesus, now transformed into the Kingdom of heaven. Is it fair of God to transcend the apparently literal bounds of the Old Testament with this new and spiritual reality? Jeremiah helps us with a partial answer. God himself has been gradually refashioning the clay into that which will please him perfectly.
Can I not do to you, house of Israel,
as this potter has done? says the LORD.
Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter,
so are you in my hand, house of Israel.
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