Reflection for Sunday – July 26, 2026

July 22, 2026Susan RollSunday Readings Homilies

Readings: 1 Kings 3: 5, 7-12; Romans 8: 28-30; Matthew 13: 44-52
Preacher: Susan K. Roll

If you were trying to inspire your listeners to take a grand leap of the imagination to understand what the living presence and love of God could accomplish in our world, what would you propose?

How about, “The kin-dom of God is like when all your spam is automatically deleted and only the messages you really need are left.” (That might sound a bit like last week’s Gospel on the wheat and the weeds sown together.)

Or maybe, “The kin-dom of God is like when all the cruise ships in the world line up at the docks of the poorest nations, and unload massive amounts of nourishing food, abundant medicine and medical equipment. As well as the trained personnel to go with them.”

Or, “The kin-dom of God is like total nuclear disarmament by all the countries with nuclear capabilities. And nobody can find where the enriched uranium was hidden. Ever again.”

But the image that warms my heart appears in verse 33, the wonderful image of the kin-dom of heaven as a tiny bit of leavening agent that makes a great massive amount of bread dough swell up and rise. In the Roman Catholic lectionary it was used last week, buried in the middle of a very long Gospel passage, almost unnoticeable.

This text deserves more respect, both because it gives us a domestic yet compelling image of the spiritual presence and power of the Holy One, but also because the woman kneading the dough presents an element of gender balance that would be characteristic of Luke but not so much of Matthew.

The amount of flour in this story is pure hyperbole, used to make a point. Scholars are not certain of the equivalent but apparently it could equal between 18 and 27 kilograms (about 40-60 pounds) of flour! This would have created a huge amount of bread dough. It had to have required the work of a number of kneaders at once. So we can’t stick too closely to the literal meaning here, or say to ourselves “Oh OK, just one more analogy.” The immensity of the image defies belief.

And that was the point.

Today’s Gospel provides us with a multi-car pileup of images, especially combined with the parables of the past two weeks. Immense imagery, stories too big to be believed, multiple ideas wrapped around each other, all draw on the power of the human imagination to understand more deeply what cannot be expressed as well in prose, flat description or data.

For the same reason, when a faith community gathers, music, poetry and art expand the scope of possibilities to enter into the living presence of the Holy. The same lyrics sung to two very different melodies can convey very different ideas. Or take the same melody and, for example, write one version in 3/ 4 time and the other in 4/4 time. That’s how Johann Sebastian Bach took a sweet, lilting love song written by Hans Hassler in 3/ 4 time and turned it into the pounding, solemn, mournful, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.”

In the Gospels for the past two Sundays, Jesus tells a story, and later, at the urging of his puzzled friends, explains to them what it was meant to say. When Scripture scholars study these passages, the evidence seems to point to an authentic story that dates back to the collective memory of Jesus’ words, followed by a point-by-point explanation composed most likely by Matthew himself.

That’s why we find perturbing images of the wheat as righteous persons who will be saved, and the weeds sown among them as evil persons who will burn in hell. Now this interpretation may have offered some vague hope and encouragement to first-century Christians who were under immediate threat of persecution, even execution, for their new faith. Unfortunately, it also plays well if you’re a fire-and-brimstone preacher trying to scare the hell, as it were, out of your parishioners.

What Jesus offered his friends and followers was a hope so brilliant, so powerful that it could only have come from the Holy One. And that should play well in any age.

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Susan Roll

Susan Roll holds an M.A. in Pastoral Theology from the former St. Bernard’s Seminary, and served for nine years as the first fulltime lay campus minister in the Diocese of Rochester, 1976-85.She went on to complete a doctorate with top honors in the Faculty of Theology at the Catholic University of Louvain / Leuven, Belgium in 1993.As the first fulltime lay professor at Christ the King Seminary, Buffalo NY, she taught liturgy and sacraments from 1995-2003.She retired in 2018 from the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada where, in addition to teaching, research and direction of masters and doctoral theses, she directed the Sophia Research Centre, taught in the Native pastoral studies program, and served as a union officer.Throughout her career she has been active in movements for the full dignity of women in the Church.