“Have you understood all this?”

They answered, “Yes.”              Saint Matthew Chapter 13 Verse 51

Being outside of the church has meant being free to answer questions in a different way.

Jesus’ question, “Have you understood all this?” would be given the same answer by most clergy as it received from the disciples, “Yes,” they would say.

An honest answer would be, “No.”

Jesus teaches his listeners about the Kingdom of Heaven using a series of parables, a series of straightforward pictures from everyday life. He is telling them that this is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like. His language is plain, his images are simple.

If the teaching of Jesus had been understood, then why was the simplicity lost? Why was the straightforward and plain language he used not adequate for the church in the centuries that followed? How did the pictures of ordinary, everyday things that Jesus considered sufficient to make his point get pushed aside to be replaced by the abstract words from Greek philosophical language? How did teaching based on telling people about mustard seeds, and pearls and fish become superseded by the teaching of the sort of concepts on which the Nicene Creed is based?

“Have you understood?” asks Jesus.

When the church has conceded that people have not understood as fully as they might, its response has been that people need to be better theologically educated. Yet Jesus never says to the crowds that they should come along for a course every Wednesday evening for ten weeks so that they could understand what he is teaching them. Jesus teaches in a way that is immediately accessible to those who listen. There is no vocabulary so complicated that people who are left wondering what it is that he is talking about.

The Covid-19 crisis might have been used by the church to review itself and to reset its strategy and its message. In four months of closure, it might have focused upon looking at the way in which Jesus did things and asked how it could follow his example. Reading the church news, the church has done no such thing. It has reopened with cries about the crisis and with a focus upon how it can persist with a way of existence that is no longer sustainable.

The complete detachment of the Church of England from the reality of the world in which it lives is manifest in the Diocese of Birmingham advertising for no less than three full-time area deans. At a time of financial crisis and a dismal decline in attendances, instead of a return to simplicity, there is a greater commitment to adding to the number of leaders whose role is far removed from anything that would be recognized by those who people the pages of the New Testament.

Read the parables of the Kingdom of Heaven and ask yourself, “if this is how Jesus teaches, then why must the church be so complicated?”

“Have you understood?” asks Jesus.

To ignore the question in the way that the church is doing is to suggest the church knows better than Jesus.