But the onus was on others to come and find the church. The congregation itself had little use for going out to search for the lost and the last and the least. It had given up being a net. It had lost its marching orders. It had gained the corner on “nice” but was losing the ability to call itself church.

C.S. Lewis knew the battlefield connection underlying Christianity. He came about that insight in a very personal way. When he was nine years old, his warm and loving mother contracted cancer. Within a very short time she was confined to bed, enduring harsh treatments, in terrible pain and stinking because of the sores and horrible wasting of her body. At night she would cry out in anguish, and young Jack (as he was known) hid in terror under his covers. He had heard the minister say that God answers prayer, so he begged God for his mother’s deliverance, but to no avail. She died gasping and screaming, and his belief in God went with her.

Years later, when as an Oxford professor he began to rationally think through the possibility of Christian belief, Lewis finally understood what was going on in his mother’s painful illness. He came to see that this world is a battlefield between the kingdom of God and the powers of evil, and that Christianity was true precisely because it took this conflict seriously.

The religion of the Bible was not a streamlined Santa Claus story of a jolly old grandfather figure who always brings gifts, whether you are naughty or nice. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the struggles present in this world and the necessary reality of God’s intervention. Lewis’ mother died not because God didn’t grant a child’s wish, but because the evil one had twisted God’s good world in such a way that even the very cells of her body no longer worked as they should. But though healing did not come in that instant of boyish spiritual lisping, the prayers did not go unheard, and his mother was not lost forever or forgotten.

So the Parable of the Net reminds us of our marching orders in the kingdom of heaven. We are not saved so that we may politely pat ourselves on the back and smile at one another in the tiny corners we occupy. No, we are part of a net that seeks and engages the fish of this world who might be swimming to their own destruction.

We Live in Confidence

Finally, Jesus’ stories in this chapter remind us that we are on the winning side in the battles of life. When Jesus tells the Parables of the Seed and the Yeast (vv. 31-35), He presents a picture of the kingdom of heaven that grows and dominates until it is the primary factor shaping the world. The tiny mustard seed morphs into a tree that provides a home for the birds, and the bit of yeast transforms the entire loaf until it is utterly and completely changed. And, it is important to note, these things happen rather automatically. The change takes place from within the seed, and from within the grain of yeast.