Standing Under the Scriptures
July 27, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

I Kings 3.5-12: King Solomon prays for wisdom, so that he may judge his people rightly.

Matthew 13.31-33, 44-50: Here are the remaining parables in the chapter, the mustard seed, the leaven in the meal, the hidden treasure, the pearl of great price, the net gathering fish of every kind.

Our Romans passage was brief (8.18-25) and our discussion of it was brief also. This was mainly because of my concern to leave sufficient time to consider our Gospel. [Note: Although this Sunday like last I will be obliged to leave before the class has quite ended, I will arrive well before it begins and so have time to collect myself.] We did note Paul’s assertion that the redemption wrought by Christ and the longing for its fulfilment extends beyond Christians to the whole of creation. As a way of understanding this I suggested an analogy with gravity which, when sufficiently strong, bends even light as in the case of black holes. But we did not I fear sufficiently regard the context of the passage, in chapter 7 and in the rest of chapter 8, without which its role is not fully apparent. In chapter 7 Paul was speaking of human bondage to the “flesh” and also of the law which makes us aware of our bondage but which does not enable us to overcome it. He concluded with the wretchedness in which this leaves us. In the first part of chapter 8, however, he described how Christ has released us from this “body of death.” This is through his having taken our human nature and its sinfulness upon himself, so as to put his Spirit within us. And his Spirit frees us from our bondage, enabling us to obey not the “flesh” but him.

Even in our freedom, though, we find that some things are much as before, that we are still involved in futility and suffering. And it is this situation that Paul addresses in our passage, out of his concern to show that it does not negate our liberation. His contention appears already in its first verse: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.” He sublimely elaborates on this glory in the latter part of chapter 8. But since it is future rather than present, it is a matter of hope rather than of sight. And that being the case, the answer lies in joining hope with patience, the combination to which the concluding verse of the passage calls us: “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

How successful we were in penetrating our Matthew passage (13.24-30, 36-43) might also be questioned. But we could see that, in parallel with our Romans one, it dealt with things being not entirely in accord with our suppositions or desires. For it is about the existence in the world of evil along with good: its origin, its ultimate disposition, and how in the meantime it is to be dealt with. It is of course the parable of the wheat and the weeds. As a class member astutely pointed out, it extends the parable of the sower, wherein the seed falling on good soil yields superabundantly. In this case also the soil on which the householder sows is good, apparently, but a complication arises: an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. And he does this, significantly, while people are asleep. The householder’s servants, when they see this, are appalled; their impulse is to go out and pull up the weeds. But the householder says no, for then the wheat is likely to be uprooted with the weeds. Instead he enjoins them to wait until the harvest, when the weeds will be gathered up and burned while the wheat will be carried to his barn.

When asked by his disciples, Jesus identifies the parable’s actors: householder/Son of Man, field/world, good seed/sons of the kingdom, weeds/sons of evil one, enemy/devil, harvest/end or culmination of the age, and harvesters/angels. He concludes by stating the equivalence of outcomes, for the weeds and for “all causes of sin and all evildoers” on the one hand and for the wheat and the righteous on the other. The former will be thrown into the furnace of fire but the latter “will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”

Thus, albeit in a kind of shorthand, the parable pronounces on the origin of evil and its ultimate disposition. About how to deal with it in the meantime, the point of greatest interest to us, it is however less clearcut. Somehow the householder’s servants, who correspond most closely to us, are not among the parable actors whom Jesus identifies. The message seems to be that in dealing with evil we are to go easy, hesitating to take matters into our own hands. But to what sort of evil does this apply? Is it to evil within ourselves, as was asked in the class? This can scarcely be so in view of Jesus’ statements about plucking out our eyes and cutting off our hands if they cause us to stumble (Matthew 18.8 and 9). Is it then evil that is external to us? Surely, in the face of evil that is clearly both identifiable and actionable, we are not to be merely passive. We need to bear in mind however that our own shortcomings limit our ability both to see and to act. It may apply, though, to evil that we cannot dispose of, because of not just its magnitude but also its interweaving with the rest of life. A case in point may have been Lincoln’s pre-Civil War position of not eliminating slavery where it already existed but still preventing it from spreading. This being so, some fine distinctions are required of us. Perhaps the point of the parable is our need to turn to the Lord for the requisite degree of discernment---the wisdom of Solomon. Perhaps also it is to encourage us to accept what we cannot change, knowing that in the end the Lord will rectify it. Jesus, in undergoing the cross, may be considered to have done this.

From this latter standpoint it may be worth concluding with Stanley Hauerwas’ comment on Augustine’s view of the parable.

“Augustine quite rightly sees that the parable of the wheat and the tares is not Jesus’ justification for the mixed character of the church, but that the parable is given to us to encourage Christians to endure a world that will not acknowledge the kingdom that has come in Christ. The parable of the wheat and tares, like all the parables, is an apocalyptic parable, but apocalyptic names the necessity of the church to be patient even with the devil.”

Faithfully, Fr. Ted