Standing Under the Scriptures
August 3, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

The readings we are considering this Sunday are the following:

Genesis 32.22-32: Jacob at the absolutely critical moment in his life wrestles with the angel, and presumably with his own soul too. (This passage is not from the lectionary, at least the Prayer Book one, but we have considered it before.)

Matthew 14.13-21: Jesus feeds the 5,000. The feeding narrative is found in all four Gospels, and twice in both Matthew and Mark. This evidences its importance, which it behoves us to probe.

Our readings for last Sunday included particularly winsome biblical passages: the prayer of Solomon in the Old Testament and the parables of the mustard seed, the leaven in the flour, the hidden treasure, and the pearl of great price in the New. The element of judgment was not however lacking, cf. the condition that the Lord attaches to his response to Solomon and the parable of the net pulled in full of fish which concludes the list.

We reviewed some of the history of the monarchy of Israel, Solomon being only its third king. It started with Saul, whose struggle against the Philistine threat ended in defeat. In David however it became firmly established: not only were the Philistines overcome but also the twelve tribes were bound together and prospered. Solomon as David’s son inherited his legacy. His prayer is a dream (his own?) near the beginning of his reign, in which the Lord asks him what he desires. And as we saw, his response has three elements. Firstly he avows his own inadequacy: “I am but a little child; I do not know how to go out and come in.” Then he recognizes the magnitude of the task laid upon him. to care for the Lord’s chosen people, who “cannot be numbered or counted for multitude.” And finally he turns to the Lord for the ability to discharge this responsibility, asking for “an understanding mind… that I may discern between good and evil.”

The Lord is pleased with Solomon’s response and additionally grants him riches and honor, although he did not ask for them. He grants him also long life but with a condition, namely that “you will walk in my way, keeping my statutes and my commandments as your father David walked.” Apparently he did not in the end do so. Already he had been notably unsqueamish in consolidating his reign, as reflected in 1 Kings 2. And later on he became oppressive in his exactions from the people in support of his own magnificence. Israel had all along had a certain ambivalence about the monarchy. Samuel, who was later to anoint both Saul and David, had warned of these very things in 1 Samuel 8. Solomon’s successor on his death he was his son Rehoboam, to whom the tribes appealed to lighten their burdens. He summarily rejected their appeal (“My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins… My father chastized you with whips but I will chastize you with scorpions”---1 Kings 12). The ten northern tribes then broke away to form a separate kingdom, a division lasting down to the Exile.

None of this detracts however from the winsomeness of Solomon’s prayer. It would befit anyone assuming office. Actually it befits all of us as Christians, for we are charged with the crucial task of bearing witness to our faith, for which our own capacity is limited if not lacking.

We found a similar winsomeness in the above-cited parables of Jesus. Those of the mustard seed and of the leaven accord with each other. They convey the surpassing power of the kingdom of heaven, in the mustard seed becoming a tree-like shrub and the leaven leavening the whole batch of flour. But they convey also that this power is not exercised blatantly, as with marching armies and sounding trumpets, but instead unobtrusively, so that its presence may be underestimated or even unsuspected. In this we saw both a warning and an encouragement. On the one hand we may overlook the importance of seeds and leaven at work around us. On the other, what we do in living out our faith may have effects beyond what we can see or imagine.

The second two parables, of the treasure hidden in a field and the pearl of great price, likewise form a couplet. Their concern is with the supreme attractiveness of the kingdom of heaven, beyond that of anything else and indeed justifying the sacrifice of everything else to attain it. This is conveyed by the finder of the treasure and the finder of the pearl selling all that they had so as to be able to buy these objects. Last Sunday we were given an example of someone supposing---falsely---that he had found what was worth giving up everything else for. This was that of a man in mid-life leaving his wife and children for someone else (though it may be doubted that such a person really intended to give up everything else). In the class I asked for examples of those who truly gave up everything for their treasure or pearl, that is, the kingdom of heaven. One member spoke of monastic vocations, another of Jesus’ own disciples. I offered a further instance, namely the martyrs of the early church, whose relation with Christ outvalued for them the most horrible tortures as well as physical death. And I suggested that, having found this relation, they are to be envied rather than pitied. We ourselves, having found the kingdom, might hesitate to pay the required price. But we can believe that the Lord would enable us to do so should the occasion arise.

We did not however stop with these four parables. Instead we went on to our passage’s final one, in which the net is hauled in when full of fish and the good are sorted out from the bad. We noted that the element of judgment was already present in the parable of wheat and weeds earlier in the chapter and that it appears in several other places as well. Notable among these is the parable of the king’s marriage feast for his son (Matthew 22), where there is a similar separating of the unworthy from the kingdom. Thus judgment cannot be considered to be only incidental to Jesus’ message. We saw it as pointing to need not to take the kingdom, marvelous as it is, for granted. Instead we are responsible for making proper use of its gifts to us. As for the necessity of judgment, without it and its clarifying of what we are being redeemed from, our redemption is not really meaningful. And as for its apparent harshness---casting into a furnace where there will be wailing an gnashing of teeth---we were inclined to think that it was not so much imposed on us as something we inflict on ourselves. This we do by rejecting the salvation that God through his Son has extended to us, choosing instead to consider that we have no need of it, that our own resources are sufficient. A class member’s definition of hell was helpful here: that place wherein we cannot talk with God.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted