Distinguishing the good from the bad
Commentary
There are certainly times when we can readily distinguish good folks from bad folks. The old western movies made it simple by dressing the good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats. In more modern movies you can usually tell the difference by whether the actor wears a smile or a sneer.
Some people in real life determine that Christians are the good ones and that the bad ones, the ones who cause all the trouble in the world, are those of other faiths or of no faith at all. Yet in this century we have seen Christians carry out atrocities against others. The Holocaust in Nazi Germany comes to mind. So also does the recent fighting in the former Yugoslavia where the Christians of Serbia have been committing atrocities against their Muslim neighbors in Bosnia and Kosovo. Discerning who are the good and who are the bad becomes increasingly difficult.
Our lessons for this Sunday make some sharp distinctions between good and bad. The pericope from Second Isaiah clearly separates bad idols from a good God and attempts to persuade the people to make their witness to the Lord in the face of the Babylonian deities. In the second lesson Paul distinguishes sharply between a life in the Spirit and life in the flesh, the first obviously good and the latter bad. And clearly the gospel from Matthew recognizes that even within the church good and bad exist side by side.
How to deal with such distinctions will vary from lesson to lesson. Or to put it in terms relevant to the Gospel from Matthew 13, when do we apply "Weed and Feed" and when do we not?
Isaiah 44:6-8
Imagine behind this brief pericope a courtroom scene. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is bringing suit against the gods of Babylon on grounds of false representation. They claim to be gods, and their claim is apparently quite successful, judging by the positive response they are receiving from many of the exiled Israelites in the land. The people have been in that foreign land so long -- probably fifty to sixty years -- that a new generation has grown up there, one that has never seen Jerusalem or worshiped in the temple there, or has never seen the Lord at work. Babylonian gods, on the other hand, have been performing just fine, according to the empirical evidence. After all, they are on top of the world.
In court the Lord -- acting as plaintiff and prosecuting attorney -- identifies himself with the words, "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no other." Then the Lord challenges the gods of Babylon, dressed to kill in their fine clothes after having been awakened for the day and bathed by attendants. The challenge is that these little statues announce what is about to happen in history so that the jury need only wait and see. But alas! the little statues cannot say a word. They cannot speak. They just stand there decorated and magnificent. And silent!
Now the Lord turns to his people who fill the courtroom, telling them, "Do not fear, or be afraid!" The Lord reminds the people that it was he who announced from of old what would happen in history. They were part of the living proof of his words. For several centuries the Lord had spoken through the prophets that the northern kingdom of Israel would "go into exile" (see Amos 7:11), and by 721 B.C. they did. Likewise the Lord announced through prophets that "Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins" (Micah 3:12), and it was in 587 B.C.; that "my anger and my wrath shall be poured out on" Jerusalem (Jeremiah 7:20), and they were. The Lord had demonstrated in recent history that the Lord's word was as good as gold -- even to their dismay. The idols of Babylon cannot speak of such forthcoming events, and so they are not gods at all, merely the works of human hands.
Without any verbal response to the Lord's challenge, the idols convict themselves, as they do also in 41:21-24; 43:8-9. Only the Lord who speaks and announces what will be qualifies as God (see also 43:11-12 and, above all, 55:10-11). The people themselves are the Lord's character "witnesses" (see 43:12), for if they do not themselves know of the Lord's words, surely their parents have told them, and so they can testify to the truth of the Lord's claim.
The message that now comes from the Lord through the prophet Second Isaiah is the word of comfort (Isaiah 40:1; 51:3). The comforting word is that the Lord is coming to take the people home to Jerusalem and to rebuild the city and its temple. They can believe that word of salvation in the present just as surely as they came to believe the truth of the word of judgment that the Lord spoke in the past.
Is there a sense in which the trial still goes on, even in our day? And where might God find the faithful witnesses to testify on his behalf against all the idolatrous claims to divinity that permeate our society?
Romans 8:12-25
In the preceding paragraphs of this chapter Paul had distinguished Christians from non-Christians on the basis of the Spirit of God. The non-Christian lives according to the flesh, but the Christian lives according to the Spirit. The same Spirit enables Christians to live here and now on the one hand, and on the other hand, God will in the future raise their mortal bodies through the same Spirit.
Now Paul continues the contrast between flesh and Spirit by arguing that the Spirit's leading brings people to be called "children of God" (v. 14). Immediately he uses lowercase "spirits" to make further the contrast: they did not receive "a spirit of slavery" that would throw them back into the fearful estranged existence they knew before, but "a spirit of adoption."
The readers of Paul's letter knew about adoption. In Greek and in Roman culture adoption was a common practice by which childless owners of property could pass on an inheritance. Paul used the image also at Galatians 4:1-7 where, as here, he quotes the expression, "Abba! Father!" There he writes to the Galatian Christians that God sent his son to redeem them precisely "so that we might receive adoption as children." The Spirit there is "the Spirit of his Son" that God sent into their hearts, enabling them to cry, "Abba! Father!" There, too, Paul wrote of the inheritance that comes through this adoption.
In our own pericope Paul develops the idea one more logical step: Christians are "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ" (v. 17). Christ is heir because he is the Son of God in a different, even unique, sense, but we are heirs along with him because God has adopted us to participate in the inheritance. Unlike the human custom in Rome and Greece, it was not childlessness that prompted God to adopt heirs. God already had his Son Jesus Christ. To include us through baptismal adoption along with Christ as heirs of the kingdom is nothing short of divine grace.
The final paragraph of our pericope focuses not on the contrast between flesh and Spirit but on the similarity of Christians and the rest of creation in suffering and on the glory that is still to come. In the present time the whole creation -- presumably all humanity along with all natural and biological life -- waits for the revealing of the children of God. Falling back on his doctrine of original sin, this entire creation, including Christians, suffers in the present time. But Paul seems to indicate an innate longing for freedom from its slavery to decay and for the freedom of the glory of God's children. That glory still to come, Christians join the whole creation in its groaning in the present while we wait for the day of resurrection, here called "the redemption of our bodies" (v. 23).
Such waiting in the midst of groaning is based on hope. Hope is not simply wishful thinking, like hoping for good weather for the church picnic or hoping for your favorite team to make it into the Super Bowl. This hope is confident trust in God in spite of all present experiences to the contrary. It is hope that God will be true to his word, and that word is the promise of glory.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus had just finished telling the parable of the sower to the general public and its explanation to the disciples. The allegorical nature of the explanation is so different from Jesus' parables that we have to wonder whether the explanation is not Matthew's own as he found it necessary to deal with questions in his own community. Our present pericope likewise appears, like other passages in this Gospel, to address a specific question in Matthew's community, namely, how did these people get in the church anyway?
The question of inclusion of some people in the church community occurs elsewhere in Matthew's Gospel. The parable about the wedding feast at 22:1-14 tells, in the first place, about the refusal of some to attend the king's wedding banquet for his son, and so at the king's command, his servants gathered from the streets everyone they found, "both good and bad." When the king observed the guests, however, he cast one out because he was lacking a wedding garment. The punch line of the parable is clear: "For many are called, but few are chosen."
Concerns for the later community show up also in the parable about the king who forgave his servant a great debt (18:23-35). The parable ends with the forgiven one punished severely for not forgiving in return one of his debtors. The lesson appears to be addressed to the church, especially since it concludes with the parallel to "every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." Likewise, the parable about the foolish maidens who took no oil for their lamps as they awaited the bridegroom (25:1-13) demonstrates the excluding of people from the community who are not prepared for the kingdom's coming.
From these various texts we can conclude the question was alive in Matthew's community. Our parable is one of at least four attempts to address the question about the inclusion of some people from the foretaste of the kingdom, namely the church. Like the parable about the sower, this parable and the explanation are separated by some brief parables and another word about the reason for telling parables.
The parable itself compares the kingdom to "someone who sowed good seed in his field, but while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away." According to the explanation the "someone" is none other than the Son of Man, the title Jesus usually uses to speak of himself (compare Matthew 16:13 and Mark 8:27). At times this title is used to speak of his presence here and now, but at other times the Son of Man image occurs in connection with the end time, riding the clouds of heaven (see, for example, 26:64). In either case, the reference is to Jesus himself. The field in which the seeds are sown, according to the interpretation, "is the world." The church is not considered here to be a community within Israel alone but worldwide. By the time that Matthew wrote his Gospel, the missionary activity of Paul and others had established congregations of the church in many parts of the Roman Empire, and so "the world" indeed was the field for sowing the gospel.
"The good seed are the children of the kingdom" who have been baptized as sisters and brothers, forming a community within the world that consists only of siblings and bearing witness to Jesus Christ in spite of the dangers from the Roman authorities. These good seed are those who have heeded Jesus' command to love one another and who found a variety of ways to demonstrate that mutual love, even in the sacrifice of their personal possessions so that the community might own all things and share all things (see Acts 2:43-47).
But among these children of the kingdom are the weeds, "the children of the evil one." This is the second time in the chapter that Matthew mentions "the evil one," the other time in the interpretation of the parable about the sower. We had said in discussion of that passage that the expression appears nowhere else in Matthew' Gospel, though it is common in Johannine literature. Here the "evil one" is "the devil," the one who tempted Jesus at such locations as the wilderness, the Temple in Jerusalem, and a very high mountain (Matthew 4:1-11). There is a smack here of the apocalyptic dualism predominant in many places in the New Testament, but interestingly "the end of the age" here is not the time for the battle between the children of light and the children of darkness (the evil one). There is no battle expected. The imagery here, consistent with the context of the parables in Matthew 13, is "the harvest." Apparently at that time the reapers, namely the angels, will not do battle but harvest the crops, first collecting the weeds and then burning them in the furnace of fire.
It is none other than the Son of Man who will send the angelic reapers to weed out the children of the evil one. Two issues of interest stand out here. First, when we think of angels, often the top of the Christmas tree comes to mind. An angel is the pretty little thing that glows up there, adding a warm and tender appearance to all who enter the room. Or perhaps nowadays with such a charming television series like Touched by an Angel, we picture angels as those messengers from God who come to help people work through difficult times or to take responsibility for their lives or to bring previously estranged people together. Here, however, the angels are sent to weed out the enemy, to cast the children of the evil one into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The angelic role here does not fit the stereotype.
Second, the one in charge of sending the angels is the Son of Man. Angels in the Old Testament are often nothing other than the visible representations of God. Since the human eye was not allowed to look upon God, God took the form of an angel -- sometimes as a flame of fire -- in order to appear visibly to humans. By the time we arrive in the period of the New Testament, however, whole hierarchies of angels developed, in part out of the apocalyptic dualism in which God's armies of angels prepared for the battle against the devil's army of demons. So exalted did angels become that the author of Hebrews spent most of the first chapter of that book arguing the superiority of Jesus Christ over the angels. Now in this pericope the authority of the Son of Man is clear: he sends the angels to do the work of weeding out the evil within the community.
How unfortunate that at times in history this teaching about the weeding out in the last day was totally forgotten. The Inquisition of the Middle Ages was based on the need to weed out here and now those who were somehow expected of harboring the evil one in their personalities, even if their "evil" had been some extraordinary good. In our own country the Salem witches experienced the same weeding, and the "furnace of fire" was indeed the fate of some of them. Thanks to the marvels of the History Channel some of these farcical attempts to cleanse the Christian community are exposed to people of all ages, and so we shake our heads at the horrors people have committed on people in the past.
Yet in our own day we still have difficulties allowing people who are different from us in various ways to coexist, especially in our Christian communities. We would gladly play the role of the angels of the Son of Man here and now to eliminate those who make us uncomfortable. In the past year we have witnessed the horrific deaths of young men because they were gay. For the same reason people are excluded from churches and other communities. Other would-be angels blow up abortion centers or shoot doctors who perform abortions because this "evil" should be weeded out of a moral society.
Should not a church who professes belief in Scripture and who cherishes the teachings of Jesus be willing to wait for the harvest when the Son of Man who judges not by what the eyes see might send his angels to weed the field? That would appear to be the only way to prevent good seed being destroyed by the bad. And by no human decision should a child of the kingdom be left out of that glorious time "when the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father."
On the contrary, we should celebrate the fact that the God we worship is so certain of a fruitful harvest that the Lord will allow the weeds to coexist with the good seed until harvest time. Only a God who is patient and sure will prohibit us from using "Weed and Feed" only to make our work in the fields a picnic.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 28:10-19a
Jacob is on a journey from Hebron to Haran, Abraham's original home in northern Mesopotamia. In the context, two different reasons are given for the journey. According to the Yahwist account in Genesis 27:41-45, Jacob is fleeing to save his life from the wrath of his brother Esau. In the priestly account of Genesis 27:46--28:1-5, Jacob journeys to find a wife from his own clan. Both reasons may be involved, because God's purpose works its way through all sorts of motivations. Before Jacob takes leave of his father Isaac, however, Isaac blesses Jacob with the wish that Jacob may become the bearer of God's promise (28:3-4). Our text for the morning tells how that comes about.
A day's journey out, Jacob camps for the night at a place originally called Luz. As he sleeps, pillowing his head with a stone (undoubtedly covered with his cloak), he has a dream of a ladder -- or more properly, a stepped ramp -- reaching up into heaven, with angels descending and ascending on the ramp. And above the top end of the ramp, the Lord stands and addresses Jacob.
God identifies himself as the same God who spoke to Abraham and to Isaac, and then he gives to Jacob the same promise that he gave to Abraham (cf. Genesis 12:1-3). Jacob will have many descendants; God will give them a land to call their own; and through them, God will bring his blessing on all the families of the earth (28:13-14). In short, through Jacob and his descendants God will continue his work of restoring his world to the goodness that he intended for it in the beginning. God's plan is continuing to be worked out in history.
An additional promise to Jacob personally follows, however. God will protect Jacob and bring him back to Canaan, and God will never leave Jacob until all that God has promised him is fulfilled (v. 15). Jacob is journeying under the protection and guidance of a divine guarantee. That is the same assurance that our Lord gave to us when he promised, "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20). And it is the basis of the same confidence that Paul expressed to the Philippians, "I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day (i.e. the second coming) of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). Our lives are not lonely battles and aimless excursions through the valleys and heights of our everydays, but guided and watched over by the Lord who is working out his purpose through us.
Jacob is awestruck when he wakes, realizing that he has encountered God at the meeting place of heaven and earth (vv. 16-
17). As a result, he sets his stone pillow up as an altar and names the site "Beth-el," "the house of God" (vv. 18-19), marking it forever after as a holy place.
These last four verses, 16-19, have often been misused in sermons and meditations and at summer camp sites. Some worship leader will tell us that a church building or some structure or outdoor setting is "the house of God" with God present there. And contrary to the text, and indeed the scriptures as a whole, God then is understood as available anywhere at any time according to our word (contra Deuteronomy 12:5; Isaiah 55:6). But Jacob has been privy to the place where heaven meets earth, and there is only one location of that meeting place for us -- in Jesus Christ. In him, we encounter the Father, and only through him (John 14:6). And it is only because Christ has promised to be with two or three gathered together in his name (Matthew 18:20) that we can say our church building or some other worship location is the place where we meet God. We cannot command God's gracious presence, but nevertheless, he grants himself to us in his Son.
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 44:6-8
Here in the strongest terms we encounter the monotheism of the Old Testament. There is no other God besides the God revealed to us through the witnesses preserved for us in the scriptures. God is the first and the last (v. 6), the Alpha and the Omega (cf. Revelation 1:8), the One at the beginning and at the end of human time and history, the eternal Lord, before and after all things (cf. Psalm 90:1-2). It is in Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), spoken to exiles in Babylonia who were surrounded by foreign deities, that we find the strongest statements in the Old Testament of the sole Godhead of the Lord.
But on what basis does the prophet Second Isaiah proclaim that fact? On two bases of history. First of all, God has had the power to rule over nature and empire and other gods in order to deliver his people Israel from slavery in Egypt. He was not thwarted by the gods of Egypt or by the power of a pharaoh or by the waters of the Reed Sea. He "redeemed" his people -- bought them back from their servitude (cf. Leviticus 25:47-49), which is the meaning of redemption. And God became their King and their Redeemer (Isaiah 44:6; cf. 6:1; 43:15, et al.).
Second, God is the One who rules over all of history. He can tell what is coming in the future, because he holds the future in his hand. He has a plan that he is working out over all the span of time, and he therefore knows what the future holds and what the end will be (Isaiah 44:7). No other religion or deity in the world has a purpose that over-arches the entire human story. Indeed, most religions of the world try to escape out of human history. But the Lord God of Israel and of Jesus Christ has that purpose, and he is day by day, month by month, year by year, century by century accomplishing it.
The proclamation of verse 8 can therefore also be spoken to us, good Christians. "Fear not, nor be afraid!" For we too have been redeemed from our slavery to sin and death, have we not? -- redeemed by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we too have been told by our Lord what the end of human history will be -- the Kingdom of God come on earth even as it is in heaven. Therefore, we too need not fear either things present or things to come, either life or death, principalities or powers, or anything in all creation, because we know -- we know with certain joy -- that God rules over our lives and universe and is directing them toward his glad conclusion. What is the world coming to? It is coming to Christ, when every knee will bow to him and every tongue confess that he is Lord of all, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11; cf. Isaiah 45:23).
Some people in real life determine that Christians are the good ones and that the bad ones, the ones who cause all the trouble in the world, are those of other faiths or of no faith at all. Yet in this century we have seen Christians carry out atrocities against others. The Holocaust in Nazi Germany comes to mind. So also does the recent fighting in the former Yugoslavia where the Christians of Serbia have been committing atrocities against their Muslim neighbors in Bosnia and Kosovo. Discerning who are the good and who are the bad becomes increasingly difficult.
Our lessons for this Sunday make some sharp distinctions between good and bad. The pericope from Second Isaiah clearly separates bad idols from a good God and attempts to persuade the people to make their witness to the Lord in the face of the Babylonian deities. In the second lesson Paul distinguishes sharply between a life in the Spirit and life in the flesh, the first obviously good and the latter bad. And clearly the gospel from Matthew recognizes that even within the church good and bad exist side by side.
How to deal with such distinctions will vary from lesson to lesson. Or to put it in terms relevant to the Gospel from Matthew 13, when do we apply "Weed and Feed" and when do we not?
Isaiah 44:6-8
Imagine behind this brief pericope a courtroom scene. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is bringing suit against the gods of Babylon on grounds of false representation. They claim to be gods, and their claim is apparently quite successful, judging by the positive response they are receiving from many of the exiled Israelites in the land. The people have been in that foreign land so long -- probably fifty to sixty years -- that a new generation has grown up there, one that has never seen Jerusalem or worshiped in the temple there, or has never seen the Lord at work. Babylonian gods, on the other hand, have been performing just fine, according to the empirical evidence. After all, they are on top of the world.
In court the Lord -- acting as plaintiff and prosecuting attorney -- identifies himself with the words, "I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no other." Then the Lord challenges the gods of Babylon, dressed to kill in their fine clothes after having been awakened for the day and bathed by attendants. The challenge is that these little statues announce what is about to happen in history so that the jury need only wait and see. But alas! the little statues cannot say a word. They cannot speak. They just stand there decorated and magnificent. And silent!
Now the Lord turns to his people who fill the courtroom, telling them, "Do not fear, or be afraid!" The Lord reminds the people that it was he who announced from of old what would happen in history. They were part of the living proof of his words. For several centuries the Lord had spoken through the prophets that the northern kingdom of Israel would "go into exile" (see Amos 7:11), and by 721 B.C. they did. Likewise the Lord announced through prophets that "Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins" (Micah 3:12), and it was in 587 B.C.; that "my anger and my wrath shall be poured out on" Jerusalem (Jeremiah 7:20), and they were. The Lord had demonstrated in recent history that the Lord's word was as good as gold -- even to their dismay. The idols of Babylon cannot speak of such forthcoming events, and so they are not gods at all, merely the works of human hands.
Without any verbal response to the Lord's challenge, the idols convict themselves, as they do also in 41:21-24; 43:8-9. Only the Lord who speaks and announces what will be qualifies as God (see also 43:11-12 and, above all, 55:10-11). The people themselves are the Lord's character "witnesses" (see 43:12), for if they do not themselves know of the Lord's words, surely their parents have told them, and so they can testify to the truth of the Lord's claim.
The message that now comes from the Lord through the prophet Second Isaiah is the word of comfort (Isaiah 40:1; 51:3). The comforting word is that the Lord is coming to take the people home to Jerusalem and to rebuild the city and its temple. They can believe that word of salvation in the present just as surely as they came to believe the truth of the word of judgment that the Lord spoke in the past.
Is there a sense in which the trial still goes on, even in our day? And where might God find the faithful witnesses to testify on his behalf against all the idolatrous claims to divinity that permeate our society?
Romans 8:12-25
In the preceding paragraphs of this chapter Paul had distinguished Christians from non-Christians on the basis of the Spirit of God. The non-Christian lives according to the flesh, but the Christian lives according to the Spirit. The same Spirit enables Christians to live here and now on the one hand, and on the other hand, God will in the future raise their mortal bodies through the same Spirit.
Now Paul continues the contrast between flesh and Spirit by arguing that the Spirit's leading brings people to be called "children of God" (v. 14). Immediately he uses lowercase "spirits" to make further the contrast: they did not receive "a spirit of slavery" that would throw them back into the fearful estranged existence they knew before, but "a spirit of adoption."
The readers of Paul's letter knew about adoption. In Greek and in Roman culture adoption was a common practice by which childless owners of property could pass on an inheritance. Paul used the image also at Galatians 4:1-7 where, as here, he quotes the expression, "Abba! Father!" There he writes to the Galatian Christians that God sent his son to redeem them precisely "so that we might receive adoption as children." The Spirit there is "the Spirit of his Son" that God sent into their hearts, enabling them to cry, "Abba! Father!" There, too, Paul wrote of the inheritance that comes through this adoption.
In our own pericope Paul develops the idea one more logical step: Christians are "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ" (v. 17). Christ is heir because he is the Son of God in a different, even unique, sense, but we are heirs along with him because God has adopted us to participate in the inheritance. Unlike the human custom in Rome and Greece, it was not childlessness that prompted God to adopt heirs. God already had his Son Jesus Christ. To include us through baptismal adoption along with Christ as heirs of the kingdom is nothing short of divine grace.
The final paragraph of our pericope focuses not on the contrast between flesh and Spirit but on the similarity of Christians and the rest of creation in suffering and on the glory that is still to come. In the present time the whole creation -- presumably all humanity along with all natural and biological life -- waits for the revealing of the children of God. Falling back on his doctrine of original sin, this entire creation, including Christians, suffers in the present time. But Paul seems to indicate an innate longing for freedom from its slavery to decay and for the freedom of the glory of God's children. That glory still to come, Christians join the whole creation in its groaning in the present while we wait for the day of resurrection, here called "the redemption of our bodies" (v. 23).
Such waiting in the midst of groaning is based on hope. Hope is not simply wishful thinking, like hoping for good weather for the church picnic or hoping for your favorite team to make it into the Super Bowl. This hope is confident trust in God in spite of all present experiences to the contrary. It is hope that God will be true to his word, and that word is the promise of glory.
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus had just finished telling the parable of the sower to the general public and its explanation to the disciples. The allegorical nature of the explanation is so different from Jesus' parables that we have to wonder whether the explanation is not Matthew's own as he found it necessary to deal with questions in his own community. Our present pericope likewise appears, like other passages in this Gospel, to address a specific question in Matthew's community, namely, how did these people get in the church anyway?
The question of inclusion of some people in the church community occurs elsewhere in Matthew's Gospel. The parable about the wedding feast at 22:1-14 tells, in the first place, about the refusal of some to attend the king's wedding banquet for his son, and so at the king's command, his servants gathered from the streets everyone they found, "both good and bad." When the king observed the guests, however, he cast one out because he was lacking a wedding garment. The punch line of the parable is clear: "For many are called, but few are chosen."
Concerns for the later community show up also in the parable about the king who forgave his servant a great debt (18:23-35). The parable ends with the forgiven one punished severely for not forgiving in return one of his debtors. The lesson appears to be addressed to the church, especially since it concludes with the parallel to "every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart." Likewise, the parable about the foolish maidens who took no oil for their lamps as they awaited the bridegroom (25:1-13) demonstrates the excluding of people from the community who are not prepared for the kingdom's coming.
From these various texts we can conclude the question was alive in Matthew's community. Our parable is one of at least four attempts to address the question about the inclusion of some people from the foretaste of the kingdom, namely the church. Like the parable about the sower, this parable and the explanation are separated by some brief parables and another word about the reason for telling parables.
The parable itself compares the kingdom to "someone who sowed good seed in his field, but while everyone was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away." According to the explanation the "someone" is none other than the Son of Man, the title Jesus usually uses to speak of himself (compare Matthew 16:13 and Mark 8:27). At times this title is used to speak of his presence here and now, but at other times the Son of Man image occurs in connection with the end time, riding the clouds of heaven (see, for example, 26:64). In either case, the reference is to Jesus himself. The field in which the seeds are sown, according to the interpretation, "is the world." The church is not considered here to be a community within Israel alone but worldwide. By the time that Matthew wrote his Gospel, the missionary activity of Paul and others had established congregations of the church in many parts of the Roman Empire, and so "the world" indeed was the field for sowing the gospel.
"The good seed are the children of the kingdom" who have been baptized as sisters and brothers, forming a community within the world that consists only of siblings and bearing witness to Jesus Christ in spite of the dangers from the Roman authorities. These good seed are those who have heeded Jesus' command to love one another and who found a variety of ways to demonstrate that mutual love, even in the sacrifice of their personal possessions so that the community might own all things and share all things (see Acts 2:43-47).
But among these children of the kingdom are the weeds, "the children of the evil one." This is the second time in the chapter that Matthew mentions "the evil one," the other time in the interpretation of the parable about the sower. We had said in discussion of that passage that the expression appears nowhere else in Matthew' Gospel, though it is common in Johannine literature. Here the "evil one" is "the devil," the one who tempted Jesus at such locations as the wilderness, the Temple in Jerusalem, and a very high mountain (Matthew 4:1-11). There is a smack here of the apocalyptic dualism predominant in many places in the New Testament, but interestingly "the end of the age" here is not the time for the battle between the children of light and the children of darkness (the evil one). There is no battle expected. The imagery here, consistent with the context of the parables in Matthew 13, is "the harvest." Apparently at that time the reapers, namely the angels, will not do battle but harvest the crops, first collecting the weeds and then burning them in the furnace of fire.
It is none other than the Son of Man who will send the angelic reapers to weed out the children of the evil one. Two issues of interest stand out here. First, when we think of angels, often the top of the Christmas tree comes to mind. An angel is the pretty little thing that glows up there, adding a warm and tender appearance to all who enter the room. Or perhaps nowadays with such a charming television series like Touched by an Angel, we picture angels as those messengers from God who come to help people work through difficult times or to take responsibility for their lives or to bring previously estranged people together. Here, however, the angels are sent to weed out the enemy, to cast the children of the evil one into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The angelic role here does not fit the stereotype.
Second, the one in charge of sending the angels is the Son of Man. Angels in the Old Testament are often nothing other than the visible representations of God. Since the human eye was not allowed to look upon God, God took the form of an angel -- sometimes as a flame of fire -- in order to appear visibly to humans. By the time we arrive in the period of the New Testament, however, whole hierarchies of angels developed, in part out of the apocalyptic dualism in which God's armies of angels prepared for the battle against the devil's army of demons. So exalted did angels become that the author of Hebrews spent most of the first chapter of that book arguing the superiority of Jesus Christ over the angels. Now in this pericope the authority of the Son of Man is clear: he sends the angels to do the work of weeding out the evil within the community.
How unfortunate that at times in history this teaching about the weeding out in the last day was totally forgotten. The Inquisition of the Middle Ages was based on the need to weed out here and now those who were somehow expected of harboring the evil one in their personalities, even if their "evil" had been some extraordinary good. In our own country the Salem witches experienced the same weeding, and the "furnace of fire" was indeed the fate of some of them. Thanks to the marvels of the History Channel some of these farcical attempts to cleanse the Christian community are exposed to people of all ages, and so we shake our heads at the horrors people have committed on people in the past.
Yet in our own day we still have difficulties allowing people who are different from us in various ways to coexist, especially in our Christian communities. We would gladly play the role of the angels of the Son of Man here and now to eliminate those who make us uncomfortable. In the past year we have witnessed the horrific deaths of young men because they were gay. For the same reason people are excluded from churches and other communities. Other would-be angels blow up abortion centers or shoot doctors who perform abortions because this "evil" should be weeded out of a moral society.
Should not a church who professes belief in Scripture and who cherishes the teachings of Jesus be willing to wait for the harvest when the Son of Man who judges not by what the eyes see might send his angels to weed the field? That would appear to be the only way to prevent good seed being destroyed by the bad. And by no human decision should a child of the kingdom be left out of that glorious time "when the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father."
On the contrary, we should celebrate the fact that the God we worship is so certain of a fruitful harvest that the Lord will allow the weeds to coexist with the good seed until harvest time. Only a God who is patient and sure will prohibit us from using "Weed and Feed" only to make our work in the fields a picnic.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Genesis 28:10-19a
Jacob is on a journey from Hebron to Haran, Abraham's original home in northern Mesopotamia. In the context, two different reasons are given for the journey. According to the Yahwist account in Genesis 27:41-45, Jacob is fleeing to save his life from the wrath of his brother Esau. In the priestly account of Genesis 27:46--28:1-5, Jacob journeys to find a wife from his own clan. Both reasons may be involved, because God's purpose works its way through all sorts of motivations. Before Jacob takes leave of his father Isaac, however, Isaac blesses Jacob with the wish that Jacob may become the bearer of God's promise (28:3-4). Our text for the morning tells how that comes about.
A day's journey out, Jacob camps for the night at a place originally called Luz. As he sleeps, pillowing his head with a stone (undoubtedly covered with his cloak), he has a dream of a ladder -- or more properly, a stepped ramp -- reaching up into heaven, with angels descending and ascending on the ramp. And above the top end of the ramp, the Lord stands and addresses Jacob.
God identifies himself as the same God who spoke to Abraham and to Isaac, and then he gives to Jacob the same promise that he gave to Abraham (cf. Genesis 12:1-3). Jacob will have many descendants; God will give them a land to call their own; and through them, God will bring his blessing on all the families of the earth (28:13-14). In short, through Jacob and his descendants God will continue his work of restoring his world to the goodness that he intended for it in the beginning. God's plan is continuing to be worked out in history.
An additional promise to Jacob personally follows, however. God will protect Jacob and bring him back to Canaan, and God will never leave Jacob until all that God has promised him is fulfilled (v. 15). Jacob is journeying under the protection and guidance of a divine guarantee. That is the same assurance that our Lord gave to us when he promised, "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20). And it is the basis of the same confidence that Paul expressed to the Philippians, "I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day (i.e. the second coming) of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). Our lives are not lonely battles and aimless excursions through the valleys and heights of our everydays, but guided and watched over by the Lord who is working out his purpose through us.
Jacob is awestruck when he wakes, realizing that he has encountered God at the meeting place of heaven and earth (vv. 16-
17). As a result, he sets his stone pillow up as an altar and names the site "Beth-el," "the house of God" (vv. 18-19), marking it forever after as a holy place.
These last four verses, 16-19, have often been misused in sermons and meditations and at summer camp sites. Some worship leader will tell us that a church building or some structure or outdoor setting is "the house of God" with God present there. And contrary to the text, and indeed the scriptures as a whole, God then is understood as available anywhere at any time according to our word (contra Deuteronomy 12:5; Isaiah 55:6). But Jacob has been privy to the place where heaven meets earth, and there is only one location of that meeting place for us -- in Jesus Christ. In him, we encounter the Father, and only through him (John 14:6). And it is only because Christ has promised to be with two or three gathered together in his name (Matthew 18:20) that we can say our church building or some other worship location is the place where we meet God. We cannot command God's gracious presence, but nevertheless, he grants himself to us in his Son.
Lutheran Option -- Isaiah 44:6-8
Here in the strongest terms we encounter the monotheism of the Old Testament. There is no other God besides the God revealed to us through the witnesses preserved for us in the scriptures. God is the first and the last (v. 6), the Alpha and the Omega (cf. Revelation 1:8), the One at the beginning and at the end of human time and history, the eternal Lord, before and after all things (cf. Psalm 90:1-2). It is in Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), spoken to exiles in Babylonia who were surrounded by foreign deities, that we find the strongest statements in the Old Testament of the sole Godhead of the Lord.
But on what basis does the prophet Second Isaiah proclaim that fact? On two bases of history. First of all, God has had the power to rule over nature and empire and other gods in order to deliver his people Israel from slavery in Egypt. He was not thwarted by the gods of Egypt or by the power of a pharaoh or by the waters of the Reed Sea. He "redeemed" his people -- bought them back from their servitude (cf. Leviticus 25:47-49), which is the meaning of redemption. And God became their King and their Redeemer (Isaiah 44:6; cf. 6:1; 43:15, et al.).
Second, God is the One who rules over all of history. He can tell what is coming in the future, because he holds the future in his hand. He has a plan that he is working out over all the span of time, and he therefore knows what the future holds and what the end will be (Isaiah 44:7). No other religion or deity in the world has a purpose that over-arches the entire human story. Indeed, most religions of the world try to escape out of human history. But the Lord God of Israel and of Jesus Christ has that purpose, and he is day by day, month by month, year by year, century by century accomplishing it.
The proclamation of verse 8 can therefore also be spoken to us, good Christians. "Fear not, nor be afraid!" For we too have been redeemed from our slavery to sin and death, have we not? -- redeemed by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we too have been told by our Lord what the end of human history will be -- the Kingdom of God come on earth even as it is in heaven. Therefore, we too need not fear either things present or things to come, either life or death, principalities or powers, or anything in all creation, because we know -- we know with certain joy -- that God rules over our lives and universe and is directing them toward his glad conclusion. What is the world coming to? It is coming to Christ, when every knee will bow to him and every tongue confess that he is Lord of all, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11; cf. Isaiah 45:23).
