TRINITY 4 10.30AM 2011 Standing under Scripture
The problem with Bible study is that sometimes it enables us too easily to tame the Scriptures. We can ask ourselves questions about who wrote this or that text and when it was written and what was the context in which it was written. We can compare one passage with another and note the differences; we may worry about whether we like the way God is spoken about. We do all these things and in so doing we avoid the weight of scripture, its word for us, its challenge to us. We fail to put ourselves under the Scriptures; we cease to listen.
Take for example our first reading from Isaiah. We are so used to worrying about the very human way in which the Old Testament talks about God that sometimes we don’t notice how unusual the Old Testament view of God is. Though the Israelites began by accepting that there may be other Gods, by the time our passage from Isaiah was written their beliefs had changed; not only was there no other God like their God, no other God who made such demands, there was no other God. The Jewish people had come to believe that there is only one God, one source of all that is, one, unique power keeping all things in being. Other people might believe that different parts of creation were the responsibility of different Gods, other people might hedge their bets by worshipping several Gods, but that option was not open to the Jews. Not only did they worship one God but they did not ask questions about where God came from – they did not ask, as other religions did, about the origin of their God. Their God was wholly other, totally unlike any of his creatures, and therefore he could have no origin like other Gods, and therefore no image could be made of him. Unlike all other Gods, the Israelites’ God was never visually represented. Nothing is like him. And yet this holy, strange, and unimaginable God is our rock. Language forces us to put this God wholly beyond our reach and in the next moment he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is not abstract or impersonal but the rock on which we stand, the foundation of our lives. He is a mystery but he is also the source of who I am, the infinitely beyond from whose presence I can never be parted.
This intimacy is made finally explicit in the life of Jesus, through whom we come to know ourselves as children of God – the God who is spoken of as ‘Abba, Father’. And that for Paul reveals a weight of glory which outweighs any suffering he may experience. Nevertheless, Paul also realizes that though we may believe in the closeness of God we may, even so, rarely experience it; we experience God rather in a sense of longing. That longing can take many forms; a longing for intimacy and closeness and vision, a longing for an end to the tragic inequality and suffering in the world, a longing for the end of prejudice and ignorance, animosity and hatred; in a strange way it is what we long for that makes us most alive. And startlingly we find that Paul believes such longing is fundamental to the whole of creation. Creation awaits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. Creation groans with us for the time when human beings will be able to live together in a world which is no longer damaged by our presence. Human beings and the world they live in will share in glory – and we are saved by that hope. Longing and hope – these are what make us most fully alive. We may not see or know what it is we look forward to, but it is defined by our most passionate concerns and commitments in the present. Hope is born of longing, and the certainty that the glory we hope for will outweigh every suffering.
And yet so often that hope can feel strangled by circumstances. The wheat and the tares grow together. This is another uncomfortable parable. There is a black and whiteness about the parable of the wheat and the tares which can seem deeply troubling. There is some subtlety in this parable but it can be overshadowed by the absoluteness of the judgment at the end. The subtlety resides in the weeds; lolium temulentum or darnel, initially looks very much like wheat. It is only when the wheat has reached the grain bearing stage that it can be seen to be different to the darnel. The wheat and the weeds can look very alike. So much of our experience doesn’t fall into the black and white category. Motives can be mixed, the consequences of our actions are uncertain, we can live in circumstances where good and evil are rarely contrasted in a dramatic and obvious way. We can live with a sense that though we try to be good in our everyday lives yet our own well being might seem to be deeply unjust in comparison with the awful suffering of the victims of famine and violence. And we do not know what our responsibility for that suffering might be and we do not know whether we can do anything about it other than by making charitable donations to relive just a little of that suffering. And so we live with guilt and uncertainty and the struggle at least to be kind and generous. We live with a sense that the wheat and the weeds are both in us.
One way of reading this parable may of course be to see the children of the kingdom and the children of the evil one not as people but as actions, attitudes, motives and consequences. The divine judgment imaged as fire may imply the burning up of all that has been wrong and evil in every life, the weeds that threaten to strangle all our potential goodness. And when they are gone whatever goodness there has been in all of us will be left to shine in the kingdom of our Father. Part of our longing and our hope may be that there is some goodness in all of us even in those who seem the most evil; but we cannot know that until the harvest has been gathered in.
Until then we stand under scripture – we stand on the rock which is our unimaginable yet intimate God; we hunger and thirst for justice and reconciliation, we hope for the glory that will heal our suffering, we endure in a world where good and evil cannot be separated and where we need a keen sense of our own capacity for mistake and hurt; and because we know that, we also know that God’s incalculable love for every person is the only foundation on which the church and we who are part of it, can grow.