Teaching by Frances Flatman on next weekend's Readings :-
Our Readings remind us that ultimately God is in control of the universe he brought into being and everything in it. Much of the time many of us, religious or not, despair of the world as it seemingly rushes headlong to destruction, whether because of wars and the destruction that brings in terms of peoples and their lives, or due to disease or other natural disasters to which we contribute. We tend to think we can, or ultimately will, find solutions to life's problems; but whereas we can make progress we never really sort everything out, new disasters arise, new injuries to society pop up all unanticipated by us in our self-confidence and arrogance.
The Book of Wisdom comes from Alexandria C 50 BCE, so is a very late ‘Inter-testamental work’. It was the product of thinkers, some Hebrew and others of Greek origin, who were asking the questions which we still grapple with today. Egypt in the last century BCE was not a stable place, albeit still hugely wealthy due to the fertility of the Nile and its exports of grain. Its Greek Ptolemy rulers slaughtered each-other as they sought power, whilst Palestine was now under Roman control, and its Hasmonean line survivors of the Maccabees shortly would be obliterated by Herod the Great. The Roman Empire was successively being torn apart by dynasts, Marius, Sulla,, and then Pompey, beheaded in Egypt after Pharsalus in 49, and then Julius Caesar murdered in 44 BCE, which sparked further civil war with the death of Antony and Cleopatra, and ultimately saw Octavius/ Caesar Augustus, his heir as sole ruler of a vast Empire which included Egypt. Those in the path of these various armies suffered greatly, and entire and once rich provinces like Asia were impoverished by the likes of Brutus and Cassius, as they raised armies to fight against Caesarian forces. Very few could have felt safe, and certainly international trade and all the other things that added to life’s comforts were in short supply. Losses among ordinary army men were colossal, as were the effects of their passing through various territories. Writers, like that of ‘Wisdom’, pondered the state of the world and their place in it. In a period singularly lacking in human mercy and compassion, they recognised their ultimate reliance upon their creator God and his infinite mercy, and came to despise the ‘insolence’ of men.
In our Gospel (Matthew 13:24-43) and a continuation of the ‘Sower’ from last week’s Readings, we find Jesus voicing a very similar understanding of the situation some 80 years after the writers of ‘Wisdom’ which he most likely knew very well. By now half-way through his Gospel, Matthew's Jesus, as we have seen, was regularly at loggerheads with the ‘righteous’, the scribes and Pharisees, whose hard line commitment to temple Judaism required everyone to comply with the heavy demands of the Jewish law, and where failure to do so set others at odds with the entire religious structure of the time. When so many occupations such as farming and pastoralism made one ‘unclean’ or a ‘sinner’, and the death and disease which stalked the entire society cut so many off from the ‘righteous’ as disease was understood as implying moral irresponsibility; we can see how Jesus, who consistently shared his life and healing powers with these groups, had by this time found himself at an impasse in relations with the authorities. The ‘Sower’, as we saw, illustrates his view of the great divide in society and of those fitted to share God’s life of the Kingdom. Here today we have three more parables exploring his understanding of the Kingdom of his Father. I suspect that the Parable of the darnel, so negative in its whole sense and in its ultimate outcome, is precisely his recognition that there was no longer any hope of any sharing of minds between his view of God and the Kingdom and that of the scribes and Pharisees, in which the parable ends so brutally in the burning of the darnel, later explained as the source of offence or ‘scandal’ in Greek, that which offends God. On the other hand, the two following parables, of the mustard seed and the woman and the flour, are both profoundly hopeful and productive. Significantly, both of them are what we might think of as ‘small time’ examples. The emphasis is on the tiny seed which grows and produces abundance of habitat for the birds; and note birds in general and not those either included or excluded by Leviticus 11. It is a picture of flourishing and goodness stretching out to the whole creation and with little to do with human beings, law abiding or not. The third parable, of the woman who makes bread, is so much better read in a foreign language, for we have no idea of the value of ‘three measures of flour’, 25 kilos in French. This is a woman baking for her village or small town, regularly feeding them as her business, a centre of community and commerce, a place of outreach and hope, and a fitting small-town picture of the Kingdom of God. Jesus, recalling Ps 78:2, reminds the crowd that this intimate entry into God’s will has been there, given in parables ‘Since the foundation of the world’, for those with hearts and minds open enough to the truth and trusting in their creator.
Over the last few weeks, we have been following Paul through Romans (8:26-27) and have joined with him in bewailing the impossibility of our ever making it on our own by way of human reasoning and self-awareness, since despite these abilities our weakness of will continually gets in the way of right action. Remember again, he was writing to Christians in Rome, many of them converts whose former ways of behaving would have been lived in direct opposition to the example of Christ - slave owning – abusive - regularly enjoying the gladiatorial slaughter of fellow humans - concerned every day to be on the make and to flourish in this go-getting society, and whose understanding of the meaning of Christs’ life and sacrifice must have been desperately limited, as is our own. Bewailing all the obstacles this placed in the way of both himself and his fellow Christians, Paul turns in hope and desperation to the power of God’s Spirit to intervene and put us on the right path. It is in surrendering to the power of the Spirit, allowing and recognising the full extent of our inability to reach out to the enormity of the divine, that can be our only hope:
‘For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words.’ Recognising the paucity of our entire capacity to enter into any real relationship with God, we can only place ourselves in his presence. Paul is making the point that this is not some exam, some bar mitzvah to be passed, but a total gift of self to God in the full knowledge that we don't know ourselves at all well, let alone the person of God, and only by this absolute reliance on the other, so dimly perceived, can we enter into his life which is His will.
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