Teaching by Frances Flatman on the Readings for next weekend :-
As I understand it, many people don’t follow the Christian way because they believe they can cope perfectly well using their own abilities. They would assume we can be perfectly happy with the world as it is and if not, think its within our grasp to fix things. Contrary to this understanding, the Christian is called to see things quite differently. We live in a state of waiting, of divinely given dissatisfaction, aware that we don’t ever quite ‘get there’. Indeed, we live in expectation of God’s enormous and quite unlooked for gift, something actually beyond our human apprehension. Many of us also bewail the state of our world; the mess we all contribute daily to it, be it global warming or war or the dreadful capacity we all have to rubbish others, and in particular those with whom we disagree.
This situation has a very, very long history, as 2nd Isaiah (55:10-11) the prophet of the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE was, with his even earlier colleagues of the 8th century, so aware. This is the prophet of the shattering Suffering Servant poems, the one like 52/53 so familiar to us on Good Friday in which the nation, Israel, is embodied as the ‘Servant’, who represents the entire nation, torn to bits by their enemies, yet who is ultimately the closest to God. Here, in our brief passage he looks forward to the return from exile of his nation. All of these great prophets of Israel, who were without exception at odds with the court and the temple ever thought that they, on their own, could or would ever sort things out. Indeed, most of the time, most of them thought that all the disasters and shame and collapse of their nation was precisely due to the stupidity and failure to act as God required of his chosen, and the state and even temple religion consistently failed. How little has changed.
We meet Matthew’s Jesus (13:1-23) about midway in the Gospel. It will help if we place everything in context. John the Baptist has been imprisoned by Herod and will shortly be executed despite the fact that the ordinary people saw him as a prophet and a true representative of God. Jesus is well into his Galilean ministry, healing and teaching the people, and even in touch with non-Jews who he clearly includes in his announcement of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, scribes and Pharisees from the locality and Jerusalem are scandalised by his behaviour; his mixing with undesirables such as tax collaborators with the Romans and prostitutes, both ritually unclean, and even the dead and the leprous. Already Jesus, according to the temple and law abiding, is believed hopelessly out on a limb, and his healing powers are ascribed to Beelzebul the devil; and he always heals on the Sabbath, the proscribed day, but for him God’s day, the day of life and grace. At this point, Jesus teaches the crowds in parables, here we have one, that of the Sower. He gives three examples of seeds which fail to come to fruition and yield any crop, and three which do so in abundance. The disciples are puzzled by his methodology and in response Jesus refers them to 1st Isaiah (6:9-10) with its devastating critique of his nation back in the 8th century BCE, coarse of heart, dull of hearing, eyes shut to reality, so that their hearts cannot respond to the truth. Those who know anything of this and other periods of ancient history will recall they are all about Israel’s blindness to the fact of their own weakness and their conviction that they could win battles against the superpowers of the day, symbolic of their failure to live properly and humbly in relation to God. The disciples are meant to realise that the parable is making clear the division between followers of Judaism and his own disciples, the latter, the good seed.
Jesus takes the disciples through the parable, indicating that it is those who listen to God, those open to his teaching, who will become like the abundant seeds. Clearly from the context there is a significant degree of rejection of others, those who, like the unfruitful seeds fail to respond as we should. Matthew was writing in the aftermath of the failed Jewish Revolt and its murderous repercussions for the nation, and where faith in Christ increasingly became an outreach to converts from paganism. Christians today find the idea of any rejection of us and others by God difficult to handle, we like the ‘mercy’ angle, and reject any idea of a God who condemns others. Yet we have to take on board Matthew’s and Jesus’ terrible sorrow at the failure of Judaism to follow his way. Without this appreciation Matthew is incomprehensible. It’s a frightening and difficult path for us to tread.
This is however central to the work of St Paul, especially in Romans, here 8:18-23, and difficult as it is we must try to enter into his thought. Paul was one of the elite Pharisees, trained by Gamaliel a famous scholar. He would have known his major prophets and their message of condemnation of his nation through and through, and my guess is that he was equipped to ask awkward questions about the isolation of Judaism and its exclusivism and separation from the rest of humanity. When at some point the grace and power of Jesus’ message hit him, on the road to Damascus or whenever, there was for him no turning back. Hence, he can speak in a supremely non-Jewish way of the ‘Whole of creation is eagerly waiting (anxiously awaiting in Greek) for God to reveal his sons.’ He understands that this sense of our incompleteness without God is a universal thing, embracing the entire creation and not simply a few ‘chosen’ Jews. He understands our estrangement from the divine, significantly not as due to any fault on our part but as written into the nature of the entire cosmos as it awaits the redemption which will come; not through any good acts on our part but as the gift of the creator in and through Christ, a gift of such enormity we can barely comprehend it. So ,whilst believers and all who ‘wait in hope’ can and do live through the power of the Spirit there is nonetheless a lack of completion, of finality about our longing for the fullness of God. Paul is very keen on this ‘all in the same boat’ valuation as he insists on the removal of Jewish food laws which divide them and us, just as he totally rejects following the Jewish law as the path to the fullness of God which is for him merely provisional and a pointer to sins committed and plays no substantial part in redemption. He sees all of us as ‘groaning in one great act of giving birth’, whilst we await the final act in our story of becoming godlike in God the Son, the Father’s unimaginable gift to his creation.
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