Proper 12A

1. A Girardian might want to connect this story with the one that immediately follows it: 1 Kings 3:16-28, the story of Solomon's wise decision in a dispute over an infant between two prostitutes. Girard has stated in several places that this is the passage in the Bible that first sparked and crystallized his thesis about the sacrificial logic to be found deep in anthropology, and the process of its uncovering by the biblical text. See for example: Things Hidden, pp. 237ff.

1. The Hebrew Scriptures are also candid in cataloguing Solomon's mistakes, e.g., in 1 Kings 11. He married many foreigner's whose influence turned his heart away from Yahweh. 1 Kings 11:3: "Among his wives were seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart." What a recipe for mimetic rivalry! Not very wise on his part. And the text seemingly tries to scapegoat the wives. Clearly, his wives couldn't have turned Solomon's own heart away from God. Solomon's heart is his own responsibility. The wives surely had a strong influence, but how much influence, and of what variety, they had is ultimately his responsibility.

3. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from July 28, 2002 (Woodside Village Church).

4. Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, pp. 143-157. McLaren (whose next book will have a significant Girardian component) suggests a theme for making a unified reading of Romans that I think works well -- namely, Jews and Gentiles being able to live together in Christ, who is "the firstborn within a large family" (Rom. 8:29). See the citation on this book in Proper 4A for a more complete description of the theme and McLaren's Seven Move outline for Romans. This passage comes within his Fourth Move: Unite all in a common struggle and a common victory, illustrated by two stories: the Story of Me and the Story of We (Rom. 7:7-8:39), of which he writes:

The resonances here with previous circlings are obvious and strong (especially with 5:1-11), with one new metaphor added: adoption, rendering Jews and Gentiles siblings in God’s one family as well as fellow citizens in God’s one kingdom. Once again Paul’s mind naturally follows a course from forgiveness (“justified” in 5:1, “no condemnation” in 8:1) to relationship (“peace with God” in 5:1, “children of God” in 8:14), to suffering (“boast in sufferings” in 5:3, “suffering with him” in 8:17), to victory and reward (“hope does not disappoint” and “love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” in 5:5, “be glorified with him” and “the Spirit bears witness with our Spirit” in 8:16-17). I find these parallels strong and moving. The points made in previous moves are truly glorious, but they shine even more brightly here, as Paul expands the scope of suffering and reward and glorification, seeing all of creation groaning in empathy and anticipation with this new humanity in Christ — one new humanity, one new kingdom, articulated in “we” and “us”. (pp. 151)

5. Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Nothing will ever be quite same in Pauline scholarship after Campbell's dismantling of justification, showing Paul's language of justification to be a secondary way of speaking for Paul when in debate with a version of Christianity that is conditional in its grace. And because we misread Romans 1-4, Protestantism has often lapsed into the conditional grace that Paul is trying to undo. Paul's primary language of unconditional grace is a language of deliverance elaborated in Romans 5-8. This is now the definitive book that must be contended with regarding any crucial interpretations of Romans. See my "Customer Review" on the Amazon.com page.

1. In 2011 this was the third week of a three week series on the mystery of suffering. It began two weeks ago with the thesis that the good soil in the Gospels are the times of suffering in our lives, with the sermon "The Good Soil of Suffering." Last week, for the second in the series on suffering, I turned to the Romans 8 text and to Brian McLaren's recent book, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words. McLaren's book is masterful once again, mapping out our spiritual journey in four seasons: Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony. And each season uses three simple words. I found his chapter on "Help" in the season of Complexity to fit the Romans 8 text for this week. I use a quote from the book, and then the second half of the sermon basically uses many of McLaren's words edited to fit the sermon, "Wading into the Deep Water: The Mystery of Suffering."

This week I used Romans 8 text and McLaren's book once again, ch. 21, on the simple word why, for the sermon "The Mystery of Suffering, Part III."

2. Preaching on this passage could be an opportunity to say something in a non-funereal setting. I use the conclusion of Romans 8 quite frequently for funeral sermons. Here, on a Sunday in the midst of a serial reading of Romans, the preacher might benefit from the wider context that is too difficult to make use of for a funeral.

3. Vs. 28, "All things work for good," sounds similar to what one often hears at the funeral home. In an effort to make sense of death, we ascribe to God's providence a reason for every solitary event: "God must have had a reason to take your child now." But consider this verse in context. Does it mean that each event might be deemed as "good" or as having a reason? Or does it mean that the end of all things is good? In other words, that all things eventually work for good, even if they strike us as bad, right now. It's not that there's a reason for every specific event. It's that all events will eventually add up to "good." The context of this passage, we should remind ourselves, is an entire creation groaning in labor pains of suffering. Yes, there is suffering now, but there is the hope that it is on its way to a glory to be revealed later, an as-yet-unseen hope.

And what comes after vs. 28 witnesses to a negative context. Paul is asking questions like, "What shall we say?"; "who will persecute us?"; "who will separate us from the love of Christ?" These questions reflect the experiences of persecution, suffering, and death. He also explicitly states that we are being killed like sheep led to the slaughter. But the proclaimed hope is that nothing in creation can make the suffering due to separation ultimate, because nothing can separate us from God's love in Jesus Christ. I'd like to find a meaningful way to bring these questions of ultimate concern into the wider context of the whole of Romans 8 without it being simply a theological treatise. That's the challenge.

4. Last week I ended up coming to what for me is a key insight: defining faith as a way of responding to evil. The parable of the wheat and weeds challenges us respond to evil patiently, letting it have its place in creation until the harvest. When we try to prematurely pluck it out, we end up doing evil ourselves. We pull up the wheat along with it. This passage from St. Paul seems to corroborate such a response to evil.

A story that has inspired me is that in the movie Simon Birch. Simon is a twelve year-old dwarf who suffers not only from his physical handicaps but also from the abuse of others. Yet his response to this evil is not bitterness, nor resentment, nor plans for vengeance on his persecutors. No, he chooses a different response to evil. He chooses the way of faith that keeps him confident of helping people someday. God will use him to do something heroic that will help save others, not work some form of vengeance.

I started looking into the book that the movie is based on, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and I've found some deeper issues there. (Apparently, there's some controversy over whether the movie does any justice to the book, Irving himself not allowing any use of the names from the book, for example. But I found the movie to have a fair presentation of some of the books key themes. Certainly, no movie can capture all the complexities of a lengthy novel.) Now, I'm reading the book, and finding a bigger emphasis on Owen's strong feeling of God's providence such that everything in his life happens for a reason, including instances of tragic suffering. In the movie, his response of faith looks primarily to an ending at which all things have worked together for good. In the book, there's more of a wrestling with all the individual moments leading up to the ending. Perhaps it will give me a foil for reading Romans 8. In any case, I recommend both the movie and book.

1. James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 83-86. In commenting on the parables of Jesus, Alison illustrates his comments primarily with the parables from today's gospel.

2. David McCracken, The Scandal of the Gospels, ch. 5, "Parabolic Lies, Parabolic Truth," pp. 71ff., and ch. 6, "Training the Scribes of the Kingdom," pp. 90ff., which focuses on Mt 13.

To repeat much of what was shared two weeks ago (Proper 10A): To understand Matthew 13, take a peek at the end. As the title of McCracken's ch 6--"Training the Scribes of the Kingdom"--might indicate, his interpretation of Matthew 13 takes vs. 52 as a key. It's a chapter worth reading.

If we take the whole chapter of Matthew 13, we find skandal- three times. Matthew's Jesus uses the Greek root skandal in both explanations of parables in this chapter. The rocky soil yields those who, "when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away (skandalizo)." (vs. 21) According to the explanation of the wheat and weeds parable, at the end of the age, "The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin (skandalon) and all evildoers..." (vs. 41) After Jesus tells these parables, he goes to his hometown (13:54-58), where "they took offense (skandalizo) at him." (For more on skandalon see the page "Girard and the New Testament Use of skandalon.")

This chapter falls into McCracken's view of both parable and skandalon: they are the occasion for either taking offense or responding with faith. (He is influenced not only by Girard but also by Kierkegaard's Either/Or.) Here is his conclusion (p. 106):

1. With Matthew 13 spliced apart in the lectionary over these past three weeks, how much of the context gets lost? Does it come through that this section of Matthew's gospel is about Jesus' preaching of God's Kingdom meeting resistance? The lead parable, the Parable of the Sower, certainly conveys resistance to the Word. But do the interpretations of the ensuing parables get skewed when separated from this lead parable and the rest of the context?

The portions of this chapter which are omitted in our three week tour through Matthew 13 are crucial to that context. Jesus and Matthew explain the purpose of telling the parables in terms of the resistance to Jesus' message. Jesus quotes Isaiah about eyes unseeing and ears unhearing; Matthew quotes the Psalmist (78:2) to say that Jesus spoke in parables to proclaim Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (Matt. 13:35). The concluding story in the chapter recounts Jesus being rejected in his own hometown of Nazareth.

There is also the aspect of what is lost by separating these parables from each other over the three weeks. We've already mentioned that the Parable of the Sower, as the lead parable, might be used to shed light on the others.

2. Something else extremely crucial is lost, I think, in separating the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds from the Parable of the Mustard Seed, which, in Matthew's ordering, follow one after the other, with even the interpretation of the Wheat and Weeds coming several verses later. Here's what I mean: the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds tells of "an enemy" who sows weeds into a farmer's field; now follow that immediately with a parable of a someone who intentionally sows a weed -- mustard! -- into his own field! Can we read these two parables together without being scandalized? Or is it better to separate them and seemingly derive two quite separate meanings from them? (By the way, these two can't be read together in Mark or Luke, because only Matthew transmits the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds.)

I would like to attempt the former option, reading these two parables together, within the wider context of Matthew's portrayal of resistance to Jesus' message of the Kingdom. The Parable of the Wheat and Weeds can be read as a subversion from within of our usual way to respond to evil. We think an enemy to God has sown evil into this world and that we are commissioned to root it out. Jesus says no. We aren't as expert as we think in knowing good from evil (something hidden from us since the beginning of our human worlds, when we fell for the serpent's temptation), and so we are prone to ripping up the wheat with the weeds. We are counseled to patiently wait for the harvest.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed immediately ups the ante by portraying a farmer who sows a weed into his field on purpose. To me, this now represents what God has in fact done in Jesus Christ. Jesus is sown into this world as one who will willingly let himself be treated as a weed in order that we might finally see the deadliness of our thinking we know good from evil and that we can thus be God's servant by weeding out the evil.

3. This interpretation of the Parable of the Mustard Seed does a number of things. First, it makes sense of why Jesus' message of the Kingdom was resisted and rejected. It also resonates with the preciousness of this message as one of grace; it replaces the wrathful God of the Last Day with the forgiving God of the Cross. When one finally opens oneself to that grace, the reaction should be to sell everything else in order to purchase the new.

Finally, it also makes sense to me about the smallest of seeds growing into a large bush-turned-tree. Jesus is sown into this world with the smallest of starts, as absolutely alone on the Cross; with the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, that start slowly grows into the largest of trees.

An example that comes to mind is that of what has happened to our view of "handicapped" people. In John 9, the disciples are still under the purview of the wrathful God who punishes such folks; they ask Jesus who sinned, he or his parents, that the man was born blind. The blind man was one of those weeds we would have wanted to uproot before the harvest. Today, after the Cross has blossomed into much wider sympathy for our past victims, we have a very different view of people who are visually challenged. Yes, often the "politically correct" language becomes a justification for rooting out some other weeds, but it also attempts to express a real change in paradigms. "Visually challenged" represents a more positive view than "handicapped" -- which is a tremendously more positive view than the disciples' view of this man as a sinner punished by God. From the tiniest beginning in the cross, we are learning to see our former choices of weeds as wheat. We are able to be much more inclusive about the children of God who represent the harvest at the end of the world.