8th Sunday after Trinity, Year A
1 Kings 3:5–12, Romans 8:26–39, Matthew 13:31–33,44–52
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
Amen.
A rapid fire set of parables from Jesus in our Gospel passage, all of them similes where Jesus is likening the kingdom of heaven to an experience that his listeners might be able to understand.
What joins them together is the sense of plenitude that they all have. In each case the Kingdom of Heaven is like something that is larger, or greater, or richer than what come before.
The Kingdom of God will not be a place of shortage, or hunger, or lack. Neither will it be a place of greed or exploitation or hoarding. God will give freely everything that we need.
Restraint and self-denial have their place, in Lent for example, but that is not the whole life that God calls us to. The self-denial of Lent helps us to focus on God in our busy lives, certainly, but it also heightens the sense of joy that comes on Palm Sunday and Easter Day. And God is found just as much or even more in the joy of those seasons.
Jesus is reminding us here that God has always provided for us, and continues to provide for us, and will provide for us for ever, and that this provision, like the manna in the wilderness will always meet all of our needs. There is no limit to the generosity of God.
But, again like the manna in the wilderness, God will not give us more than we need, and he will not give us that which we do not need.
It may not feel like that for us here, today.
Many of us are probably thinking that God is not providing for all our needs. Many still lack food, or shelter, or security and comfort. Many have more than they need, and greedily hoard more. Many of us, even if we feel comfortably provided for, probably have much which we don’t need, but which the world forces upon us. There is still sickness and death in the world, sorrow and pain.
But the promise that we have is that the kingdom is coming. The future will be better than the past. God is with us, even now, even in this world.
Even in our sorry and pain, God is with us. And God promises that the Kingdom will come, and the Kingdom will be filled with God’s abundance.
So we should live in the promise of that abundance. And God is abundant in his love for us, so we should be abundant in our love for each other.
As God welcomes all into his Kingdom, so we also should welcome all into our church, which should be the model of the kingdom that is to come.
As God finds joy in each of us, so we should find joy in fellowship with each other.
The parables end though with one of Jesus’ images of division and judgement. How does this fit with that message of abundance and welcome?
For some, such images are traditionally reassuring. It is right that the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. But as we delve deeper into the questions this raises, then it becomes more complex.
This is what Paul spends much of his letters, especially Romans, analysing and agonising over. As Paul recognises, none of us are good – we are all trapped in human sinfulness.
Paul’s answer to this, and the key to reading all of Paul’s letters, is that the only escape from this trap, the only way to be counted amongst the righteous, is through the free-given and unconditional love and grace of God.
Paul’s language and arguments are dense, complex and made all the more obscure because we are not natives of his culture and not native speakers of the first century Greek that he is writing in. We therefore can never be sure that we really understand the words he is using as he intended them to be understood, or get cultural references that he would have assumed that his audiences would understand.
It is therefore very easy to misunderstand and misinterpret Paul if we read from the bottom up and from the beginning to the end. We need to read Paul already knowing what the big picture, the overarching story already is.
And that big picture is that we are freed by the unconditional love and grace of God. We are not freed by our own efforts, or by our own faith, but by God’s freely given gift to us.
This provides a perfect example of the complexity of Paul’s language. The phrase that Paul often uses is being made righteous or justified. At least that is how it is often translated into English. It comes up in our reading from Romans today – those he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Justification is a big theme in Romans, but what does it really mean?
The honest answer is that we can’t really be sure. The family of words that Paul uses for this stem from dikaio, which is legal Greek vocabulary. Paul would have been very familiar with legal Greek, and with court processes – he did after all spend a lot of his life in court and in jail. He was a hardened repeat offender. If the Romans had had a three strikes law, he would definitely have fallen foul of it.
So the word can mean to act or judge fairly. Or it can mean to vindicate or find innocent. For Paul especially, who probably felt that when he was brought before a court he was being unfairly accused, justification would have had strong overtones of being found innocent and being freed.
So what does this mean for Jesus’ description of the good and evil being separated – the good for reward and the evil for punishment.
It means that we should always read this, and know that we cannot claim the right to be judged as being good. We all fall short, some more, some less, but none of us can honestly say that we do not fall short.
And I think that Jesus is talking about the separation of the good from the evil to remind us that our shortcomings have consequences.
We cannot enter the Kingdom through our own efforts, but God’s love and grace is such that he calls us into the Kingdom despite that. He forgives us our sins, and welcomes us as his children.
Our actions and our faith are not a precondition to this forgiveness, but are a response to it – we try and lead good lives because God has already forgiven us and will continue to forgive us, and also because our sins have consequences – God may forgive us, but the consequences of our actions live on in the lives of others who we have hurt.
Our faith is not a condition for God to forgive us and welcome us into the Kingdom, because nothing God does can ever be conditional. Nothing and no one has any power over God, to force or prevent Him from doing whatever he choses to do. God’s action is always unconstrained. People may say that God’s own sense of justice requires him to punish us, which is why Jesus needs to die to satisfy God’s need for justice, but God has no needs, God has no constraints, God can act however he wants.
And I believe that God chooses freely to welcome us all into his kingdom, and there is nothing that we or anyone else can do to stop ourselves or anyone else being welcomed into that kingdom, because, as Paul so powerfully puts it, there is nothing, not death or life, or angels, or rulers, things present or things to come, or powers, or height or depth or anything else in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing, not even ourselves, can come between us and God’s love for us.
Amen