Proper 10 A

Genesis 25.19-34; Romans 8.1-11; Matthew 13.1-23

Did you ever hear the story of the two Bole Weevils who were rivals for the hand of a lovely little female Bole Weevil? We used to enjoy telling this story when I was studying for my PhD in literature back in the 1970s, because one of the Bole Weevils was a slight, scholarly type. In the comic books we grew up with there was always an ad for the “dynamic tension” Charles Atlas body-building programme. The ad showed a skinny kid getting sand kicked in his face by a beach bully. This was the familiar type being portrayed by the scholarly Bole Weevil in the story. His rival was an athletic type, rather dense, like Esau in the Old Testament story—one who would enjoy hunting and knew how to do car repair and lay tiles. The girls always went for this type. The scholarly Bole Weevil knew he didn’t have a chance as a suitor. But at the end of the day he was indeed the one chosen by the lovely little female Bole Weevil, to everyone’s surprise. And why? Because he was the lesser of the two Weevils.

This joke explains an awful lot of the Genesis narrative, and indeed the self-understanding of the Israelites throughout their history—the story of the triumph of the underdog. This is the story of Gideon, the story of the slaves in Egypt, the story of those who were exiled to Babylon for their own damned fault, but for whom God’s grace nevertheless became real once more in their homecoming. The story of Israel is the story of God’s grace for the underdog.

In Jacob’s case this story is dramatised as the unwillingness of the second child to settle for the cards he has been dealt. In traditional societies everywhere the older child gets it all. The Patriarchal narrative in Genesis is about patrimony going to those one would least expect to receive it—Isaac, born so late and unexpectedly in Abraham’s life just when all hope of promise would seem to have been dried up, Jacob the second son, and then when the disaster of famine hits it is the youngest, the good-as-dead Joseph who saves the day for his brothers. These are all stories of hope in defeat and exile, and they form the theme behind the child who grabs onto his elder brother’s heel as he is born.

The point of the story of course is not just that the grace of God saves the underdog. The underdog refuses to settle for the cards as they have been dealt, as I said above. I think of community organisers like Saul Alinsky or some of the famous Twentieth Century martyrs, Martin Luther King, Jr, Ghandi, Oscar Romero—people who refused to accept the way things were and acted to change them. The story of Israel is both the story of God’s grace and the story of those who carry the will of God in their own hearts to work for change.

Paul’s explication of the struggle between “the law of the spirit of life in Christ” and “the law of sin and death” in Romans 8 needs to be seen in terms of this underlying significance of the Jacob story as it broader biblical context. It certainly won’t do to diminish the significance of what Paul is saying by limiting it to a merely personalised concern for what we do with our silly members. The law of sin and death is not only that incurvature of the spirit to the concerns of self and security as described by Augustine but the limitation of hope to preserving the stability of what has been known in the past. What Paul is speaking about is a dynamism of a living spirit that breaks through all fundamentalisms and literalisations and power structures in family life, society, church and geopolitics that fear the future and fear vulnerability and fear what compassion for others might require of us—power structures that so often form the scaffolding of our very identities and leave us unable to grow and mature. It is one of the greatest mistakes of Christianity to see what Paul is talking about in terms of biological death and life after death. These are merely the vehicles of a metaphor articulating a dynamic that takes place in the ordinariness of our lived lives, in our experience of transformation and liberation. The church has hijacked this powerful language of personal and social transformation that lies so deeply in the heart of Scripture and literalised it as palliative assurance to the emotionally vulnerable at the time of funerals, and, as a consequence, severely impoverished the spiritual life of its people. When Paul says, verse 11, “If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his spirit that dwells in you” (my emphasis). The real death Jesus died, after all, was the same death we die at our conversion, the death to sin: “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God” (Romans 6.10). Death, for the baptised, is not something we either dread or anticipate in the future. For the Christian, death is located in the past. As the baptised, we can say, “I died” (Romans 7.10). This for me is a core theme in the Christian life, and so much works against us addressing it openly.

The opening of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13 always reminds me of the huge cottonwood tree that stood outside our house across the street from the church I served in Chicago. Once a year the entire neighbourhood was covered with its seeds—billions and billions (to quote Carl Sagan) of white downy little things carried on the hot summer air—a perfect image of the prodigality of God’s grace. But who understands God’s grace, and who can receive it? The inability of some to hear and see has been proverbial from the year zot, as Matthew indicates by quoting the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 6.9). Those who can hear (i.e., whose lives are fertile ground for the seed) are described more clearly in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. They are those whose spirits have been crushed, those who mourn and are not comforted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who are peacemakers, the anawim. The very experience of brokenness, in other words, is a prime factor in being able to hear (and therefore receive) the grace of God that remains opaque to others. The “others” are those who for reasons of social position, power, wealth and so on lead them to so focus in upon themselves and the anxious preservation of their own securities that they remain deaf to the gospel call to let go and to allow God to be God. Those who grasp lose, those who let go for the sake of Christ gain.

Matthew throws in a verse that in Mark is part of a parable about stewardship: “For those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Again, this needs to be read alongside the blessings of the Beatitudes, I think. In both Mark and Matthew this wisdom is about how unfair the gospel is, but in Matthew those who have been most blessed with wisdom are those at the bottom of the pile. In the upside down world of the gospel the voice of authority comes from below, from those who know what righteousness is because they have been denied it, and from the crucified, not, that is, from Caesar or from Pharaoh, the usual sources of authority. The wisdom of the parables has been denied to the clever.

Those who constitute poor soul for the gospel therefore are those whose life encumbrances make it virtually impossible for them to hear. They are poor stewards, unable to risk themselves in giving, and poor hearers of the Word. The seeds may be broadcast, but these seeds are pitched toward those who hold counter-values to the prevailing social order, which, like religion, always has this tendency toward a conservativism and resistance to change that guarantees oppression of the weak.

But it's not just politics we’re speaking of here. I had a conversation with a lovely young woman at a party a few weeks ago that lead to a question about what books we liked to read. Her favourites were those personal motivation books I see dominating the shelves at the airport W. H. Smiths shop. It came out later that her mother had died a couple of years ago, and that she was still struggling with this, and that she and her mother had both expected her mother to get better even at the last moment of an obviously terminal illness. I thought to myself as I listened how typical this young woman must be in representing the anxieties Matthew is so concerned about in his gospel, and how her anxieties are encouraged by being surrounded by a culture that pushes us to be all we can be without limits. Read The Fat Jesus by Lisa Isherwood. We can’t hear the gospel because we are possessed by the culture we live in.

A few years ago, thinking about my looming retirement (this coming January), I responded to a programme the county council was running giving free training to those who might wish to start up a business. I had a few interviews with an advisor in the programme. He saw the business of business as an ideology, and saw the church as the great enemy. The best thing about life was to get there first and climb to the top of the pile. He had no use for Fair Trade or Fair Trade, let along our work with destitute asylum seekers or other marginalised people like the gays and lesbians our open and affirming policy attempts to serve. It struck me how business damages people, and why there are so few business people in our churches today, whereas back in the fifties, when culture and church were more congenial bedfellows, we had plenty of business people in church. I believe it is still this way, in certain churches, back in my home country.

And then of course there is all this resistance to women bishops in the Church of England. What are the cultural factors that lead so may people to think this way? Who can explain the misogyny and the homophobia and the biblical literalism championed by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans?

In any case, there are multiple factors that lead the seeds to fall on infertile soil, and most of them have to do with the cultures in which we live and move and have our being. The gospel teaches us to break free, with the spirit that raised Christ from the dead, because at the end of the day these concerns that cause us to be deaf to the gospel are the sources of sin and death, in the Pauline sense of those words.

A final comment on Matthew 13 is that while Mark ended this story celebrating the superabundance of the harvest from the good soil, Mathew gives a variety of yields, a hundred, sixty, thirty-fold. Life is complex. Not even the good soil will give you consistent results.