Two-Minute Homily: Dual Citizenship          

FINDINGS II

Proper 11 - A - July 17, 2011

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43            

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43   

Jesus spoke another parable to them, thus: "Heaven's rule may be compared to the one who sowed good seed in his field. And while everyone was sound asleep, an enemy came and sowed the seed of weeds among the wheat and then slunk away. When the crop began to come up, so came up the weeds as well. The slaves who worked for the field's owner came to him and said, 'Master, we thought the seed you sowed was good seed. If that's true, where did these weeds come from?' The owner answered, 'Some enemy has done this to me.' The slaves answered, 'Then shall we pluck up the weeds?' 'No,' the owner replied. 'If you do that, you'll pluck up the wheat along with the weeds. Let both grow up side by side [until they are obviously distinguishable], then at the harvest I will instruct the harvesters to gather the weeds first and tie them up in bundles for the burning. Then they can harvest the wheat for me.'" . . . Then Jesus left the crowds behind and went [back] into the house. Whereupon his disciples approached him wanting to have some explanation of the weeds in the parable. This is what he said: "The one who sows the good seed is The One Like Us; the field is the world and the good seed are the heirs of heaven's rule; the weeds are the offspring of the enemy [the evil one]. That one is the devil; the harvest is the end of this age, and those who do the reaping are [heavenly] messengers who will scoop up all those who undermine heaven's rule, and they will pitch them into the furnace of fire where, as a result, there will be heard the sound of weeping and gnashing teeth. Then those who have been found righteous [judged and vindicated] will shine like the sun under the rule of heaven. So if you have ears, use them."

(Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook.)

RUBRIC

The parable of the wheat and the weeds over time has been not only misunderstood but misapplied, sometimes in a spirit so unlike the one to whose its imagination is credited. It has been used to demonize heretics whom prevailing hierarchies in the church found troublesome. The Donatists of the late fourth century C.E., who apparently prized doctrinal purity above peace and good will, wanted anathematized as unwanted weeds any who did not believe as they believed. Martin Luther was content to exclude heretics but not to kill them, while, by a kind of twisted logic, was willing to have the ruling secular authorities do both. Gott im Himmel!

The implication is that heterodoxy is the work of an evil one just as the parable suggests of the weeds. Orthodoxy is the fruit of the good seed. And so it goes. We will attempt to make the understanding of the parable less extreme and more useful to the contemporary world as we recall George Orwell's condemnation of ideology as a collection of smelly little orthodoxies.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

Matthew was a committed recycler. Within the space of one chapter he reuses the material of 13: 1-9 and its allegorical interpretation of 13: 18-23, this time making explicit that the parabolic referent is the "rule of heaven." It may be that Matthew knew of the parable of the seed growing in secret of Mark 4: 2-29 and appropriated some of its basic material and edited it for his own use. But the direction is not the optimistic one of the hundred-fold harvest, but the regrettable reality of weeds sown by an "enemy" -- the Greek there means "a hateful (έχθός) or hated person."

There is a natural desire on the part of those trying to encourage good to root out the bad at the first opportunity. But the teller of the original parable was apparently familiar with crop farming and knew that to attempt to remove the weeds (ζιζάια) -- a wheat-lookalike called "darnel," which was a nuisance -- would remove the wheat as well because the one could be mistaken for the other. The idea was to wait until both the wheat and the weed had grown to maturity, then removing and discarding the latter while harvesting the former.

The parable poses an interesting question about the nature of the Matthean communities from which this peculiar material (the explanation of the parable) came. Was there internal strife with competing teachers, each perceived by the other to be headed in a wrong direction? The hint of final judgment comes with the gathering of the faux wheat and its consignment to the fire. How bad were things at century's end for the Matthean communities that they gave in to a them-and-us mentality so reminiscent of the struggle visible in the Fourth Gospel where the "them" finally became simply "the Jews?"

In Matthew's interpretation of his own parable the at-first anonymous sower becomes "The One Like Us," a messianic figure. The field (αγρός) becomes the world (κόσμος), the good seed is equated with the heirs of the heavenly rule and the bad with the offspring of the enemy. And so goes the allegorical interpretation.

One wonders what the phrase "heirs of the heavenly rule" denoted in the Matthean understanding of the time. The rule of heaven would have been the environment resulting from the internalization (planting?) and practice of "these sayings" (Matthew 7:28) -- largely the ethic enunciated in the Sermon of the Mount -- in the community (harvest?) The offspring of the enemy would have been those who in the eyes of the communities did not commit to or embrace Jesus Judaism.

It has certainly been tempting to some who read the gospels as eschatological tracts to use Matthew 13: 36-43 as a prophecy of coming judgment. There is an odor of Manichaeism about it, to be sure. Yet it cannot be seen as anything less than regrettable that the Judaism of the synagogue and the movement of Jesus Judaism diverged in opposition. It reminds one of the unfortunate schism that occurred in the 18th century between Anglican and Methodism. Jesus Judaism could have profited from keeping in useful dialogue with the synagogue (see Matthew 5: 17-19) and the synagogue from the reform and renewal Jesus Judaism offered (see Matthew 9: 16-17).

Matthew here, though, burns the bridge with his thinly veiled metaphor of the "furnace of fire" and the weeping and gnashing of teeth. The language of 13:43 (Then those who have been found righteous [judged and vindicated] will shine like the sun under the rule of heaven) borrowed from Daniel 12:3 gives an uncompromising Maccabean fierceness to the text. One can readily see how the early church cut off its synagogue roots and went its own way, consigning to perdition those who did not follow. It is a tendency too often manifested in the life of the church, and, furthermore, has been one of the contributing factors to anti-Semitism.

It may be that the wheat-weed parable reflects an unfortunate period of religious history and needs to be viewed in that light.

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Two-Minute Homily

Dual Citizenship             

By Harry T. Cook

When I took retirement from the active ministry of the Episcopal Church, my wife and I sought another affiliation, being no longer permitted by protocol to continue in community with people we'd known in the parish I'd  served for 22 years. Such an affiliation was not to be found in an Episcopal Church, as it turned out -- though I have joined myself in part to a parish up the road a piece in which occasionally I am asked by its very nice rector, who is a friend, to do some teaching.

As a couple, though, we chose to affiliate with The Birmingham Temple, which was the first secular humanist congregation in world Judaism. It happens that its founding rabbi, the late Sherwin T. Wine, and I had been friends, colleagues and collaborators for years. His successor, the amazing Rabbi Tamara Kolton, became the pastoral figure in our lives. From my years of being around the temple, I realized I knew a good many people there. They liked me. I liked them. And so we joined.

No, we did not convert to Judaism. Neither did we leave the Episcopal Church, though we sometimes think it has left us in its perfervid efforts to appease its right-wing factions.

I had studied Hebrew and Aramaic in a graduate school of theology and, as a matter of fact, won the coveted Hebrew prize in my first year. I continued my research for years using those languages, and during a term of years as the religion reporter for a major daily newspaper burnished my knowledge of Judaism and of its institutions. Withal, I had become over time a journeyman scholar mostly of first-century C.E. Greek texts -- mostly those in what is called the New Testament.

What I found in my research was a continuum, the beginnings of which may well have been in the lives of simple, egalitarian communities in the hill country of what is now northern Israel in the 13th century B.C.E. It continued through the era of the Hebrew prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries down to the itinerant intellectuals of the early first century C.E., one or several of whom turned out to be named Yeshuah, a common name for male children born in Palestine in those days.

The Jesus (Yeshuah) we meet in the canonical gospels was not a Judean, but he was a Jew. Luke makes a deal of his going to his hometown synagogue "as was his custom" (Luke 4:16). Jesus was given by the late first century evangelists credit for what turns out to be the Judeo-Christian ethic based on  the teachings of Hillel the Elder who distilled the essence of Torah into eight simple words: What you hate, do not do to another.

The ethos of The Birmingham Temple is shot through with that wisdom. Yeshuah of Nazareth would be most comfortable there. We are, too, because the good seed is sprouting there all the time, and the harvest is an hundred fold. Shalom.