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Persistence or trust?

October 15, 2022

Pentecost 19 – 2022
Luke 18:1-14
Marian Free

In the name of God Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver. Amen.

Allow me to read the first parable again.

And he said a parable to them. Concerning their necessity always to pray and not to become discouraged, saying,
“Some judge was in some city; God was he not fearing, and people was he not respecting. And a widow was in that city. And she kept coming to him, saying, ‘Avenge/grant me justice against my adversary.’
“And not did he wish at that time. But after these things he said to himself, ‘if even God I do not fear no people do I respect, yet on account of the trouble this widow causes, I will avenge her, so that not into the end, coming, she will give me a black eye.’”
And said the Lord, “Hear what the unjust judge says. And will not God make vengeance to his elect, those who cry to him day and night, and will he be patient upon them? I say to you that he will avenge them swiftly. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, then will he find faith upon the earth?

Now I imagine that translation might have taken you aback. It is awkward because it is a literal translation, and it is confronting because it forces us to see the parable in a different light. It is however a more translation and as such helps to give us a clearer sense of the parable’s meaning.

Collectively, we have a tendency to be complacent, if not lazy, when it comes to matters of faith. For example, when it comes to the bible, if or when we read it, we presume to know and understand it. Very often, we see what we expect to see rather than approaching the text afresh and asking questions and exploring it more deeply to see what else it might reveal. Familiarity does not so much breed contempt as it encourages complacency. It is easy to assume that what we have been told – at Sunday School or in a sermon – remains true for all time. This is especially true of the parables. We know the parables so well, they. Have been explained to us so often, that we can sum them up in a single phrase. The prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the barn builder and the persistent widow all bring up images not only of the parable, but of the meaning of the parable.

It is comforting and reassuring to have at our disposal stories that encapsulate what it is to be a neighbour, that illustrate how much God loves us or show the foolishness of storing up one’s wealth. Every now and again though it doesn’t hurt to be challenged, to have our traditional interpretations thrown into question or to see a saying or a parable in a new light because nothing is set in stone no one alive today was present to hear Jesus teach and even our gospel writers are the second or third generation of followers.

Before our gospels were written in their current form, Jesus’ teachings were conveyed orally. Over time different leaders will have given them different emphases depending on the needs of their audiences. When the gospel writers finally gathered Jesus’ sayings into a form of biography, they made decisions about the order in which they would present Jesus’ teaching and life. In the process they also included their own editorial comments – creating a narrative and sometimes interpreting Jesus’ words for the readers. The story didn’t end there. During the course of history, the bible was translated – first into Latin and then into the common language of the people. Translation led to another layer of interpretation. No matter how dispassionate they tried to be, each translator came to the scripture with a pre-existing bias which imposed itself on the text.

Few of us are aware of such biases and of what we bring to the text.

The literal translation of today’s parable of the widow and the judge is a good illustration of the problem. Even though the word εδικεω (edikeo) means to avenge, our translators have chosen (for whatever reason) to translate it as justice. Vengeance is a strong and uncomfortable word, and it certainly doesn’t fit with our received learning that the widow has no agency, that she needs someone to take her side. Yet there is no suggestion in the parable that our widow is powerless OR that she is meek and vulnerable. Indeed, she is arguing her case before the judge, without anyone to support her. She wants revenge and she will get it by wearing the judge down. When the judge finally gives in, it is less because of the widow’s persistence and more because he is afraid that she will resort to violence if he doesn’t give her what she wants.

This is a much more likely scenario than the one we usually associate with this parable. Jesus’ parables are intended to shock us, to challenge our conventional way of thinking. If we domesticate them (have the widow seek justice not mercy) we take away their sting – the point that Jesus is making to force us to re-think the way we see the world. Luke’s addition to the parable does just that. The parable proper is the story of the widow and the judge (verses 2 through 5). By adding an introduction and conclusion, Luke uses Jesus’ parable for a specific different purpose. Luke’s introduction and conclusion – Jesus told them a parable about the need to: “pray always and do not lose heart” and concludes that God will give justice to those who: “cry to him day and night” suggest that he uses it to encourage Jesus’ followers to pray – even when the circumstances seem to mitigate against prayer. (Luke’s additions and the translators’ preference for justice rather than vengeance contribute to a picture of a widow who is vulnerable and praiseworthy.)

But, as Amy-Jill Levine points out – in this parable neither the judge, nor the widow are ‘moral exemplars’. The widow seeks vengeance and will not stop until she is satisfied, and the judge allows himself to be corrupted or at least compromised – by giving in to the widow, even though he presumably did not think she had just cause.

The point is precisely that God is not like the judge, and we are not to be like the widow. God does not need to be worn down by our consistent pressing and cannot be forced into acting against God’s nature. We are not to be like the widow – taking things into our own hands, battering God into submission, or trying to bend God to our will. God can be trusted and God will grant justice to God’s elect. Our task is not to persist, but to trust, to believe that it is in God’s nature to bring about justice and that God will hear the cries of the broken-hearted and oppressed.

“Vengeance is mine” says the Lord in Deuteronomy (32:35)
If there is vengeance to be taken, God will take it. So we can leave it to God.

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Weed or towering cedar? The Kingdom of God.

June 12, 2021

Pentecost 3 – 2021

Mark 4:26-34 (some thoughts)

Marian Free

May I speak in the name of God who created us, Jesus who redeemed us and the Spirit who enlivens us. Amen.

A key theme of the Hebrew Bible is the Kingdom of Israel. From the time Saul is appointed as the first king, the historical books are concerned with the rule of the various kings, their victories (or losses) in battle, the size of their kingdoms, their wealth and, of course, their relationship with God. Never was the kingdom so powerful, grand and wealthy as in the time of Solomon who had “dominion over all the region west of the Euphrates from Tiphsah to Gaza, over all the kings west of the Euphrates; and he had peace on all sides”. Not only was his kingdom extensive, but his wealth was legendary. Just imagine: “Solomon’s provision for one day was thirty cors of choice flour, and sixty cors of meal, ten fat oxen, and twenty pasture-fed cattle, one hundred sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks and fatted fowl. Solomon also had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen.” Under his rule Judah and Israel lived in safety – under their vines and fig trees.

Solomon’s wealth and power were displayed in the houses that he built for himself and for his wife which were made of the finest stone and timber and lined with gold and precious stones. Likewise, Solomon’s Temple was extraordinary – filled with vessels of gold and silver and bronze, adorned with carved timber and furnished with the finest of cloth. So rich was Solomon and so secure his kingdom that it was said that: “The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and he made cedars as numerous as the sycamores of the Shephelah.” He had seven hundred princesses as wives and three hundred concubines!!! (See the first few chapters of 1 Kings for details.) Even allowing for exaggeration, the description of Solomon’s power and wealth gives some idea of the the sort of kingdom that Jesus’ contemporaries might have been expecting God to restore.

To them, the comparison of the kingdom to a mustard seed would have been utterly surprising, shocking and even offensive. Not only that, Jesus is using imagery that would have been confusing. When the Hebrew Bible wanted to use plants to symbolise powerful kingdoms, the writers chose plants that were equally powerful and majestic – the mighty cedar tree or the cosmic tree that represented the Babylonian Empire.  (“it was large and strong, with its top touching the heavens, and it could be seen to the ends of the earth. … Under it the wild beasts found shade, in its branches the birds of the air nested; all men ate of it”; Dan 4:8-9), Or the vision of Ezekiel in which the restoration of the people of Israel after the Babylonian captivity is imaged as a shoot plucked from the crest of a cedar (Babylon) and planted on mountain heights, where it becomes a majestic cedar and “birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it.”( (Dennis Hamm SJ. http://www.liturgyslj, 13/6/2021).

Not only does Jesus chose something as pedestrian as a mustard seed with which to compare the kingdom – he mixes his metaphors. Even though mustard is a short, scrubby plant and small, Jesus still envisages birds making nests in its shade. He inverts and subverts the Old Testament imagery of the mighty cedar. As he describes it, the kingdom of God is not majestic and powerful. It will not come with force and overwhelm all that is before it. Instead, the kingdom will come subtly and quietly – like the seed whose growth cannot be observed until the first shoots push themselves above the ground. What is more the kingdom of God will not tower over or overshadow those beneath it, but will still spread out and provide shelter and shade for those who seek it.

The kingdom of God does not consist of mighty armies or lavish palaces. Its king does not enforce submission, but rather encourages loyalty through love. Its leader does not impose his will, but instead models servant leadership.

We are gravely mistaken if, like Jesus’ contemporaries, we are expecting God to break in to our world with power and might ready to bend the whole world to God’s will or (worse) to establish us as God’s representatives on earth. Jesus’ life and ministry illustrate the sort of kingdom about which he speaks. It will (it has) enter(ed) our world unexpectedly and quietly and has disrupted our preconceptions and our expectations. In fact, it was for the majority of people, completely unrecognisable.

In the Lord’s Prayer we pray for God’s kingdom to come. Let’s be sure that we are not looking for it in the wrong places.

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The seduction of the kingdom

July 25, 2020

Pentecost 8 – 2020

Matthew 13:44-58

Marian Free

In the name of God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways. Amen.

There is something seductive about religious experience. Being filled with the Holy Spirit or feeling as though one is in the presence of God is such an amazing feeling that many people try to recreate it. In the process they forget that God is not at our disposal to be summoned at will. The same is true of preaching. My own experience is that there are times when I speak with such passion that I can feel the impact my words are having. While it is tempting to make this a regular habit, I am aware that it would take me down the track of insincerity. I would become more concerned about the effect of what I was saying rather than the content. I would be relying on my own ability to move people rather than on the Holy Spirit. This tendency to self-congratulation can, I think, be seen in some evangelists who almost certainly begin with good intentions, but who become convinced of their own power to move people and end up build empires that are really about themselves not God.

Over the last two weeks we have been exploring the interpretation of parables. I have suggested that the purpose of parables is not – as the biblical interpretations suggest – clear and accessible. Parables are, we believe, intended to jolt us into a new and different way of thinking. I suggested that a good example of this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus’ listeners (ordinary Jews) would have been expecting that the third person along the road would have been one of them. First, the Priest, then the Levite – the next one would surely be a person to whom they could relate. Imagine the listener’s surprise when the third character on the road is not one of them but a despised Samaritan. It is he, the enemy, who stops to help the injured Jew. This is the sting in the tail, the unexpected twist that forces the audience to reconsider their long-held prejudices and challenges their accepted ideas as to who does or does not belong in the kingdom of heaven.

Today’s parables are no less shocking, in particular the one about the field. Again, because the parable is so familiar and because we are so used to hearing it in the context of the parable of the pearl, we hear it in the positive sense of giving up everything for the sake of the kingdom. In so doing, we miss the blatant immorality of the parable and give no thought to the possibility that the one buying the field is enriching himself – potentially at the expense of another. Selling everything in order to achieve the kingdom might seem to be a noble action but even in today’s society, buying property without disclosing information regarding its true worth would be regarded as devious and self-seeking. 

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (Matt 13:44).

In the ancient world burying treasure or items of value was a common practice – especially in the context of war and exile. It was not unusual for the person who hid the treasure to forget where they hid it, to die without sharing its location or to be in a position from which they never returned home. Ownership of found treasure was a matter for discussion among the rabbis which suggests that it was not an unusual circumstance.

In the case of the parable, it is clear that the treasure does not rightfully belong to the finder and that the finder buys the field with the intention to deceive – why else would he hide the treasure having found it? As Crossan points out: “If the treasure belongs to the finder, then buying the land is unnecessary. But if the treasure does not belong to the finder, buying the land is unjust.” This is not the only issue that the parable raises. In order to purchase the field, the finders sells all that he has an action that potentially leaves him impoverished. He may have the treasure but in all likelihood,  he cannot use it[1]. What then does the treasure have to do with the kingdom?

Scholars like Crossan and Scott believe that the key word in the parable is “joy”. They suggest that there is a lawlessness to joy, to the kingdom, something that disrupts the normal flow of events, a force which is freely given and distributed, but which cannot then be constrained or refrained. (Think of the sower who throws the seed with wild abandon – heedless as to where it might land and how it might – or might not – grow.) No thought is given to the recipient of the treasure. There is no test of character, no limits placed on the use of the gift. The seed is thrown, the treasure brought to our attention, whether the recipient deserves it or not.  It is, they suggest, the very “lawlessness”, the unexpected nature of the treasure-finding that means that it has the capacity to both bring joy and to corrupt.

Here is the sting. The idea that the kingdom has the power to corrupt pulls us up short. If it is the kingdom of God, how can it be anything but pure and moral and yet the examples with which I began indicate that that it is possible for the weak to be seduced by the gifts and the power of the Spirit and to use them for their own ends rather than for the advancement of the kingdom. 

The parable may tell us about giving up everything to achieve the kingdom, but this seems too self-evident. It is more likely that Jesus tells it to shock his listeners out of their complacency, to challenge their beliefs that God’s gifts are given only to the deserving, to undermine their desire to see only the positive aspects of God’s gifts and most importantly, to warn us against relying on our own egos rather than being totally dependent on the presence of God with us.

The kingdom of God is like treasure – once it is given, God does not demand it back. Be careful how you use it. 

[1] We have to remember that this is not a true story. There are a lot of unanswered questions – if the man does not own the field, what is he doing digging in it? If he is there legitimately as a day-labourer or a slave, what can he possibly have to sell?  

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Leaving it up to God

July 18, 2020

Pentecost 7 – 2020

Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43

Marian Free

In the name of God who sends rain on the just and the unjust and causes the sun to shine on both the evil and the good. Amen.

The events of recent times – Covid 19 and “Black Lives Matter” – have brought out both the best and the worst in human nature and have revealed deep divisions in our society and more particularly in that of the United States. To give one example, the legislated wearing of face masks seems to have touched a deep chord in the people who are objecting to the ruling. In Florida, an enquiry into the legislation heard the most extraordinary, and emotive reasons as to why the wearing of masks was, among other things, satanic. Passions are running so high on this subject that in the United States people have been spat on, a man has been charged with making terrorist threats and woman who was asked to wear a mask in a store began throwing her groceries everywhere. In Gosford in Australia, friends of mine were rudely told to remove their face masks by a young passer-by. These reactions, though unpleasant, pale into insignificance compared with the young bus driver in France who was hauled from his bus and kicked to death simply for asking four passengers to comply with the requirement to wear masks.

The pandemic has exposed vastly different attitudes to authority, competing interests with regard to health and to the economy and opposing views about the nature of freedom. At the extremes of some of these positions are people who are so convinced that they alone are right, so threatened by change, so worried about the impact on their personal freedom that they are taking matters into their own hands with, as we have seen, tragic results. 

In these difficult times, differences and divisions between different elements of society are highlighted and exaggerated leading to parochialism and partisanship. People are divided into them and us with “them” being everyone who holds a different view or behaves differently from ourselves. 

Parables such as the one I have just read play right into this tendency to divide society into those who agree with us and those who do not, those who hold our faith and those who don’t, those who are rigid adherents of the law and those who are not. The way that this parable is usually understood  – thanks to Matthew’s addition of an interpretation – can lead to self-satisfaction on the one hand and condemnation of the other on the other hand. If we are wheat (which of course we are!) then those who are different from ourselves must be weeds and by definition must be destined for destruction.

However, as Rosemary reminded us last week, Jesus’ parables are primarily about the Kingdom of God (or Kingdom of Heaven). They are not about us. 

I have said on many occasions that parables are not neat and self-explanatory (as Matthew’s interpretations suggest). Jesus doesn’t tell parables to affirm the way we see the world but rather to challenge our preconceptions, to shake us up and to move us to a new way of thinking. In other words, rather than confirm our world view, Jesus tries to help us to view the world from another, completely different perspective – that of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Take today’s parable for example – the sower is not, as might be expected, a poor share farmer, a day-laborer or a slave but a householder. We learn that the sower owns both land and slaves. Jesus’ audience would have pricked up their ears. Why, they would have thought, didn’t the householder delegate the task of sowing to his slaves? This is not the only aspect of the story that would have jarred with common practice or experience. Jesus listeners might have wondered why an enemy would plant darnel – a weed so commonplace that it would most likely have sprung up by itself and why would the householder instruct the slaves to leave it to grow when good agricultural practice would have been to weed the crop? You certainly wouldn’t allow these weeds to grow – the seeds of darnel are poisonous. Harvesting the plants together would have risked mixing the two thereby making the wheat worthless.

What to us, who are so far removed from first century Palestine, seems like a possible scenario, would, to Jesus’ listeners, have been a reversal of normal practice – slaves plant the seeds and crops are weeded as necessary. In the Kingdom of Heaven Jesus suggests, the good and bad exist together – separated only at the harvest.

Left to stand alone the parable exemplifies the complexity of human existence and the fact that Christians and non-Christians alike comprise the good and the bad, the saintly and the unsaintly, those with open and receptive hearts and those who are narrow and mean-spirited. Discerning who belongs in which camp can be as difficult as determining which is wheat and which is weed. As individuals and as community, we represent the breadth and depth of human experience and of human behaviour – the best and the worst together. 

The point of the parable seems to be this – that the world and its people are full of complexities, and it is not up to us to make distinctions based on our ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. Only God can truly discern the purposes of our heart. Only God can recognize what has made us who and what we are. Only God is in a position to determine who is good and who is not. Judgement will happen in its own time and without our intervention. 

If the wheat and the tares are left to grow together, if the good and the bad in ourselves and others are part of the reality of our existence and if rooting out the bad has the potential to damage the good, then perhaps the lesson is that we should be more gentle with ourselves and more understanding and compassionate of others.

Above all, in today’s turbulent times, perhaps we should humbly mind our own business and leave to God the matter of judgement. 

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How does your garden grow?

June 13, 2015

Pentecost 3 – 2015

Mark 4:26-34

Marian Free

In the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. Amen. 

For at least the last forty-five years I have been involved in discussions about the future of the church. In particular, I have observed and been party to a lot of navel gazing in relation to declining attendance on Sundays and a variety of suggestions as to how we might halt that decline. Numerous reasons have been offered for this parlous state of affairs – women returning to the workforce, television, Sunday sport and Sunday trading – to mention a just a few. The liturgy has also been blamed for a downturn in attendance. In particular, there are those who express a concern that our form of worship doesn’t appeal to young people. As a consequence there have been a variety of attempts to address this problem, ranging from Folk Masses in the 60’s to Twitter Masses in the last decade.

Focus on the liturgy has not been the only response to this perceived crisis in the life of the church. Programme after programme has been rolled out, each with a degree of optimism that suggests that this time we have the right formula and one that will bring people back to the church. Sadly, over time, these programmes fall into disuse and distant memory as they fail to live up to their promise. Church attendance remains at best static and worse continues to decline.

The cynic in me wonders whether our concern with church attendance has more to do with maintaining the institution of the church than it does with spreading the gospel message, more to do with us and less to do with God. At the very least it implies that without our help God will simply fade into insignificance, that without the church there will be no God!

A perusal of the Gospels reveals that, unlike us, Jesus was not concerned with the religious practice of the people – how often they went to the Temple, or whether or not they attended the synagogue on a regular basis. Jesus seems to be more concerned that the crowds understand the liberating power of the gospel. The Gospels record that Jesus set people free from their diseases and infirmities; he released them from the power of evil spirits and he liberated them from a false understanding of the scriptures and from the misleading teaching of the leaders of the church. Above all, Jesus was concerned that the people fully understood the nature of the Kingdom of God (or heaven).

Jesus himself proclaimed that the Kingdom of God had come near (Mark 1:15) and when Jesus sent out the disciples, he gave them authority over unclean spirits. The disciples proclaimed repentance, cast out demons and anointed and cured the sick (Mk 6:6-13). They did not concern themselves with filling church (synagogue) pews.

Jesus’ primary concern was the Kingdom of God and most of the parables relate to this theme. These parables begin: “The Kingdom of God is like – a sower, a seed, a woman, a shepherd ..”. From all of these images, his listeners were able to build a picture of the kingdom of God in which the lost are sought and found, growth is secret and more abundant than expected, weeds will grow together with the wheat, debts are forgiven and the first will be last. Moreover, the kingdom will be worth more than everything that we own and we will give all that we have to possess it.

The parables do not say or even imply that the Kingdom of God will consist of full churches or of dioceses that are financially secure. The signs of the Kingdom are much more subtle and unexpected. More than that the Kingdom, according to Jesus, is not ours to build, but always God’s. It is the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of the church and of church-goers. We seem to have convinced ourselves that the Kingdom is entirely dependent on the existence of the church and lost sight of whose Kingdom it is and that we expend far too much time concerned with the survival of the institution of the church and far too little time announcing the kingdom of God as an alternative to the kingdom of this world.

This morning’s parables are particularly challenging in a climate that is focused on church growth. The first, the parable of the sower, is a stark reminder that the growth of the Kingdom is entirely determined by God and not by human effort (‘the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how’). The second, the parable of the mustard seed, confronts us with the idea that to an untrained eye the Kingdom might look like an insignificant herb or weed – nothing like the images that “Kingdom” usually calls to mind. In other words, whatever the Kingdom is, it will not be as we expect.

In the light of these parables, perhaps it is time that we, the church, stopped looking inwards, trying to tweak what we do on a Sunday morning so that it becomes more attractive to more people; time that we moved out from our beautiful buildings into the communities around us; time that, instead of trying to persuade people to come to us that, we found ways to set people free from the chains of individualism, consumerism, ambition, from oppression, injustice and violence.

Above all it is time to take a deep breath and to remember that it is God (not us) who will cause the Kingdom of God to grow and that in ways that we may not see or understand. It is time to recall that the Kingdom that will be unlike any other Kingdom that has preceded it. If we cannot imagine it, we certainly cannot build it. In other words, perhaps it is time to relax, to stop struggling for survival; to let go and let God and then to watch in amazement to see what God will do and then to go wherever God may take us.

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