Biblical
Words [668]
People feel bound by their tribal ethos,
but life in the Spirit can lift them beyond such boundaries.
Genesis 25:19-34.
After several weeks of readings about Abraham’s
life, our readings in Genesis now turn to Jacob, the even more immediate and rowdy ancestor of Israel
While the Abraham stories in Genesis usually
maintain a proper dignity and reverence for the worthy old ancestor, the Jacob
stories present the main character in a more boisterous and not very respectful
light. What we have in these stories, of
course, is tribal lore, a kind of folk
wisdom compounded of earthy insights about tribal characteristics.
Old folks tend to comment on how you could see the
personality traits of a prominent person showing up already in that person's childhood. Out of such comments come stories of tribal
fathers and mothers. They are earthy,
pretty blunt, and very ethnic. They are
tribal.
The birth story, verses 19-26:
The destinies and behavior traits of two peoples are projected back to
the circumstances of their birth. Jacob
was a fighter. He was fighting in his
mother’s womb – with his brother who may have gotten out of the womb first but
not without Jacob hanging on to his heel, symbolizing that Jacob would
eventually “supplant” [a play on the name Jacob] his older brother (verse
26).
The birthright story, verses 27-33.
When they were young men, the older brother Esau was a hunter while wily
Jacob was more agricultural, raising lentils to make delicious stew. Jacob catches Esau in a moment of desperate
hunger and forces him to sell his “birthright” before he will give him any
food. For the old folks telling the
stories, this is the same punch-line as in the birth story – the younger son
supplants the older. What in the natural
course of things would have been Esau’s has become Jacob’s. Jacob got the birthright, the normal
inheritance of the firstborn son.
In yet another story, which our Lectionary readings
skip, it is told at even greater length how Jacob cheated Esau out of their
father’s final powerful blessing, the blessing that would pass along the
charismatic power of the ancestor to the next generation (the story in Genesis
27).
In all these ways, the old folks looked back from
the days when Israel dominated its neighboring kingdom of Edom and said, It was
written in the stars – or in the signs at birth, in the foolish selling of
birthrights, and the crafty manipulation of blessings – that Israel would be the
great power over its brother tribe to the south.
So was tribal history shaped. So is tribal history still shaped.
Psalm 119:105-112.
The tribal destinies foretold in portents at birth,
and in surprising reversals in formative years, came in time to be understood
as divine decisions gradually worked out in human experience.
In later times and other settings, the tribal mode
of wisdom was replaced by the revelation mode of wisdom. Thus, finally, even the descendants of Jacob came
to understand that it was the word or decree of God that ruled human life. This insight the devout teachers and poets of
the wisdom tradition in Israel expressed in this great psalm, all 176 verses of it, making it a monument to their belief in God’s torah as the key to history.
If we listen to this stanza created by the devotion
of the torah-lovers and hear it as the speech of Jacob, the beneficiary of the
twists and turns working in his destiny, then we learn that it is not tribal
history that matters in his life but only God’s “word,” “ordinances,” “law,”
“precepts,” “decrees,” and “statutes” that guide and determine his life. “Your decrees are my heritage forever; they
are the joy of my heart.” (Verse 111,
NRSV. Note that the exact terminology here
varies in different English translations.
All the terms quoted are, however, synonyms for “torah,” law. ).
This is the Jacob
no longer shaped by tribal lore. It
is the Jacob revered as ancestor by those who knew and loved what God had given
through Moses.
Romans 8:1-11
The Epistle reading
shows that for those who are “in Christ Jesus” it is not destinies,
birthrights, or ancestral blessings that make our fate; it is the Spirit of
God.
“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
has set you free from the law of sin and of death”— free from the tribal
bondage and determinism of the past (verse 2, NRSV).
Paul has passed through (in chapters 3-7) the
discussions of justification by faith, of original sin, and of the personal
bondage of life dominated by “the flesh.”
Now he unfolds the positive side of the drama of salvation in Christ, the
life in the Spirit.
“Spirit” was mentioned five times in the Letter to
the Romans prior to this chapter; here it is used over twenty times.
[Should it be “Spirit” or “spirit”? Translators get to decide this, since the
ancient Greek has no such distinctions.
The original KJV (1611 Facsimile) uses “spirit” throughout this passage;
New KJV makes it “Spirit,” NRSV footnotes give you a choice.]
“By ‘spirit’ Paul means the supernatural or divine
element in human life, and his test for it is the presence of a love like the
love of God in Christ” (C.H. Dodd, Romans,
Harper, 1932, p. 118.)
In our reading there are two points. (1) The life in
the Spirit is very different from the former life lived “in the flesh.” The flesh is death; the Spirit is life and
peace (verse 6). (2) The new life
is the life of God’s Spirit. “You are in
the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you” (verse 9).
Though in the past the body was dead “because of
sin,” now the Spirit is alive “because of righteousness.” If in the old life our dead condition showed
up through sinful actions, now the life of the Spirit shows up through
righteous actions.
The Spirit creates a sharp contrast between life and
death, and therefore a sharp contrast between sinful and righteous acting.
Matthew 13:1-9 , 18-23
Today’s Gospel reading
begins three Sundays of readings from Matthew’s third collection of Jesus’
teachings, the parables of the Kingdom.
Modern
Study of the Parables. In the last hundred plus years of New
Testament scholarship a sharp distinction has been made between what Jesus
originally meant by his parables and what his followers and later church
teachers made of them, not just in their teachings but right in the Gospel
texts. The early followers had changed
the meanings of the parables before the Gospels were written.
The scholarly emphasis has especially been on the
difference between a parable and an allegory. A parable has one main point to make and all
details are subordinated to that point, while an allegory assigns significance
to each of the details separately. If
one allegorizes the Good Samaritan, the inn to which the wounded man is taken
is the church, the robbers are the powers of Satan, the medicines given the man
are the sacraments, and so on. That is
an allegory. The single point of the
parable, on the other hand, was simply who is a neighbor to the man in
need.
On this scholarly view of Jesus’ parables, the
allegorizing tendency began already here in our reading, with the parable of
the Sower. Mark’s Gospel, which Matthew
follows closely, had already made the fatal shift from parable to
allegory.
However, the Sower (or the parable of the Soils) is
perhaps one of the weakest places to apply this theory. That some of the parables may have been
allegories from the beginning seems clear from the parable of the Wicked
Tenants, used in all three Gospels (Mark 12:1-12; Matthew 21:33-41 Luke 20:9-19
Concerning
the Sower.
The parable tells how the sower scatters the seed so that it falls on
all sorts of soil. Three kinds of soil
are unproductive. On good soil the seed
is very productive, so much so that the loss to the poor soils is negligible. The point of the parable – when one is certain it cannot be an allegory –
is the abundance of the crops that do
produce. Even the details of what
happens to the seeds on bad soils are only for the sake of this one point about
the abundance produced by the word of the kingdom when it is fruitful.
To which Floyd Filson commented, “Does this parable
teach only that in spite of loss of labour and seed the sower still reaps an
abundant harvest? No; the varied soils
in which the seed falls also have point…” (The
Gospel According to St. Matthew, “Black’s New Testament Commentaries,” 2nd
ed., London
If the parable is more of an allegory, it is about
responding to the message of God’s kingdom – as is all this section of
Matthew’s Gospel. The point of the
parable then is that indeed there will be losses, represented by each kind of
soil. Not all who have the chance will
respond productively to the good news of the kingdom. This parable tells you some of the
reasons.
There are three kinds of failure to make the kingdom message one’s own.
First, there are those who just don’t get it – one “does
not understand it” (verse 19, NRSV).
Secondly, there are the quick starters, enthusiasts who turn
out to be rootless and fall away before closing time.
Thirdly, there are those with agenda paralysis. They have so many things demanding their
resources that the gospel message is squeezed out and they are smothered by the
thorns of the world.
The fourth option is when the seed grows to
abundance and the energies of life become extravagantly productive – though it
is a productiveness defined exclusively by the life of the kingdom of heaven
(and not necessarily by the world in general).
If Jesus himself didn’t teach the parable this way,
the experience and understanding of his disciples quickly showed that it has
more relevance and truth this way than otherwise!
The parable of the Sower is about life as open to a
new message. It insists that life is not
necessarily confined by past birthrights and birth accidents, though people may
allow such things to smother their lives.
The parable insists that the power of God’s word will find its productive reception. The hearers of the word have a genuine
choice, a chance to grasp the heritage of a new life, a life of the
spirit/Spirit “that blows where it wishes” (John 3:8), and that brings blessing
and righteousness in its breeze.
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