Reflection on Readings for Fifth Sunday after Pentecost by Dr. Dennis Ormseth

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost in Year A

Listen to true prophets! Righteousness and Justice for All Creation! Care for Creation Commentary on the Common Lectionary—Year A 2011 By Dennis Ormseth Readings for: Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Psalm 86:11-17; Isaiah 44:6-8 or Wisdom 12 :13, 16-19; Romans 8:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 3-43 Notice the ecology of these parables! The Parable of Weeds among the Wheat follows immediately on the reading of the Parable of the Sower and its explanation, both in Matthew’s narrative and in the lectionary last Sunday and this Sunday. Comparison of the two parables is instructive. The parables share important elements of interest to the reader concerned with care of creation. Although Jesus’ purpose in telling the story is to instruct the disciples concerning the growth of their community, the story locates that community in relationship to Earth. The parables share a narrative structure that moves from sowing to sprouting to harvest. They both have a very simple, relational, if not explicitly ecological, perspective, namely, seeds need to be matched to soil, and roots hidden beneath the soil are intertwined and cannot be separated without killing the plant. Finally, in both parables, the seed represents the potential growth of the community of Jesus’ followers. The kingdom of heaven on earth, we might conclude, conforms in important ways to the regular processes of creation. Like the parable of the Sower, the parable of weeds among the wheat is a story that the Lord, the Servant of Creation, would have loved to tell. There are significant contrasts between the parables as well. Here the parable of the Weeds among the Wheat is explicitly introduced as a means to understanding the kingdom of heaven, a point that was only an unspoken assumption in relation to the parable from last Sunday. Warren Carter plausibly suggests that the aim is “to direct the audience to think about the story in relation to God’s empire, but leaves it to the audience to discern connections” (Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, p. 288). Here the seed is declared good, and the field is the sower’s own property—both factors unmentioned in the first story. The new parable involves more human characters: a lone sower in the first parable, here a landowner with his household slaves, and also the unidentified “enemy” who comes in the night to sow weeds among the wheat and then disappears. The more complex operation of the household economy contrasts significantly with the simple agrarian image of the solitary peasant sower. This comparison illumines an important feature of the context implied by this Sunday’s parable. It is a context in which considerable control over the land is presupposed: it is land that is owned as part of an estate with slaves. The land is under regular, organized cultivation, where care is taken to see that the seed is good quality, and slaves or servants appropriately share the landowner’s concern about the yield. One suspects that the careless sower of last Sunday’s parable might not last long in this company. And, notably, the slaves expect to be directed into the field to violently uproot the weeds. Carter’s point about empire is well taken: the social location is an organized economy, which is being disrupted by an alien agent, in a conflicted cultural environment. In contrast to the Roman Empire, the Empire of God is creative and life-giving. Yet the empire of God is different: evocative of a highly organized economy though the narrative might be, the images remain agrarian. As Carter observes, “The scene of growing wheat suggests that God’s empire is creative and life-giving in providing food to sustain life, in anticipation of the abundance that will mark its full establishment” (Ibid., p.288-9). Furthermore, when the weeds sown by the enemy are discovered, the landowner restrains the slaves, saying “let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (13: 30). The point is clearly to keep the plants in the earth until they are ripe, well beyond the time their true character has been revealed, so that the harvest of the yield of the good seed can be as full and complete as possible. As before, Jesus is not instructing his followers in agronomy; he makes use of what would be largely common sense for most everyone in an agrarian culture, to set out what would be uncommon sense under an imperial regime. The powerful typically get rid of those in opposition to them by “rooting them out” without regard to collateral damage, in the phrase of our day. We have the technological means to do this now: well-designed herbicides can do precisely what mechanical row hoes have done clumsily. But political applications of the policy are still very costly of life. For example, some do it with no concern for collateral damage, like the well-intended but unthinking slaves in the parable, do the damage by incurring unintended consequences. Others heedlessly and deliberately “do what is necessary” to eliminate whatever threat the opposition poses, up to and including “scorched earth” warfare and genocide. The destruction of both human communities and their natural environment continues, the opposition seemingly ineffective against the newest juggernaut. Things are different in the reign of the Son of Man, the parable promises. As Jesus’ subsequent explanation to his disciples makes clear, in what is now revealed to be a cosmic struggle between the powers of good and evil in the world, the good children of the empire are encouraged patiently to wait out the season of growth and the ultimate denouement of the children of the enemy (those who sowed weeds), in confidence that God’s purposes will prevail at the harvest. The imperial cycle of violence will stop. True, the image of that harvest is itself violent: “Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (13:42). As Carter observes, ‘the gospel borrows imperial and violent images to depict the final triumph of God’s purposes,” although we might suggest alternatively that as every good gardener or farmer knows, weeds need to be burned to prevent them from regenerating, and ashes help renew the soil. It is nature’s way. The final judgment marks the end to imperial violence—not replication of it. What is in view here, in any case, is a final end to imperial violence—not replication of it. As Carter explains, “The evil that is overcome includes all causes of sin, a cognate of the verb ‘cause to stumble/sin.’ These causes include anything that diverts or destroys disciples (5:29-30; 18:6-9) and anything that rejects Jesus rather than recognizing his identity as God’s commissioned agent” (Carter, p. 294). And whatever the implications of this violent image for the end of the ages beyond the triumph of God’s purposes, the mandate for time forward until God brings the world to fulfillment is to follow the policy of the wise landholder, or Son of Man, namely, to act so as to sustain and to fulfill life as fully as possible, even for those who oppose the purposes of God, and let God bring all things to their appropriate, God-determined end. And as the Son of Man, in our view, is also the Servant of Creation who does what God wills for the entire creation (see our comment in this series on the readings for The HolyTrinity), what God wills for the sake of the “children of the empire,” namely to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” (13:43) is more likely to be the final purpose of God’s creative activity on behalf of the rest of creation as well, and not its utter destruction, as a literalistic application of the parable’s conclusion might be taken to suggest. This reading of the parable is strongly supported by the lessons that accompany it. Indeed, the lessons provide a basis for sketching out a theology of creation that fully grounds the reading we have given. The reading from Isaiah is an example of what Walter Brueggeman calls the Old Testament’s “rhetoric of incomparability:” “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god; Who is like me?” (Is. 44:7). This kind of statement, he notes, comes early in the tradition “and yet is a most sweeping generalization,” so that “we may regard it as the most poignant spine and leitmotif of all of Israel’s testimony concerning Yahweh” (Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 139). The point is not so much that there is no other god like Yahweh (“Israel did not know or care that other peoples made similar claims for their gods.”), “but that Yahweh really is as said—in extreme form a God of astonishing power and reassuring solidarity” (Ibid., p. 143). Specifically, in this instance. the incomparability concerns God’s ability to know the future he has promised: “Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be.” This future, strikingly, is the renewal of the land and people together upon their return from exile: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my spirit upon your descendents, and my blessing on your offspring. They shall spring up like a green tamarisk, like willows by flowing streams” (44:3-4; not included in the assigned verses). Yahweh is, according to this first lesson, the one to bring about the renewal and restoration of creation envisioned as the culmination of the narrative of the parable. God knows the future, because God creates it (Cf. Isaiah 40:28-31; 45:12-13.) It is the second lesson, however, that draws our greatest interest here. The second half of the reading, Romans 8:18-25, is what David Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate regard as an “ecotheological mantra text.” The text has come to be cited widely by writers on ecotheology, as they make their appeals for creation care and Christian environmental concern. But the text has received new attention from Pauline scholars without special environmental agendas as well. Horrell, Hunt and Southgate locate a significant change in the weight the passage is given in the interpretation of Romans and in the Pauline literature more generally. “The changing readings of this passage . . . give a clear indication of the way in which the issues and challenges of the contemporary context shape the questions brought to the text and in turn shape the interpretation on the meaning of the text.” The development is similar to what happened to the interpretation of Romans 9-11 when Jewish-Christian relations became a significant aspect of the interpretive context. “Under the influence of a context in which the magnitude of the ecological challenge is increasingly a point of public and political consensus,” these authors write, Romans 8:19-23 “may come to be seen as a (even the) theological climax of the letter.” In their recent book, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis, they devote an entire chapter to the interpretation of this passage, and they carefully weigh the question of whether or not the text can sustain the importance that is being placed on it by ecotheologians (Horrell, Hunt and Southgate, pp. 69-70). See the excellent book The Greening of Paul by Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate. This book is absolutely essential for anyone engaged in our quest for biblical underpinnings for the care of creation, and we therefore present the argument of this chapter is some detail. The key steps in their argument are as follows: 1. The narrative approach to the interpretation of Paul’s theology, for which the authors present a strong argument in the opening chapters of the book, is particularly appropriate to interpretation of this passage. “While itself brief and frustratingly allusive,” the passage “depends on a certain story about the past, present , and future of creation in God’s saving purposes. Creation ‘is waiting with eager longing’. . , ‘was subjected to futility’. . , in hope that it ‘will be set free’ . . .” (Ibid., p.71; the elided words are the corresponding Greek terms, which we are not able to reproduce here.) The account has “a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it also entails a transformation,” which allows the authors “to construct the outlines of a narrative trajectory, while the employment of [gar] and [hoti] indicates causal links between the elements, thus constituting a plot.” Furthermore, they note, Paul introduced the comment about creation groaning, saying “we know that . . ,” thus apparently “appealing to knowledge that he can reasonably presume his readers share” (Ibid.). 2. The narrative’s “past” includes some event of “making/founding/creating” the object of which is in a condition of “current, and presumably prior . . . bondage to decay.” This “creation” has, additionally, “been subjected to futility, of an unspecified nature, not of its own choice, though the subjector is not named.” Bondage and subjection represent “the negative dimensions of its past and present experience, which are transformed with the resolution of the story” (Ibid., p. 72). The “present” is the co-groaning in co-travail of creation and Paul’s community. The “future” anticipated in the longing of creation for the revealing of the “sons of God,” the hearers “who have the ‘first fruits of the Spirit’ and “wait for adoption as God’s sons”, and the hope of creation to be “liberated from bondage to decay” and to “obtain the freedom of the children of God.” Thus, as the authors see it, “the plot looks forward to a final transformation which resolves and surpasses the negative state of decay and futility” (Ibid.). 3. Turning to a more detailed analysis of key phrases, Horrell, Hunt and Southgate argue that “creation” refers here to “nonhuman creation, whatever precisely is or is not included in Paul’s implicit definition” (Ibid., p. 73). “Bondage to decay” refers, they think, not to death as the consequence of the Adamic fall, but more comprehensively to the ‘unfolding story of Genesis 1-11, in which corruption affects all flesh. “Subjection to futility” refers, similarly, not to any specific act or cause, but to the fact that “the existence of creation (and of humanity) is futile and frustrated, since it is unable to achieve its purpose, or to emerge from the constant cycle of toil, suffering, and death” (Ibid., p. 77.) 4. With respect to the present, the creation’s groaning is “a co-groaning with Paul and other Christians and the Spirit, a shared travail that also represents a shared hope, though some aspects of that hope are distinctive to the ‘sons of God,’ who are described here as those who have ‘the first fruits of the Spirit’” (Ibid., p. 79.) The creation, specifically, is “awaiting the revelation of the Christian believers,” and this “unveiling is related to their adoption as sons spoken of in verse 23” (Ibid, pp. 79-80). The “adoption as sons” probably includes “redemption of their bodies” in a resurrection from the dead which in Pauline eschatology is “the initial event in a series that will eventually encompass all creation. . .” The adoption is “important not simply in itself, but insofar as it heralds a wider process of eschatological transformation. The hope that always accompanied the creation’s subjection to futility was and is the hope that the creation itself will be liberated” (Ibid., p. 80-81). In summary, Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate hold that Paul teaches that an “enslave-too-decay creation has been subjected to futility by God.” But that it was “subjected in hope” means “that the focus, from the subjection onwards, is entirely forward-looking; there is no description of the act of creation, no indication as to what (if anything) preceded its subjection to futility.” The “co-groaning” and “co-travailing” has been the state of creation since its subjection; the creation is “bound up with humanity and the Spirit in a solidarity of shared groaning, and, similarly, a shared hope” (Ibid., p. 82). The highlight in Romans is the moment when the groaning creation will welcome the revelation of the “children of God” who will care for creation. Focused on the “moment of the revelation of the sons of God,” the passage presents “the sons/children of God” as “leading characters, since it is their liberation on which that of creation depends and onto which the hopes of creation are focused.” But of course the character of the story whose presence is “most crucial to the progress of the plot” is actually God, whose actions are “hidden within the force of the so-called divine passives” of the “creation was subjected . . . will be liberated” (Ibid, p. 82-83.) Romans 8, the authors conclude, “is a particularly developed and powerful depiction” of the Pauline narrative of “a process, decisively begun yet still to be worked out through suffering and struggle (e.g., Phil 3:10-14; cf. also Col 1:24)” with “its insistence that it is only in conformity to the sufferings of Christ that a sharing in his glory and inheritance is attained (8:17), a narrative in which verses 19-23 so enigmatically include the whole of creation as co-groaning” (Ibid., p. 83). What strikes us so forcefully relative to the interpretation of the assigned texts for this Sunday is the parallel structure and themes between the narrative of the parable of the weeds among the wheat and this Pauline creation narrative. The unexpected and unexplained seeding of the weeds, the command of the landowner to the servants of the household to desist from destructive separation of the weeds from the wheat, the promised future rescue of the wheat at a future time when the Son of Man will act to end the competition for land by removing all causes of sin and evil; here in a “down to earth version is the narrative of bondage to decay, subjection in hope, and future redemption” in which “children of God” play an important if not a decisive role of bearing hope and assisting the (non-human) creation to its ultimate restoration in Christ. To be sure, the narratives differ in language and accents, appropriate to their narrative settings and social context. But it seems reasonable to suggest that when Paul wrote that this narrative is something that “we know,” it is not difficult to imagine that they knew because Jesus himself had told the story, in different words, at an earlier time. At minimum, the texts urge us to desist from ecological destruction—now! What this correspondence might mean for the practice of the Christian church in its care for creation is, of course, another whole discussion. While Horrell, Hunt, and Southgate caution their readers that “there are reasons to be more cautious and careful than much ecological appeal to this favorite text has been,” they find that there are “significant ethical implications” to be inferred from the passage “when its narrative genre is taken into account. . .and when it is related to the wider contours of Pauline theology and ethics,” as they do in the concluding chapters of their book (Ibid, p. 85). We would suggest, for starters, that following the command of the land-owning Son of Man, the ethic of the parable is to desist from the ecologically destructive action of “rooting out” our enemies. Or, expressed positively, we should maintain respect for the ecological integrity of all things. Expressed in positive terms, this conforms well to the ethics of “other-regard and corporate solidarity” as the authors envision it emerging from the Pauline literature (See their chapter 8, “Pauline Ethics through an Ecotheological Lens” pp. 189-220). But for the Apostle, it is more simply a matter of “by the Spirit” putting “to death the deeds of the body” so that one may live. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God—the Lord, the giver of Life”—are children of God . . and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (8:13-17).