Eighth Sunday after Pentecost; 23 July 2023; Proper 11A (RCL); Genesis 28:10-19a; Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23; Romans 18:12-25; Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43.
More on wheat and tares below, but I want to start with the Romans reading. Paul’s theological vision is stunning. Creation is not yet complete; it is coming to birth. And it was subjected to futility by none other than God. What can this mean?
Maximus the Confessor, in his writings about the the mystery of Christ, (see Jordan Daniel Wood’s new book), makes the claim that creation and Christ’s incarnation are the same thing in the divine purpose. Creation is not complete until the Incarnation is complete. Both bring God’s Logos (a Greek word with a wide range of meanings, including “word, purpose, rationale”) into expression. Christ and creation overlap. Maximus seems to be channeling Paul, especially this passage.
God had created humanity as the stewards of creation (Romans, Chapter 1), but we messed it up; we were to bring creation to its full fruition in sharing in the life of the Trinity, sharing in the love for which God created. Abraham, Israel, and the Law were all meant to remedy human sin, which shirked its purpose as creation’s stewards; we worship the creature rather than the creator (an astute analysis of our current predicament). Creation is waiting for us to fulfill that purpose.
So, that’s what Paul means when he says that God subjected creation to futility. It wouldn’t have been futility if we had fulfilled our role, but instead, we have subjected it to bondage. So, now creation awaits the revelation of the children of God, our adoption, and our fulfillment as part of the Incarnation of Christ. There’s a translation issue in the NRSV: I consider the sufferings of the present time not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us. The preposition “to” in Greek is eis, into. It’s not that we are about to see God’s glory — we are about to be God’s glory, or God’s glory is going to be in us.
It is that glory which frees creation from its bondage to futility. When our adoption is complete, we take our appropriate role as God’s co-creators, bringing creation to its fulfillment. That’s why (in a later paragraph in Chapter 8), Paul says that although we don’t know how to pray (what to ask for for the fulfillment of God’s purposes in creation), the Spirit prays with our spirit to help us know how to forward God’s purposes in creation.
Paul sees our baptism as the down payment of the Spirit, as the guarantee that God’s purposes will not be thwarted, that we cannot be separated from the love of God in Christ, the love which brings the whole universe into its participation in the life of God. Paul’s stunning vision is that we, this small, rag-tag Christian community, play our role in the fulfillment of creation’s purposes — beautiful and humbling.
Now, about wheat and tares. The parable can be separated from Matthew’s allegorization of it. The law in Leviticus tells us that a field sown with two kinds of seeds in an abomination, so not only has the enemy ruined the master’s crop, but also made his field abominable to God. And here’s the stunning piece of that. The master just shrugs his shoulders and says, “An enemy has done this.” There is not attempt at discovering the identity of the enemy or of revenge. Just a shrug.
And rather than worrying about “cleansing” the field, the master lets things lie, and then at the harvest has the reapers gather the weeds first and then the wheat. He tells the reapers to bind the weeds into bundles to be burned. If one is simply trying to get rid of the weeds, one just throws them on a bonfire. To bind them into bundles implies they will be used as fuel, probably for one of those clay beehive ovens in which bread is baked.
The master can use what others consider a disaster to good effect. Our tendency is when weeds are sown into our lives (or the lives of those we love) is to try and root them out, whereas the master in this story will find a way to use what we would consider a disaster. That’s what the kingdom is like.