The Promise: To Become a Blessing to All the Peoples of the Earth
This is the promise God made to Abraham. So far, as the
story is told in Genesis, the fulfillment of the promise depends upon Sarah and
Abraham having a child, “and he as good as dead” as the treatise called Hebrews
reminds us; [i]
Isaac survives a near-death experience; Rebecca has the option to say “No” to
marrying Isaac; and now one twin, Jacob, tricks his older brother Esau out of
his birthright. [ii]
And this is just the opening few acts of the story! One has to believe in
miracles and/or God’s providence that the promise made it all the way to Jesus
some 1800 years later! Along the way there are those who have, as Psalm 119
puts it, let God’s Word be “a lantern to their feet…and a light upon their
path.” And Matthew’s story of Jesus
tells us that he applied his heart to fulfill God’s statutes of blessing, compassion,
justice, love and forgiveness for all people by forming an ongoing community of
disciples “forever and to the end.” [iii]
Chapter Thirteen in Matthew marks a new approach to Jesus’s
teaching. Up to now he has been rather straightforward in his teaching like the
Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. And he has been busy living out God’s
statutes of hospitality for all people, including strangers, outcasts, resident
aliens, widows, and orphans, all the while challenging those tenured to the
status quo and the occupying forces of Caesar’s Empire, Rome. He calls people
not to believe in him, but instead to follow him: to be with the people he
seeks out, and to heal folks in body, mind and spirit. He encounters
resistance, and promises those who choose to follow him that they too will
encounter resistance.
Now as he speaks to crowds that will inevitably include
those who resist the ways in which he fulfills God’s statutes and promises, he
begins to teach in parables – parabolic stories that begin in one place and
wind up somewhere completely different. That is, like a parabola, the meanings
and interpretations continue all the way out to somewhere like infinity! And
beyond! That is there is no one way to interpret a parable. In Matthew 13:1-9 the
parable is about agrarian practices to a crowd that is largely made up of
tenant farmers – indentured “farm hands;” practically speaking, debt-slaves
working in a system that rarely allowed one to work off one’s debt – a not
unfamiliar predicament within the financial systems of our own day.
He says, “Listen! A sower went out to sow!” Those of us who
do listen may notice, that this sower seems rather wasteful, scattering the
seed all over the place rather than carefully making cultivated rows. Some of
the seeds land on rocks, some among thorns and weeds, and just a few, fall on
“good soil,” to yield one hundred, sixty and thirty-fold! “Let anyone with ears
listen!” That is, despite squandering and wasting much of the seed, this sower
ends up with a bumper-crop of completely unheard-of yields!
Try to imagine the disciples and the farmers in the crowd
hearing this tale as Jesus plays with them. No wheat on earth, then or now,
would yield one hundred-fold. No doubt they would have laughed at the very mention
of it. Jesus then says, Well how about sixty, do I hear sixty-fold? More
snickering and a few cat-calls! People are right! You are a glutton and a
drunkard if you think sixty-fold is possible! OK, he says, how about
thirty-fold, which lies at least within the slim possibility of best
agricultural practices.
In the section missing, the disciples take him aside and
say, in effect, you are losing the crowd, and may be losing your mind as well!
Why are you doing this? He says to them, you have seen how our Father’s world
works if we fulfill his statutes of compassion, love, forgiveness and justice
for all people, no exceptions, no exclusions. But there are those who just
cannot hear this or understand what we are doing. Still, we need to be
extravagant like the sower, sowing and practicing the good news of our Father’s
kingdom, which is utterly unlike the kingdoms of Israel at present, and Rome at
present. But you will understand, and there will be others who will understand
– and if we are sworn and concerned to keep God’s righteous judgments, the
yields will in fact increase. We must work and do the things we are called to
do faithfully, forever and to the end! And most importantly, even those who
scoff at us know what we all know: whatever yield we gather is a gift from the
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of us all. It is our Father
who makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine and the seeds to grow.
We remember that Matthew’s story of Jesus is being told to
those who have already seen the destruction of Israel, Jerusalem and the
Temple, the very center of Israelite religious ritual for centuries. Everything
has been burned to the ground. Yet, the gift of a great harvest still awaits
us, says Matthew’s Jesus to the disciples and others who have ears to hear! The
power and the witness of the people of God, always fragile and at peril in a
world that does not have the lantern and light of God’s Word shine upon their
path, nevertheless, the Lord shall be magnified by the generosity of God into a
fruitful and extravagant harvest. “Therefore, the church is called to ‘waste
itself,” to throw grace and love and compassion around like there is no
tomorrow, precisely because there is a tomorrow and it belongs to God!”’ [iv]
As imperfect as the church has been in generosity and
wasteful extravagance throughout the ages, here we are. The promise of being a
blessing to all peoples, fragile and at risk as it may be, has been entrusted
to us. We can be hearers and doers of God’s word. We can choose to welcome
black, brown, yellow and red people of all nations and all cultures. We can
choose to accept all male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and
queer people. We can choose to reach out to all who are free, enslaved,
trafficked, oppressed, and in anyway restricted from living life to its fullest.
We can offer a world of justice and peace for all people. We can choose to
respect the dignity of every single human being – and every creature under heaven
as well! We can choose to be responsible stewards of the environment God has
created for us to live in – this fragile earth, our island home. And in fact,
we have all promised, in our baptism, to choose to live out of all of these
truths of God’s Word! Because we have been touched by Jesus and the example of
his word and his works. Every day we read the good news, and every day Jesus
picks us up and turns us around whenever we stray from his path.
There is a tomorrow. And Jesus makes clear to anyone who
hears, that tomorrow will be given like the hundred-fold yield of wheat. When
we walk with Jesus wherever we may be, we can and will bear bounteous yields
with the seeds that he sows! We are the keepers of the promise that has been
given to us just as it was to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus! Because he’s our
friend he says will do the things he does, and greater things than these we
shall do! We can become God’s blessing to all the peoples of the earth! Let anyone
with ears listen!
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