An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Disreputable Parables in Violent World

A sermon on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52 by Nathan Nettleton

Yesterday’s news of the horrific massacre in Norway has shocked the world. Norway, the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, is not a place we associate with extremist violence. At least from here on the other side of the world, it seems a generally relaxed and happy and peaceful place, and one whose social climate is the envy of much of the rest of the world. For us who are seeking to follow Jesus, there is further distress in the news this morning because the gunman, Anders Behring Breivik, is being described as a ring-wing Christian extremist. A Christian extremist. In other words, he probably understood himself to be doing the will of God, to be taking part in a holy crusade in the name of Jesus. He almost certainly understands the God of our Lord Jesus Christ to be an angry and violent God who uses people like Breivik to unleash his furious retribution on a disobedient and sinful world. And whether we like it or not, this is not exactly a minority view of God, even among those who seek to follow Jesus. Most Christians would not imagine they are called to commit mass murder, but the image of God as an angry judge who will one day bring down fiery judgement on the earth and cast sinners into the eternal torture chamber of hell is quite widespread. And if you really believe in such a God, then theoretically it is not such a big step to believe that we are called to be agents of God’s retribution.

In truth though, one of the reasons that such a view of God remains popular is that it doesn’t usually lead to sudden unexpected massacres. Usually it contributes to the maintenance of social order. Just like an angry parent threatening a spanking, the image of an angry God who will punish wrongdoing has long served to keep people in line and hold chaos and anarchy at bay. And so the institutions of both church and state have continued to promote this image of God as a means of preserving public order and control. This doesn’t eliminate the violent rage of people like Breivik, but it usually succeeds in channelling it in social useful ways. And when there is an aberrant outbreak of uncontrolled violence like yesterday, the violent anger of the rest of us is quickly channelled into a unifying cry for retribution on the perpetrator. Never was this more apparent than when the western world unified itself in a common quest for vengeance after the 9/11 attacks, but we will doubtless see it again now. There will be a feeling that retribution on Breivik alone, after so many deaths, is probably not enough, so his contacts and connections will be explored in the search for a wider network of evil that we can unify against and seek to purge from our society. Without such a relief valve, the anger and fear and desire for vengeance themselves build up a pressure that threatens to spill out into social chaos and spiralling violence.

Now I say all this because without some sort of understanding of how these forces of violence and retribution work to maintain the basic structures of our society, it is difficult for us to comprehend why the teachings of Jesus were so shocking and provoked such resistance and animosity. The passages we heard over the last two weeks and this week from Matthew’s gospel are both an example of this and a comment on it. In the overall flow of the gospel, they belong together, and together they form the central block of five major blocks of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s account. And they are bracketed by and interspersed by comments making it clear how much resistance there is to his teaching about God. It begins with Jesus snubbing his family and announcing that his real family are those who do the will of God, and it ends with his home town turning against him and rejecting him and his message. In between those bookends we have the parable of the seed on the four types of soil that we heard two weeks ago, the parable of the weeds sown by an enemy in the wheat field that we heard last week, and then the six little parables we heard tonight which include more weeds. But also among them, in one of the bits the lectionary left out, we hear Jesus quote the prophet Isaiah to explain that most people listen and listen without hearing, and look and look without seeing, because their minds are so closed that they cannot accept the good news about God. And this points to an important thing about these parables and all the parables. They are not so much little analogies to be simply decoded and understood: “This is like this; O yeah, so it is!” Rather they are a kind of subversive communication that is designed to try to sneak through our defences and open us up to a new way of thinking. The response that Jesus is seeking from us to his parables is not so much an understanding that says “O yeah, I get it”, but a willingness to receive the parable and let it work away in us and take us where it will.

Sometimes these parables are perfectly capable of being interpreted in ways that are quite consistent with the old views of the violent God of retribution that Jesus is challenging. Last week’s parable of the wheat and the weeds or this week’s parable of the sorting out of the fishing catch — saving the good and incinerating the bad — can easily lead to a reaffirmation of the idea that the day will come when God will wreak his vengeance on those who have done wrong. But Jesus often does that: he works with a conventional image of God and instead of being completely obvious in the way he overthrows it, he plants a few details that subtly undermine it from within. Over and over, the message of Jesus is clear in both his words and his actions: God is not a God of anger or retribution, but a God of love and mercy. God does not intend to bring retribution or vengeance down upon the heads of anybody at all, but desires to shower all people, no matter what they have done, with forgiveness and grace and love. And most people hear this as good news when they are applying it to themselves and their loved ones, but as soon as it is applied equally to those they hate and fear and despise, they find it to be a most unpalatable message and they want to throw Jesus over a cliff. That Jesus loves you and will readily forgive all your sins is welcome news, but Jesus loves and will readily forgive the sins of Anders Breivik and Osama Bin Laden and Fred Nile and the boguns who prowl the streets looking to beat up Indian students and gays is not nearly such welcome news, It makes people bristle with anger. And understandably so, because it undermines the fragile balance of fear and unity that our society has relied on to hold itself together and prevent us falling into chaos.

But Jesus is not interested in maintaining the stability of our culture. Jesus’ agenda is to supplant our culture with a new culture – the kingdom of heaven. Culture and kingdom are almost interchangeable words here, and the first two parables we heard tonight speak of Jesus’ approach to cultural change. He is not on about reforming our existing culture. Rather he is sowing the seeds of a new culture that will grow in the midst of the old and eventually affect everything. Like a mad farmer who deliberately sows a feral weed like blackberry in his field and eventually finds that it has taken over the whole farm. Or like a woman who mixes a little yeast into the flour or a secretly spikes the fruit punch with vodka. Nobody sees what is happening, but the whole batch is affected. Jesus uses these deliberately disreputable images because he is not only talking about how it happens but about how suspiciously his message is received.

But when it is received, he says, when people are captured by the earth shattering nature of the message and cast themselves into its embrace, they are like someone who will joyously give up everything to gain what they have found. Again the images are a bit disreputable. There is something ethically questionable about hiding the treasure in order to buy the field, and the pearl of great price comes from a shellfish which is regarded as unclean under Jewish law. But, says Jesus, if you get what I am saying about who God is and how God relates to us, then nothing else will matter to you and you will give everything for this grace.

But what of last week’s parable of the wheat and the weeds, and this week’s parable of sorting out the catch in the fishing net? Don’t they still speak of a God who will eventually bring down an angry judgement on evil and cast sinners into hell? Well kind of, maybe. But even to the extent that they do, it seems that Jesus is simply taking a conventional image and instead of questioning the whole of it, he subverts it from within. You see, the common response to the idea that God is eager to punish sinners is to think that we need to identify sinners and deal with them too. The vast majority of us don’t go nearly as far as Anders Breivik, but our churches have still been characterised by an obsession with dividing the good and the bad and punishing the bad. But in both these parables, even while Jesus leaves the possibility of eventual judgement in place, his main point is clearly that we are not called to try to decide what needs incinerating and what doesn’t. It is not our job to either do the judging or carry out the sentence. Any time we try to be the agents of judgement, we do more damage than it could ever be worth. If only Mr Breivik had got that. We are clearly called to treat all as though they were good wheat or good fish and to accept that the church will consist of both without us needing to sort it out, and if there is any sorting out to be done, it is off in the future and none of our business.

And even then, I still say “kind of, maybe”, because it is by no means beyond dispute that the weeds and the bad fish should be understood as individual people. It could just as readily be that they refer to wrong attitudes and wrong structures and wrong ways of going about things. And those who are weeping and gnashing their teeth are those who clung tenaciously to those things as the things were cast into the fire. For in the vision that Jesus advances, that seems to be the only way that anyone misses out on the love and mercy of God. If you cling to those things that God casts aside and you refuse to accept the grace that God would extend to those you want to see condemned, then you will inevitably reap what you sow. You will be judged by your own measure, because you will refuse a mercy that must be shared with those whom you are not willing to share it with.

Whatever brand of Christianity Anders Behring Breivik thought he was subscribing to, it clearly did not have room for the idea that the love and grace of God could extend to the young people of the Norwegian Labor Party. If God was not ready to execute retribution on them yet, then Anders would hurry up the process. And while most of us would pull up way short of mass murder, our churches are still full of people who are ready to be the agents of God’s judgement by casting out the fundamentalists or casting out the gays, casting out the nationalists or casting out the asylum seekers. And Jesus’ radical good news is just as confronting to each and all of these sides. God loves you and them. God’s mercy is equally available to you and them. God is not who you thought God was. God is love and light and grace and in God there is no shadow side, waiting to break forth in vengeance.

“Have you understood this?” asks Jesus. If so, you are like the fine wine merchant who can bring out just the right wine at a moment’s notice, something old or something new as the occasion demands. In other words, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The good news that God is not as we thought does not mean there is nothing of value in the scriptures of the past. There is much of value there to be brought out by the wise. But there is also much that is radically new in what Jesus teaches us and in what the Holy Spirit is continuing to make known to us.

It may not be welcome news to a culture whose order and stability are based on the promise of retribution, and perhaps Jesus was joking about this when he compared himself to a feral weed sown in the field. For ultimately that’s what happened and showed us what it was all about. When we heard Jesus’ wild and unexpected message, we reacted like we do to a feral weed in the field, we set out to eradicate it. And in so doing we revealed once again how the system works to maintain its order, but Jesus rose above it and continues to offer us forgiveness. Its scary, but there it is. Our own innocent victim offers us forgiveness, and all we have to do to embrace it is accept hat he’s going to offer it to our worst enemy just the same. Unpalatable. Disreputable. But ultimately worth selling everything to embrace.

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