Hilton Head Island, SC – December 10, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 13:24-30; Matthew 13:36-43
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom.” – Mt. 13:38
Jesus and the Extraordinary
During Advent we have looked at how Jesus perceived the individual self, and how he understood the world. Today we shall consider a couple of episodes in the Gospels of how he conceptualized himself. Next week, on Christmas Eve day, we will look at some of the statements through which Jesus explained his concept of God. All of these subjects are extraordinary in themselves, and Jesus’ ideas about them were also extraordinary.
There is nothing that Jesus perceived that anyone else ever perceived in exactly the same way. Each of us is unique in our own thought processes, and thus we have our own unique thoughts. But Jesus thought about things in a manner never even closely duplicated by any other person in the history of the human race.
During Advent, we are contemplating four different subjects about which the thinking of Jesus was extraordinary. These are, in order, how he thought about the individual self, the world, Jesus’ own concept of himself, and how Jesus perceived God. Today, on the second Sunday in Advent, we shall ponder how Jesus perceived the world.
The world is a major concept that has captured the imagination of writers as long as writers have existed. Some found the world to be greatly troublesome. The last quotation on the topic of the world in my Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations, which has dozens of such quotations, is this one by William Wordsworth: “The world is too much with us, late and soon/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/ Little we see in nature that is ours.” Sometimes the world is too much with us. However, Jesus didn’t see it that way. Or at least in his best moments he didn’t.
On the bulletin cover this morning is a quote from Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon: “God hath not taken all the pains in forming, framing, furnishing, and adorning the world, that they who were made by him to live in it, should despise it; it will be well enough if they do not love it so immoderately as to prefer it before him who made it.” That is a very long and complex sentence, and also a very wise statement. Furthermore, it seems to be more in line with Jesus’ thinking than what Wordsworth wrote. Nevertheless, in context Wordsworth was closer to the thinking of Jesus that his brief quote would suggest. We should be World-Affirmers, but never without first affirming the God who made the world.
Speaking of Christ’s birth in his poem On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, the great English poet and theologian John Milton beautifully described the process of the earth’s creation, “While the Creator great His constellations set/ And the well-balanc’d world on hinges hung.” Milton offered his poetic opinion that once God had created the universe, the world waited for the right moment for Jesus to be born. And when Jesus came into the world, and began his ministry in a small province at the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, he brought with him an extraordinary concept of what God intended by means of the creation of the world. Long before the Big Bang, God had plans for our planet, and Jesus of Nazareth was central to that plan. Before or when Jesus began his itinerate mission of preaching and teaching, Jesus seemed to be powerfully aware of the plan, though not, perhaps, of its specifics.
In the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is recorded as having delivered seven parables in a row about the kingdom of God. The disciples, who presumably had not been disciples for very long, didn’t get the point of two of these parables. In their bewilderment, they asked Jesus to explain them, which he did. One of those parables was read along with Jesus’ explanation of it earlier in the service today. It is called, in King James English, the parable of the wheat and tares. “Tares” were a variety of weed which apparently thrived both in first-century Judea and also in seventeenth-century England. When fully grown, tares looks very much like wheat.
The parable tells of a farmer who planted wheat in his field. But while he slept, an enemy of the farmer went through the newly-sown field, planting tares among the wheat seeds. In time the wheat grew to its full height, but so did the weeds. The farmer told his servants to let the wheat come to its full fruition, rather than to try to remove the weeds with the possibility of also killing the wheat. And that, according to Jesus’ parable, is what they did.
After the crowd left when Jesus had finished telling his seven parables, the disciples asked Jesus what the parable of the wheat and tares meant. The moral of the story blithely sailed over their not-always-so-receptive heads. So Jesus told them its meaning. He said that the one who planted the good seed was the Son of man; in other words, it was Jesus himself, following instructions from God, who did the planting. Further, said Jesus, the good seed represents those who happily enter into God’s kingdom, both on earth and in heaven. The field, said Jesus, is the world itself. Thus God by means of Jesus came to plant good seed in the world. They are those who joyfully respond to God.
I readily confess that it is the part about the tares being children of the devil that personally I have always found distressing. I do not and cannot and probably shall not ever believe there is a devil, or that such a demonic being ever takes possession of anyone on earth. I have no doubt that Jesus believed that, and I know that many of his contemporaries believed it. They thought God was about to send the world catapulting into its fiery finale. Therefore I strongly reject the last part of the parable and strongly affirm the first part. The world IS the field in which God plants his good seed, and all of us are intended by God to become part of a good harvest. God would never create us good in order that evil might take control of us. We all do bad things, sometimes even evil things, but it is neither because, as Flip Wilson used to say fifty years ago, “The devil made me do it!” nor is it because God purposefully allows us to make bad choices. If we do evil, that is plainly our choice, and it doesn’t happen by God’s divine acquiescence. Many bad things happen, but not because God has any part in the process.
Nevertheless, there is sadly a great deal of realistic truth in what Jesus said in his parable and in his later explanation of it to the disciples. The world is good, extraordinarily good, but human beings can sully it and besmirch it and turn it into something God never intended. We even are capable of destroying the world altogether. Increasingly, ecologists, environmentalists, and political scientists are telling us that. We are the primary culprits in climate change, and only we can stop the process, if any longer we have enough time to reverse our folly. We can send the world into a fiery finale with nuclear weapons, because too many of our nations have too many of them for the safety of the planet. People indeed can destroy the world if they act with reckless abandon. Jesus was certainly right about that.
Still, the world is God’s field. As the hymn Come, ye thankful people, come so majestically declares, “All the world is God’s own field,/ Fruit unto his praise to yield;/ Wheat and tares together sown,/ Unto joy or sorrow grown.” The world is good, Jesus proclaimed, and we must never forget that. No matter what we may do that is sinful or badly misguided or just plain bad, the world is essentially good, and both God and Jesus always declare that truth to us.
God did not create the world fearing that He might lose the world. He created it knowing that He would save it. How and when and in what manner we do not and cannot know, but God knows. As Jesus ended his explanation to his mystified disciples, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear” (Matthew 13:43).
Sometimes it appears as though, as is so often said, the world is going to hell in a handbasket. To many people who are alive in the world right now, this seems like such a time. To many of the people living in Jesus’ time, especially Jews under Roman captivity, the first century also was such a time. Jesus himself may have been strongly influenced by such dark thinking.
And yet, and yet: Jesus held out great hope for the world, because He knew it was God’s world, and he believed God would not ultimately allow human evil to obliterate divine goodness. It is this powerful duality which Jesus was able to maintain throughout his ministry until the day he died on a cross on a small hillock outside the walls of Jerusalem. The world is good, but there is much evil in the world. Nevertheless, God is in command, and therefore the end, whatever and whenever it is, will be good.
A week ago we went to see the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It stars Frances McDormand as a very frustrated mother, and Woody Harrelson as the rapidly dying chief of police in a small town in the Ozarks. The story is this: the mother’s daughter has been raped and murdered by an unknown and un-apprehended assailant, and after six months, the chief of police has not caught the killer. So the mother, who is a very determined, very abrasive, extremely aggressive woman, pays for messages on three billboards asking what the chief is doing to catch the killer. She hopes public sentiment will force him to do something. It is a very well acted movie in a very tense emotional setting. The plot is somewhat implausible, and the language is simply atrocious throughout, but it is an instructive presentation of the human condition in some of its most excruciating moments.
If you detest the excessive use of unnecessary foul language, don’t go to see Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. There is no valid artistic reason to insert such trash talk into an otherwise excellent example of the cinematic craft. But if you want to observe the downside and the upside of the world which God created, it might be worth your time and the price of admission. It is being claimed that Ms. McDormand may get a second Oscar to follow up on her darkly comedic role from years ago in Fargo.
People do awful things, but they also do amazingly wonderful things. Not only do people do that, but you and I also do that. If we get too down on the world, we can give up on it. However, if we choose to see good in the world, we can learn to stick with it to the end. “The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom.”Jesus tells us that God has planted goodness throughout His world. Therefore there is no way that the world will go down in eternal flames. Temporal flames, maybe, but eternal flames: never.
In the meantime, however, we will always be confronted by good and evil, triumph and tragedy, hope and despair. It cannot be otherwise.
It is easy to get down on the world. Jesus did sometimes. His followers also did - - - a lot. The apostle Paul and the writer of the Book of Revelation are two examples of that tendency. Nonetheless, there are always illustrations of goodness in the world, if we just keep our eyes open.
There was a recent obituary in the newsmagazine The Week. It told about a US Navy pilot from the Korean War. Thomas J. Hudnut, Jr. graduated from the Naval Academy in 1947 and gained his wings two years later. The first black aviator in the Navy, Jesse Brown, was assigned to his squadron prior to the outbreak of the Korean War. When the two pilots met, Ensign Brown withheld his hand, to prevent Lt. Hudnut from being embarrassed by having to greet a black pilot. But the white flier pointedly held out his hand to welcome Ensign Brown into the squadron, and they soon became fast friends.
Later, On December 4, 1950, the two men left their carrier on a mission into North Korea. Brown’s plane was shot down. When the pilot guided his stricken plane into an open field, it burst into flames. Instead of waiting for the rescue helicopter to come, Hudnut crashed landed near Brown. He tried to put out the fire with snow. When that didn’t succeed, he attempted to pull the injured pilot from the cockpit by hand; then he used an axe, desperately trying to free Ensign Brown from his harness. By the time the helicopter arrived, Brown had died. For his extraordinary bravery in trying to rescue his fallen comrade, Thomas Hudnut was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
The world is filled with millions of good people who do millions of good things. It also has some people who do bad things. God did not create a hopelessly flawed human species in the world He created. He planted good seed, and it constantly keeps coming to fruition. As the hymn declares, “God is working His purpose out/ As year succeeds to year;/ God is working His purpose out,/ And the time is drawing near;/ Nearer and nearer draws the time,/ The time that surely be,/ When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God/ As the waters cover the sea.”
Advent is that time of year when we look forward once again to Christmas. Jesus Christ is coming into the world. Because that is so, the world shall never again be the same.
Those who live in constant sorrow view the world as a sorrowful place. Those who live in confidence and joy view it with hope and expectation. On the first Christmas Eve, the world in solemn splendor lay to hear the angels sing.