Prayer
Open our hearts to the wisdom of your Son, that, without concern for the cost of discipleship or the reward of our labors, we may grasp how incomparable the honor of working in your vineyard from morning until night. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.
From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year A, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.
From Prayers for Sunday and Seasons, Year A, Peter J. Scagnelli, LTP, 1992.
Some Thoughts on Matthew 20:1-16
"The scandal of this parable is that we are all equal recipients of God's gifts. The scandal of our faith is that we are often covetous and jealous when God's gifts of forgiveness and life are given to other in equal measure."
Commentary, Matthew 20:1-16, Karl Jacobson, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
"The scandal of this parable is that we are all equal recipients of God's gifts. The scandal of our faith is that we are often covetous and jealous when God's gifts of forgiveness and life are given to other in equal measure."
Commentary, Matthew 20:1-16, Karl Jacobson, Preaching This Week,WorkingPreacher.org, 2011.
"In the end, it’s not about unfair payments. At the parable’s conclusion, the full-day workers don’t moan that they have been cheated. They complain instead to the landowner, You have made them [the one-hour workers] equal to us."
ON Scripture, Matthew L. Skinner. Commentary and association with current news events, links and videos.
ON Scripture, Matthew L. Skinner. Commentary and association with current news events, links and videos.
This passage naturally offers some important wisdom for life in community that is mission oriented; or strives to be mission oriented.
1. One shall not presume and boast about the judgement and one's election among the first. In other words sitting in that pew for twenty years doesn't make it yours.I don't think we can fully separate the text from the notion that the gentile mission was affecting the inherited faith of the church. The people that Jesus reached out to during his ministry and the people the apostles reached out to were very different from the people who had long awaited the Messiah.
2. It reminds us the last shall be first, and the first last (illustrating 19:16ff). Or, one might think twice before complaining that the priest is spending too much time with new members.
3. We must realize that the newcomers are equally welcome to voice their opinions.
This Sunday there will be a lot of different sermons on this text. And, I believe that it is safe to say most will be focused on the established church's need to make room.
As insiders we naturally want to interpret the message to the other insiders.
I want to offer that the real grace of the passage is that it isn't meant to be (in my opinion) a polemical argument against those already at work in the field. It is quite the contrary.
Jesus' message is one of grace to those who come late.
Jesus is talking not to the establishment but the newcomers.
We would do well to remember this when preaching.
Truth is most people feel like they are the latecomers, they are not good enough, they have done something so wrong that even though they dared walk in the church on this particular day it won't do any good because they are doomed.
Most people don't feel they are good enough to receive the grace of God and that is precisely the message of the cross. No one can do anything to win it! We have all come late!
We are truly challenged by this somewhat Matthean Paulinism. "As Isaac the Syrian provocatively put it, 'How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers? (Asc. hom. 51)'" As insiders we just can't shake our desire to truly be about works. (Allison/Davies, Matthew, vol 3, 77)
Allison and Davies write: "Hence the less deserving may receive as much as the more deserving. Like the Spirit, the divine grace blows where it wills. That destroys all human reckoning and therefore all Christian presumption....hope should never become self-satisfaction. (Ibid)
I agree with my fellow semi-pelagians we cannot completely lift this out of context for Matthew has plenty to say about how Christians behave in the vineyard. But I wold remind us all that is in response to the grace of God; it is not in order to receive the grace of God.
BUT it is clear that there is tremendous good news this week in the Gospel: Nobody ever comes late! We are all just arriving right on time.
This is one of the most positive letters that Paul writes. He is in prison and encouraging the Philippians to read and know about the mission of the Gospel. He tells them of how he has spread the Gospel to his captors and they are sharing in the Good News.
He appears worried about his potential death and knows that Christ has not yet returned, and he will not be likely to see him. He understands that the mission of Christ must go on and that the spreading of the faith is essential - even without him. We can almost feel his emotions as he ponders his fate. He is hopeful for both his life with Christ after death and the life of the faithful after his leaving.
God has really done a number on Paul, he understands his whole life and the very meaning of creation now through the lens of a living Christ. He believes that while he is one with Christ in this world in the next that unity will be solidified. For his life he has understood that he was to be a laborer in the vineyard. Even though he was not one of the original followers he has understood his work no less essential and his preaching of Christ as the fullness of his call.
He is hopeful that he will be with the Christians for a while longer so that he may continue the progress of the kingdom in which he has a share. Regardless of whether he is with them or not he holds them up to a high practice of living a life of Christ. He tells them to live in community and to reflect to one another and the world the servant-hood of Christ. they are to be strong in their faith. They are to be bound together and not divided. They are to work together and be of one mind in their faith.
These are difficult times but he encourages them to be united in their cause. Speaking from prison where he himself is jailed because of his faith he tells them not to be discouraged by those who will challenge them. They should be strong in their faith and be sure of their own inheritance of the kingdom of God. Like Paul and like Christ though they may suffer they are suffering in community with others. It is a much greater thing to persevere and to be supportive on one another with the assurances that come from God and God's love for them.
If they will labor on like Paul still others will come to know Christ through their witness.
What strikes me in particular is how at every turn Paul is attempting to make a witness of Christ's love, of Christ's forgiveness, of Christ's relationship with those who may cause suffering and persecution. He himself is undaunted in trying to tell the story of Good News to his captors and in turn helps them receive Christ. To those in Philippi he encourages them to make a witness to those who harass them. This behavior is the opposite of how we deal with those who are against us today.
If someone is against us we wail back, we seek their demise, we seek to win by power and control. We do not become week or as a servant so that they may hear and be converted. We do the opposite of what Paul intends in making a witness. It reminds me that there is a great deal of courage needed when we seek to be like Christ and become lower than we believe we should be in order to serve the very people who may in the end be our undoing. That is quite a very different model of Christianity that the one we typically model in our contemporary society.
The passage for this Sunday from Exodus is the story of the manna and quail in the wilderness. It is about God’s providence for the hungry. It is about God’s listening ear and God’s intervention in the world.
The passage appears in John’s Gospel and is an allusion along with other Exodus mentions that correlate the ministry of Jesus with the work of Moses. Scholar Richard Hays in Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, p. 291, makes the comment that while the author of John’s Gospel does use the references there is no particular explanation but rather that the reader is supposed to understand the significance. The Passover of Israel is a common theme mentioned four times throughout the Gospel as it makes its way towards the Last Supper.
Left to our own devices we might see that at the minimum the Gospel is revealing in the work of Jesus the themes of God from the history of Israel. Jesus’ own ministry is defined in similar spiritual terms as that of Moses. Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 is connected then to the manna and quail from heaven. Here what we can say is that God in Christ Jesus is doing and working out God’s purposes just as God did so with Moses. God hears God’s people crying and God frees them, feeds them, and delivers them.
Some
Thoughts on Exodus 16:2-15
The passage appears in John’s Gospel and is an allusion along with other Exodus mentions that correlate the ministry of Jesus with the work of Moses. Scholar Richard Hays in Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, p. 291, makes the comment that while the author of John’s Gospel does use the references there is no particular explanation but rather that the reader is supposed to understand the significance. The Passover of Israel is a common theme mentioned four times throughout the Gospel as it makes its way towards the Last Supper.
Left to our own devices we might see that at the minimum the Gospel is revealing in the work of Jesus the themes of God from the history of Israel. Jesus’ own ministry is defined in similar spiritual terms as that of Moses. Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 is connected then to the manna and quail from heaven. Here what we can say is that God in Christ Jesus is doing and working out God’s purposes just as God did so with Moses. God hears God’s people crying and God frees them, feeds them, and delivers them.
It is not simply that Jesus mimics what came before in the history of Israel but that the arc of salvation stretches backwards just as it stretches forwards. The very nature of God is to care, deliver, and provide for God’s people. In this way the work of God in Christ Jesus is not unique but part of the continuing and emerging story of the relationship between God and God’s creation.
Furthermore, what John’s Gospel does tell us is that while it is similar work it is also different. Jesus is not another Moses, or doing similar work, but in line with God’s eternal work. The difference is important though. That difference is that while the manna and quail in the wilderness was temporary and perished the work of the Christ will be eternal.
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