The Spirit of Life Frees You: 12 July, 2020
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
All the lectionaries include the parable in verses 1–9 and the allegorical explanation in 18–23. Note that only this parable and next week’s parable of the wheat and weeds include interpretations placed on the lips of Jesus. While most scholarship asserts them to be additions, this does not preclude them as legitimate interpretations of the parable. That said, parables are inherently polyvalent, and the preacher can feel free to work beyond the allegory provided.
The image of a sower who so wildly scatters seed as to let it fall upon every conceivable surface is a viable reader response for modern hearers and for Jesus’ audience. This connects to the abandon and abundance referenced in Isaiah. The soils provide ample material to focus on the concerns of both Matthew’s community and modern church folk about why the gospel has been rejected by so many, often by each one of us in our daily struggles to hear.
. . . When one wishes to get rid of weeds in the yard, you not only address the weeds, but sow more seed to crowd them out. At a minimum, there is opportunity for a message of inclusion, radical, persistent grace, and the call of God’s people to sow as if there is no tomorrow. –– Timothy V. Olson
Isaiah 55:10-13
Food and drink without price and available to anyone who is thirsty or hungry casts the invitation widely. One wonders whether the privileged will take up such an invitation since it allows all the wrong people to come. The invitation moves to a promise as it throws open something much more radical. Sitting in exile, the people addressed by Second Isaiah wonder how the house of David shall stand again. Will a descendent rise again? Isaiah seems to offer something beyond imagining.
The covenant with David becomes part of the fare offered at the banquet. The exiled, the ones who can’t pay a thing, will indeed be the way that God continues to bless the people and the nations beyond them (v 5). The call is for not only a return to the graciousness of God (vv 6–7), but a call to re-imagine the whole relationship between God and the people. Exile may have destroyed all they understood, but not the faithfulness of God. –– Timothy V. Olson
Romans 8:1-11
The announcement that there is no condemnation in Christ flows from the previous chapter where Paul asserts the way in which the law condemns us because of our bondage to sin. Flesh, as it is used here, is not a gnostic condemnation of all things material. Paul understands fully the goodness of creation. He refers here to the corruption of the material world, the body, by the presence of sin. It is not what God intended because it is the manifestation of a break between creator and creation. As Christ takes on “the likeness of sinful flesh” (v 3), he overcomes and condemns sin in the flesh. This opens up a life in the Spirit of Christ instead of life “in the flesh.”
This new life is directed toward God, in harmony with divine aspiration and intentions. –– Timothy V. Olson
Timothy V. Olson is the pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Ankeny, Iowa.
Homily Service 38, no. 8 (2005): 13-23.