A new initiative, ‘First Thoughts’, aired on the St John the Evangelist Parish in Belfast’s Youtube channel, features short reflections on the day’s lectionary reading. It is live at 9 am each day.
I was the speaker this morning. You can watch, or read the text of my contribution below.
Today’s reading is Matthew 13:47-53.
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.
Have you understood all this? They said to him, Yes. And he said to them, Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
And when Jesus had finished these parables, he went away from there …
My first thoughts when I read this passage were:
It is not easy to think about angels throwing people into a furnace of fire. But I suppose there is something in the parable that resonates with our human tendency to think in binaries: the righteous and the evil. I see this in my five-year-old son: after listening to a story, he will often ask about a character: Is he bad? Is he good? My stock answer is ‘there’s good and bad in everyone’, but this never really seems to satisfy him.
That’s why I am a little suspicious when Jesus asks his disciples if they have ‘understood all this’ and they answer ‘yes’. We know that elsewhere in the gospels the disciples never seem to understand anything straight away. It makes me wonder if it is really so straightforward for those angels to separate the righteous from the evil?
If we are honest, as our minds advance beyond that of a five-year-old, we know that ‘there’s good and bad in everyone’. You may be familiar with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s insight on this. He wrote:
‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
In light of today’s reading, those words are terrifying indeed.
And living as we do, in a post-Holocaust world, the imagery of the parable is even more terrifying. In the living memory of some of us, people were put in concentration camps, murdered in gas chambers, and then incinerated in furnaces of fire. We have seen hell on earth.
And that hell on earth was a product of humanity’s obsession with separating the so-called righteous from the so-called evil. It seems that whenever human beings try to do the separating, we get it wrong.
Perhaps that is why in this parable, and in others that Jesus tells, he says that the kingdom of heaven contains both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. And Jesus urges us to just let that be: to let the fish swim together, to let the wheat and the tares grow together, to let the sheep and the goats graze together. Maybe what he wants us to understand is that it is not up to us to separate the righteous from the evil, but rather to rely on God and his angels for that. Is that what the disciples understood when they answered ‘yes’ to Jesus’ question? Or were they already counting themselves among the righteous, secretly pleased that those who they thought were evil would suffer judgement?
If we understand that judgement is not up to us, we also should understand how insidious it is to ‘think of ourselves more highly than we ought’, as the Apostle Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans. If we take these parables seriously, they remind us that we can’t just sit back and assume ourselves among the righteous. Our choices matter: we are responsible for what we do and what we say on this earth – and we can make it a heaven, or a hell, for ourselves and other people.
But finally, and thankfully, we must read these parables in light of the overall message of the gospels. That message is that God’s love is wider, longer, higher and deeper than we can ever imagine. There are no sins that God cannot forgive, and there is no person too evil to be redeemed.
Thanks for listening, and God bless you today.