The Gospel for this week is yet another parable set in a vineyard. Strictly, it is an allegory since it is not simply a story with a message, but one in which the participants can be directly correlated with the people to whom, and about whom, the story is told
    On the surface, the parallels are not hard to see. God is the owner of the vineyard. The tenants are those entrusted with witnessing to his lordship. The slaves are the Old Testament prophets sent by God, time and again, to recall his people to faithful obedience. In the face of their repeated rejection the landlord’s own son – Jesus – is sent to the vineyard. His murder at the hands of the tenants brings God’s wrath upon them, and custody of the vineyard is placed in other hands.

Who exactly are these first tenants? It is easy to misidentify them as the Jews, and hence suppose that the new tenants are the Christians. This is an inference that has often been drawn in the past. But it is mistaken, and the lesson from Isaiah puts us right on this score: “the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel”. It is not the tenants, but the vineyard itself, strange to say, that is to be identified with the Chosen People. The fertile ground that God has provided, however, loses its fruitfulness when plants cease to grow as God has intended.
   When Jesus uses the same parable, he switches attention from the vineyard to those who work it, from the people of Israel to their leaders. Forgetting, or disregarding, their obligation to God, they claim the headship of Israel for their own nationalistic purposes. It is in order to rescue his Chosen People, not to abandon them, that God sends his Son. This means that the new tenants do not mark a radical break with the past. Rather, they are called to be more faithful stewards of the same God.

Paul’s Epistle for this Sunday can be seen to reflect this interpretation of the allegory. He is, he tells the Philippians, "a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee", thereby emphatically underlining his own Jewishness, something he never discounts or disowns. But, he says, “whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss  . . .  because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”.
      The continuity between Jew and Christian is essential to the Gospel message Paul preaches. It carries this implication, however. If the ancient Pharisees forfeited their spiritual inheritance because of arrogance and complacency, a similar attitude can rob modern Christians of theirs. The Church so easily becomes concerned chiefly with its own security, popularity and prosperity, it is constantly at risk of repeating the error of the tenant farmers in the vineyard.

This week’s Epistle includes what is arguably the most beautiful passage in all of Paul’s letters – his theologically deep and poetically compelling affirmation to the Philippians of the incarnation of God in Jesus. For a long time, biblical scholars thought that this was probably an early Christian hymn, but opinion on this point has changed in recent decades. Still, whether it is or not, the passage brilliantly captures the indissoluble unity of the human and the divine that was made possible by Christ's perfect obedience. The climax looks to a time when ‘every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’.
     There follows, however, an instruction to the Philippians that seems to conflict both with the Lordship of Christ, and with Paul’s well known insistence on faith before works. 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’, Paul writes. Yet surely the Good News of the Gospel renders this instruction redundant? Since Christ has saved us by being 'obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross', are we not relieved of the burden of working out our salvation for ourselves? Paul, of course, does not mean to deny this, and so he immediately adds to his instruction this essential qualification – ‘it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. But doesn’t this just compound the problem? Is it God at work, or is it us at work?

The Gospel throws some light on this issue. It falls into two parts whose connection is not altogether obvious. The first part recounts another of Jesus’ encounters with the chief priests and elders, while the second part is another vineyard parable. In the parable, two sons react differently to their father's instruction to work in the vineyard. The one who explicitly refuses, appears to be rebellious yet ultimately does as his father asks. The other appears to be dutiful by saying the right thing, but in fact goes his own way. Jesus asks his hearers to decide which of the two sons is the obedient one. It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is obvious. The ‘rebel’ is the obedient son because, in the end, he decides to act as his father instructs. The two parts of the passage are connected because the parable is directed at the chief priests and elders. They it is who appear to obey the ways of God, yet they rejected John the Baptist, just as they are rejecting Jesus. It is ordinary people, and especially apparently unrighteous tax collectors and prostitutes, who got it right. They welcomed John the Baptist, and they can see God at work in Christ.
    The message is this. Salvation is a combination of knowledge and will. We need to know how we ought to live. This means having open and inquiring minds, praying with the words of this week’s Psalm, 'Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation'. But we also need to acknowledge our frailty. Though the life of faith for us is a communion with God, this necessarily falls short of Christ's perfect union. That is why, like the tax collectors, but unlike the chief priests, we need to look to Jesus. In our attempts to do so, it would be difficult to improve on Paul’s opening advice. ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’. True discipleship means being of one mind with Jesus. But a crucial part of the sentence is the very first word -- ‘Let . .’.

​

• Jonah 3:10-4:11 and Psalm 145:1-8  • 
• Philippians 1:21-30  • 
• Matthew 20:1-16

​The whole of this week's Gospel comprises a single parable – the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. Unlike many other Gospel parables, this one has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a punch line. This means that we can follow it very easily. 

An employer pays his workers according to the agreement he made with them. They are greatly surprised, and annoyed, to find that he has paid them all the same amount, even though they have done significantly different amounts of work. The problem, though, is not simply to understand the story. We also have to ask what lesson are we supposed to draw from it.
      Occasionally people have thought that this parable has direct application to the workplace. They take the message to be that Christian employers ought to pay their workers equally rather than on a meritocratic basis. Sometimes, they have found warrant in it for an even wider principle of Christian social ethics, one that supports something like the Marxist dictum ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Yet, Jesus makes it plain that he is not talking about ordinary life, but about ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’. That is to say, his parable concerns the way God deals with us, not the way we deal with each other.

Even if this is what the parable aims to illuminate, however, there still seems be a problem of interpretation. The vineyard owner says to the labourer who complains that he has worked all day, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong’. At one level that is plainly true, but is it a good enough response to the complaint? How can it be just to give the same reward to radically different amounts of work? Don’t the labourers who worked longer deserve more?

These questions have familiar religious parallels. If the redemption of the world is universal and includes everyone who repents, this means that repentance wipes out past sins. However wicked anyone has been, it seems it doesn't matter in the end. Could such a doctrine be squared with our sense of justice? Can it be just for God to treat fraudsters, child abusers, serial killers and terrorists in the same way as those who have been decent Christians -- or simply decent citizens -- all their lives, provided they express repentance, should it only be on their death beds? What is the point of lifelong faithfulness, if it makes no difference in the end?
      To this recurrent, and heartfelt question, the Epistle from Philippians suggests an answer. If, as Paul affirms ‘living is Christ and dying is gain’, then the benefit to us of God’s redeeming work in Christ is ‘inestimable’ (as the BCP General Thanksgiving expressly declares). That is to say, unlike payment, the value of knowing the love of God in Christ can't be measured in any meaningful way. Duration does not determine the value of love between people. Love is not lessened in or for those who die young. Similarly, living in awareness of God's love is supremely valuable regardless of how early or late in life we have come to it. Nothing can improve upon it because there simply is no greater benefit that lifelong laborers could hope for, or deserve. And this remains true, quite irrespective of how God treats other sinners.

​Knowledge of our own salvation, then, should dispel any envious glances we might be tempted to cast at those who, from a materialistic point of view, ‘got away with it’. Are the years they lived in self-indulgence, dishonesty or cruelty a way of life we would have chosen, if only we had known that we could be forgiven just before death? What kind of life could we want more than to live ‘in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ’, and to do so for as much of our lives as possible? Of course, we know that we will always fall short. That is why repentance and forgiveness have such an important role.

• Genesis 50:15-21 and Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13  • 
• Romans 14:1-12  • 
• Matthew 18:21-35

​​In one way or another, the readings for this Sunday are about tolerance, forgiveness and judgment. In the contemporary liberal democratic world, tolerance is lauded, officially at any rate, while being 'judgmental' is among the worst of sins. That explains why most mainline Christian denominations have been so anxious to cast off the Church’s historical reputation as ‘judgmental’, and keen embrace a non-judgmental inclusiveness instead. This reflects, they think, what they see to be God's unconditional love in Christ. God loves you whoever, and whatever, you are.

​     More conservative Christians sometimes condemn this as a willingness to abandon a Gospel that preaches sin and salvation, in the interests of appeasing the secular world. Yet, the passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans that serves as this week's epistle, does provide biblical support for non-judgmentalism. The disagreement Paul writes about – whether or not to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols -- is of no concern to us today. But the advice he bases upon it has much wider application. Though we ought to be firm in our own convictions, he tells us, we ought not to pass judgment on, still less despise, those who disagree with us. The Gospel passage puts the same thought in the wider context of those who harm us. Forgiveness is ‘seventy times seven’ more important than retribution, however natural the desire for this may be. Here we have a truth that everyone has reason to welcome, if we are not to fall into the rank hypocrisy of the indebted slave in the parable that Jesus goes on to tell.

​To this extent then, biblical teaching coincides with contemporary liberal opinion. At the same time, the wholesale rejection of ‘judgmentalism’ conflicts with another key element in these readings. Human beings, they all tell us, are indeed under judgment, both for what they believe and for what they do.
   This comes out very clearly in the Old Testament lesson. When Jacob dies, his sons are understandably afraid that Joseph will now feel free to avenge himself for the cruelty they showed him all those years before when they sold him into slavery. They know full well that what they did was wrong. That is why they lied to their father about it at the time. When they approach Joseph, possibly with another lie about Jacob’s dying words, his response is so gracious that it brings them to tears. “Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good”. Joseph forgives them, but he does not in any way discount what they did. Rather, he turns from away from his own feelings and towards the ultimate judgment that must fall upon them, at the hands of God.

​No one really thinks non-judgmentally. Even the most liberal person holds that racist beliefs, for example, are invariably rooted in falsehoods, and that their fruits, especially when sincerely held, are inevitably evil. Paul's point, though, is that Christians – even in this kind of case -- ought to be very careful that they are not trying to pre-empt God’s judgment. ‘Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister?” he cautions his readers. So while he takes his stand against human judgmentalism, he immediately places it in a larger theological context: “For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God”.
     The Gospel story of the hypocritical slave, let it be noted, ends with his being “tortured” as an act of justice. In the past, Christians have been very ready to usurp God’s justice and do the torturing themselves. Nowadays, perhaps, they are more likely to make the opposite mistake -- presuming upon God’s mercy and doing the forgiving themselves. The difficult thing is to witness to the solemn truth that “each of us will be accountable to God”, and at the same time do so in a spirit of love rather than loathing.

The Gospel for this Sunday contains a phrase that has powerfully consoled Christians in difficult circumstances of many sorts – ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’. Faced with social isolation, political oppression, cultural indifference or simply declining membership, it is both critically important and deeply reassuring to hold fast to the truth that neither popular success nor numerical strength is relevant to the promise of divine presence. Indeed, perhaps we have less reason to be confident of the presence of Christ when two or three thousand are gathered together, since mass movements have often proved the enemy of true religion.

At the same time, there is always this risk -- that ‘where two or three are gathered together’ is reduced to a self-justifying mantra. This happens when it is invoked by opinionated minorities in defense of their splits and schisms. It also happens when it is used to exempt complacent churches from their evangelical obligations. It is true when churches are animated by clubbishness, rather than the expansiveness that comes from faith in God. In all these cases, divine assurance is displaced by human failing – self-righteousness, complacency, fearfulness – often masquerading as ‘concern’ or ‘community’. It is salutary to remember, therefore, that the wonderful assurance Jesus offers in this much repeated sentence is not unconditional. 

The extract from Paul’s Letter to the Romans prescribed for this Sunday, addresses just this issue. Though relatively brief, it is also remarkably dense. Its central message is that Christ is truly present only in those who have ‘put on Christ’. What does this mean? It means adopting a cast of mind or way of looking at things -- the mind of Christ-- whose key elements are these. First, Christians need the conviction that ‘now is the time to wake from sleep’. The things we often struggle for, such as wealth, power, or personal career, are in an important sense unreal. Second, we need to abandon ‘the works of darkness’ i.e. the devious and destructive ways in which we can so easily pursue our goals, and be willing to have the brightest light shine on the way we conduct our lives. Third, we have to affirm that love best fulfils ‘the law’, which is to say, that living truly in accordance with the laws of God means being motivated chiefly by a love for the world and the people around us.
   Christian conduct down the centuries has shown just how hard it is to follow these prescriptions. Often the difficulty arises from self-centredness, but social and political conformity, an unwillingness to stand out (or in older language ‘witness’) is no less likely to deflect us from the mind of Christ. Yet, if we pause to dwell on it, we can come to see that both personal selfishness and social conformity are obstacles to a truly extraordinary prospect. Through Christ, mere mortals can participate in the divine life of the one true God.

• Jeremiah 15:15-21 and Psalm 26:1-8  • 
• Romans 12:9-21  • 
• Matthew 16:21-28

​In the Epistle for this Sunday, Paul sets a very high standard for Christian conduct: ‘Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit . . . Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer . . . Bless those who persecute you . . . Live in harmony with one another . . . Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.’ ​

,These injunctions stand in very sharp contrast with the passage from Jeremiah, who expresses very little patience in suffering, and none at all when it come to blessing persecutors. “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?”, he wails, and asks God to “bring down retribution for me on my persecutors”. Paul’s experience of Christ, it seems, has moved him to a far higher and worthier ideal. Yet if we are honest we have to admit that the ideal he sets before us is a counsel of perfection. How many Christian lives actually model this ideal? How many ever have? Most Christians are more like Jeremiah, if the truth be told. This raises a critical question. If the call to true Christian conduct is unrealistic, what is the point of preaching this, no doubt fine, ideal to the Church and to the world?  

​This is not an easy question to answer, but reflection on the Gospel for this week can steer us in the right direction. These few verses from Matthew bring to the fore the strange relationship that Simon Peter had with Jesus. In part, this reflected his impulsive and vacillating character. Peter was the sort of person, the Gospels tell us, who could be inspired to leap over the side of a boat one moment, only to be crying out in fear the next. One instance of his vacillation is especially well known and especially important -- his behaviour at ‘the time of trial’. When danger looms -- in the unlikely form of a servant girl! – the emphatic threefold assurance of love and loyalty to Jesus that Peter has made a short time before, is rapidly displaced by three equally emphatic denials -- 'I never knew him'. And then of course, he swings back into remorse when the cock crows.

The strange thing, though, is that Jesus also seems to vacillate in his attitude to Peter. Last week's Gospel recorded how, early in their relationship, Jesus declares Peter to be the ‘rock’ on which the church is to be founded. Now, in this week's passage that same rock is declared ‘a stumbling block’, someone who has to be told, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’  -- a dramatic reversal indeed.
Yet this fact remains. Jesus chose Peter and never rejected him. He made Peter a witness of the Transfiguration. It was Peter who was granted the largest number of post-Resurrection encounters. He even washed Peter’s feet. Why? An important clue to the puzzle lies in this week’s rebuke: ‘You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’. It is precisely Peter’s inconsistent character that equips him for the role he has been assigned. In his weakness, he sets his mind on human things, and in that respect is a true representative of our common humanity.  In his devotion to Jesus, he sets his mind on divine things, and however faltering his devotion proves to be, it nonetheless exhibits a spiritual hope of which we are all capable. Paul’s counsel of perfection is a description of that hope. Its ultimate realization, however, is not to be found in Peter or in us, but in Jesus. That is why Jesus alone is to be hailed as true man and true God. In him we see both what we are, and what we are meant to be.

• Isaiah 51:1-6 and Psalm 138  • 
• Romans 12:1-8  • 
• Matthew 16:13-20

​In this week’s Gospel, Jesus poses two questions to his disciples: Who do people say I am? and Who do you say I am? ​

While others, in attempting to identify Jesus, have placed him in the long and distinguished line of Jewish prophets, Peter’s own answer is, “the Messiah”. Jesus’ response is intriguing. Peter, he declares, could only have identified him as Messiah by divine revelation, and on the strength of this he, Simon, this simple fisherman whose courage will fail him at the moment of trial, is nevertheless the Rock on which the Church will be built. This gives new significance to Isaiah’s instruction “Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the LORD. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug”.
   Then, having entrusted Peter with what is both an astonishing privilege and an awesome responsibility, Jesus, we are told, “sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah”. Why would he do this? The same puzzling instruction is to be found in Mark’s Gospel, many more times than in Matthew’s in fact. When the disciples finally appreciate that Jesus is indeed the Christ, they are commanded to tell no one – a commandment that Mark suggests they are not long in breaking. So why does Jesus want them to be silent?

One answer is this. The Messiah is not another prophet with an important message to proclaim. He is, rather, the fulfilment of all prophetic messages, the person who inaugurates the world to which the prophets have been pointing. This realisation is not something that could be inferred on the basis of scriptural knowledge or exegesis. That is why the learning of the Pharisees, however valuable in many respects, must always fall short of the thing at which they aim. By the same token, relatively uneducated fishermen can come to understand the significance of Jesus. As Isaiah puts it in the Old Testament lesson “though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly; but the haughty he perceives from far away”. Recognizing Christ’s Messiahship is a gift, not an accomplishment. Hence the commandment to silence. Others cannot come to identify Jesus as the Messiah simply by being informed. They have to arrive at the confession that Jesus is Lord for themselves. Informing them prematurely, paradoxically, may get in the way.
   This is what St Paul is referring to in his letter to the Roman Christians when he calls them to the “renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God”. A mind renewed is not one that has acquired more skills or gathered more information. It is a mind that thinks of the skills and information that it possesses in a different way  -- as “gifts that differ according to the grace given to us”. Such a mind is profoundly humble, content to accept its own aptitudes for what they are, and not rivalling or aping others. This humility, though, is grounded in the highest aspiration.  Those who accept that “we who are many, are one body in Christ” can then hope that the mind renewed within them is the mind of Christ.

​Of course, St Paul had to keep reminding Christians of this. Experience shows how feeble our grasp and how flickering our understanding can be. But that is precisely where the Messiah promised by Isaiah comes to our aid. “My salvation will be forever, and my deliverance will never be ended”.

The relation between Judaism and Christianity has long been highly problematic. Anti-Semitism was the great stain on European Christianity in medieval and early modern times, and perhaps this even paved the way for the monstrous hatred of the Jews exhibited in the secular, post-Christian ideologies of Nazism and Communism. On the other hand, from a very early stage, Christian theologians insisted, against those who claimed that the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles were sufficient, that Christians could never dispense with the old testament of the Jewish Scriptures, because these were essential to understanding the new testament (or witness) that had been made manifest in the life and death of Jesus.
     The Epistle and the Gospel for this Sunday reveal that the question of how the relation between 'old' and 'new' testaments to God's work in the world should be understood, was a pressing one right from the start. It confronted not only Paul, but Jesus himself. Both faced the charge that embracing the Gospel meant abandoning the ‘faith of their fathers’, and by implication rejecting the God of Israel. Both of them emphatically denied it.

Their response makes it plain that the Christian Gospel is not about propagating a new religion and displacing the old, but about renewing faith in God’s promises to his Chosen People. ‘I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham’, Paul declares. ‘God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’. And then he adds an interesting twist.  It is through witness of the Jews that the Gentiles have been lifted out of their sinful ways, and it will be thanks to the witness of the Gentiles that the Jews will be restored to God.
      This line of thought echoes the sentiment expressed in this week's Old Testament passage. God declares through the prophet Isaiah that “foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
 
At the heart of the Gospel passage from Matthew, we find the same message. While it seems to fall into two quite separate parts, they are in fact connected. In the second part, Jesus travels to Tyre and Sidon, both notoriously sinful cities from a Jewish point of view. There he encounters a Canaanite woman who shouts at him for help. The Canaanites were not Israelites, and initially this makes a difference to Jesus’ response. His principal mission, he tells the woman, is "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel". Why is Israel lost? The answer is, ‘Phariseeism’, which is to say, it has come to be dominated by a complex labyrinth of ritualistic practice and social conformity As a result, the spiritual guidance given by the Jewish teachers no longer has any value for anyone who would walk in the ways of God. It is tantamount to the blind trying to lead the blind.

• 1 Kings 3:5-12 and Psalm 119:129-136  • 
• Romans 8:26-39  • 
• Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

​St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the most theological book of the Bible, is an intriguing mixture. It alternates between dense, often convoluted reasoning, and poetry of quite extraordinary power.  The Epistle for this Sunday falls into the second category, and it constitutes one of the finest, most insightful and most inspiring passages in all of Scripture – “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In this single, admittedly lengthy sentence, Paul perfectly captures and expresses the meaning of the Gospel in the lives of ordinary Christians, both past and present, and the assurance that it gives.

But he also thereby brilliantly illuminates the Gospel for this Sunday. The Lectionary has omitted some verses from the 13th Chapter of Matthew and in this way intensifies its rapid listing of short parables about the Kingdom of God. Jesus uses the different analogies he employs to impress upon his hearers – and upon us – this thought: when we sign up to Christian faith we are making a choice of the greatest significance. Initially it may seem a little thing, just as yeast makes up a very small part of the ingredients of a loaf of bread. Even so, it transforms all the rest. Faith that, despite so many contrary appearances and experiences, the world is under the control of a personal and loving God, and faith that the humblest and most marginalized can be valued participants in God's kingdom, transforms life from the inside. That is the point of the parable about finding a treasure so priceless that is to be preferred to everything else we possess.
      Of course, to many people the Gospel these parables articulate is not new. They have grown up in the faith, and been “trained for the kingdom of heaven” to the point where sheer familiarity dulls the sense of its significance. But another parable speaks to them. Their task is to bring out of the treasure they have been given both “what is new and what is old”.

​To gain or regain the gift of faith is not to be given guaranteed protection against sickness or injury, hardship or injustice. Faith is not a kind of cosmic insurance. Rather, Paul tells us, it is to know that, whatever injustices, illnesses, and temptations befall us, “in all these things we are more than conquerors" provided we view them all "through him who loved us”. This faith is especially relevant at times of widespread fear and anxiety, as for instance, in an epidemic. But it is also especially challenging. History has witnessed plagues far more devastating than the present pandemic, and in these Christians enjoyed no special divine protection. Yet, they continued to proclaim with confidence that “neither things present, nor things to come will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” and that is what matters. With the churches all closed in the name of ‘safety’, and surrounded by precautions when they re-open, it is less easy to say that the world has heard today’s Christians confidently affirm this same proclamation of faith.

• Isaiah 44:6-8 and Psalm 86:11-17  • 
• Romans 8:12-25  • 
• Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

​Over these few weeks, the lectionary focusses on three parables in which Jesus uses the image of seed and sowing. The first of these, which provided the Gospel for last week, alerts us to the spiritual dangers of indifference, passing enthusiasm and worldly projects. His use of the image this week is rather different. It anticipates the ‘good seed’ of the Gospel confronting not merely human weakness, but the malevolence of ‘an enemy’.  

​When Jesus explains the parable to his disciples, the enemy turns out to be the Devil. To modern ears, any reference to the Devil (or Satan) sounds like one of those superstitious ideas science has taught us to abandon, a concept that only religious fanatics would use nowadays.  Yet our news media are filled with actions and events that regularly seem to show forces of evil taking possession of human hearts and minds, and driving them to levels of blindness, wickedness and cruelty far beyond ordinary selfishness or indifference. This troubling phenomenon is not confined to individuals, the  child molesters, drug traffickers or mass murderers who capture the headlines. The most problematic instances are social and cultural, those times and places when ordinary citizens, caring about friends and family, concerned with educating their children, maintaining the pattern of everyday life as best they can, also accept, sustain and staff truly evil systems of religious persecution, racial discrimination, or mass incarceration. Nazi Germany is, of course, the paradigm instance of this. Paradoxically, the evil of it all relied on normality.  Unhappily, there are many other contexts closer in time, when ignorance and fear have swept through whole populations of decent people with, after a time, catastrophic results. Here, we might say, we find the decent and the devilish living side by side, and that is precisely the phenomenon that Jesus' parable depicts.

His reference to the Devil reveals that Jesus thinks that what is good and true and beautiful is always under threat, and must be defended against evil forces that are not alien, but lie close at hand. Whether we use the language of Satan or not, it is a fact of human experience that the world in which we find ourselves does have evil ‘tares’ growing alongside divinely planted ‘wheat’. An important part of the parable, though, is that the two are inextricably intertwined, and will remain so until God brings the harvest in. This alerts us to another danger. One of Satan’s favored strategies lies in exploiting our inclination to leap to judgment and to sort out the world for ourselves, placing our faith in political and social institutions -- strengthening the powers of police and judiciary, for instance, relying on new technology, or employing military might – and justifying this faith in ourselves by appealing to ‘science’.
   From a religious point of view, the greatest error human beings can make, individually or collectively, is to think that they can be the means of their own salvation. Anyone who thinks this, explicitly or implicitly, has turned away from God. The inclination to do so at times of crisis is understandable, of course, but the wreckage brought about by these humanistic experiments, be they the dreams of fascist, communist or democratic regimes, is evident for all to see. Paul, in this week’s Epistle is also addressing a world that is waiting "to be set free from its bondage". But he tells the Romans that Christians must "hope for what we do not see”, and consequently “wait for it with patience”. Waiting of this kind is the real test of faith in God.