Week 17 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 14.17-22; Psalm 79; Matthew 13.36-43

Even in the New Testament we can detect, from time to time, a concern that if God is presented as too indulgent towards sinners, too compassionate and merciful, it will not be helpful for them (for us). Better to remind them about judgement and punishment, not just to present them with the reality of their situation, but to motivate them to conversion through fear of that punishment if by no other means.

The account of Jesus's encounter with the woman taken in adultery is one example: it moved around in the manuscripts of the New Testament, the first community not sure what to do with it, before it finally settled in John 8. Was Jesus too liberal, too indulgent, in his response to adultery? Another example is the allegorical explanation of the parable of the wheat and darnel in today's gospel. One difficulty is that such allegorical explanations - were they from Jesus himself or from the disciples? - fix the meaning of the parable whereas left to itself a parable can continue to bear many meanings and be fruitful in interesting ways. The allegory tells us what to think about the different elements in the parable and about the relationships between them. Left to itself the parable remains open, inviting us to bring it into our meditation, to allow it to fertilise and deepen our understanding of what God is like.

The explanation we hear today also seems to contrast with the parable itself. Where the parable points our attention to God's patience and compassion, the explanation not only shrinks its meaning but does so in a way that changes the image of God with which we are being presented.

In beautiful poetry the consequences of sin are powerfully presented in the reading from Jeremiah. Devastation follows on sin. Losing the relationship with God means losing everything else that might give meaning and purpose to life. To what can the people appeal? Jeremiah's response anticipates the teaching of Jesus, telling us that the people, if they are to have hope of recovery, must look to something in God rather than to anything in themselves. It will be 'for the Lord's name's sake' that they appeal, asking him 'not to disgrace the throne of his glory', asking him to 'remember your covenant with us and break it not'.

We have broken that covenant and any hope for healing and reconciliation is in God. It is to God alone that we look, for it is he alone who has done all these things. And we do so with greater confidence following on the way in which God's judgment on this world has actually been revealed, in the cross of Jesus, where we see entwined together like the wheat and the darnel, the awful reality of sin and the extraordinary beauty of God's infinite love.