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S. Pentecost 8.26 Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43

And his disciples came to him saying, ‘explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field’…

And have you ever noticed that when Jesus ῾explains῾ a parable (which is actually quite rare, this is one of only a handful with an explanation) you are usually left with more not fewer questions? Robert Capon in his fine book on the parables of Jesus wondered if the ‘explanations’ were actually designed to deepen the mystery? Great question! I think Fr. Capon was onto something there…

Several of my teachers were big fans of Kierkegaard and especially his ideas of “indirect communication” and “repetition”. These two ideas helped me learn to sit lightly with the “explanations” of Jesus and my own addiction to explaining and getting a grip on all this theology stuff. But like any addict, it’s a battle I constantly fight… 🙁

I simply ache to give you a 1,2,3 explanation like we did last week of the parable of the Sower when we suggested that we aren’t simply one of the 4 soil types, but contain multitudes, all 4 types that we alternate between. I also think that’s true of the weeds and the wheat. As 100% sinner and 100% saint our entire earthly life we are both weed and wheat…

But it is also clearly the case in this parable that, in the End, we all will be one or the other. Jesus says at The Last the weeds will be gathered by his angels and burned and, at Last! the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father! So there will be, as in Harry Potter, a Sorting Hat, a separation of weeds and wheat…

And how do we understand that?

Well; this is where the ideas of ‘indirect communication’ and ‘non-identical repetition’ can help. While my old teacher Paul Holmer introduced me to these two Kierkegaardian notions back in div school when I was 22, 23, it was reading the Radical Orthodox Cambridge theologians nearly two decades later that helped me kinda understand what he and SK were talking about and could see it’s definitely a core Xn concept in the holy scriptures…

(In my experience, you become a Xn the same way Hemingway says people go broke: ‘two ways: slowly, then all at once’ 😉

In the 2013 book “Repetition & Identity” (great but maybe the most difficult book I’ve ever read—fair warning and ‘double-dog dare you’… 😉 we see two kinds of repetition: identical and non-identical. Factories of mass production are paradigms of identical repetition, each thing composed of the exact same parts without variation.

Human beings are non-identically repeating. We remain identifiable as “the same person” throughout time but; our experiences, actions, victories and defeats create a “surplus” that is the source of all divine joy, wonder, mystery and creativity, and can never be quantified nor accounted for by mathematics, logic, history, ‘Science’!, AI or data… 😉

So, from “Repetition & Identity”: “Even Christ is not one original given monistic thing prior to a non-identical repetition… In fact, it is not a matter of ‘not even’ Christ but rather of ‘especially not Christ!’, the absolute divine-human thing, the most intensely real thing of all. Christ is said in the NT to be a ‘sign’… this means that he points away from himself, and must be non-identically interpreted by someone who realizes that this is a sign, and who is able to read it. But Christ is also said to be ‘a sign of contradiction’ (Luke 2:34)… if every sign points away from itself, a sign of contradiction also points to itself, but only as something which can neither be rendered entirely visible nor be directly articulated…

“It follows that we cannot speak of Christ in a representational manner, but only through ‘indirect communication’. For if he is God simply as a man, then even were we to stand before him, it would not be evident that he is God; he would rather remain incognito. Certainly his miracles, the other reports of his actions and his own parables afford some clue to his status, but even the power of miracles is a sign that must be read for its meaning… Because Christ’s divinity is a sublime non-appearing within his beautiful appearing, we can only approach him through perpetually supplemented enigmas.

“So not only is the incarnate Christ not directly visible, he cannot be interpreted at a distance, like other signs, as Protestant hermeneutics have tended to suppose. Rather, any hermeneutic approach of an interpreter to a text to which he is external is here impossible. Instead, the only way to regard Christ is in a sense to become him, to ‘reduplicate’ him as a disciple and an apostle… and in this ‘reduplication” we can prove the reality of atoning work in the the integrity of an ethico-aesthetic ‘style’ which endures and foils evil, anxiety, and tragedy with a saving fortitude and joyful ultimate confidence… in this case, the message is none other than the life of the teacher himself, and can only be comprehended when it is non-identically recreated in the life of the disciple” (Pickstock, Repetition & Identity pg. 146-47).

I mention here that the book makes it quite clear this ‘non-identical re-creation’ of the life of Christ, this “becoming him in a sense” is a pure gift of God we passively receive in the means of grace, by faith wrought through the old apostolic liturgy of word and sacrament being offered to you here and now…

We have to get sucked into the Story of Jesus told to us by Matthew today and be the weeds and the wheat becoming both so enamored with the glory of the Son and so disgusted with the weeds the enemy has sown in us that we yearn to burn up in the Blaze of Glory shining from Jesus’ face…

Kind of a good new/bad news message, I grant you… 😉

And I hope you hear this as good news, but I am one of the angels, gathering out of the Kingdom all causes of sin and law-breakers, shining the blazing Light of Christ on you, now, to burn that shtuff up—not an entirely benign procedure, Ma’am! But it’s over quick-like! The stinger’s already been plucked out by Jesus. Just… breathe 😉

And seeing just how ugly the weeds of sin have made us, and how beautiful the appearing of Jesus is, we’re like: “even if it burns like hell, we’re drawn, like moths to his flame, shucking off all pretensions to goodness, truth, and beauty, throwing ourselves head-first and laughing into the holy rage calling our name…”

It is unsurvivable, for sinners—this Heavenly Blaze! Left to our own devices and desires, we’d never willingly dive in. But like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego thrown into that fiery furnace quite unwillingly by Nebuchadnezzar, in the ‘heat of the moment’ we meet Jesus, in the midst of the fire. And he turns the burning into a transfiguration of us into his own glorious Image and we emerge unscathed—without even the whiff of fire or smoke upon us… 😉

Ah; the glory of it all! May it not be lost on you, as Peace, surpassing all understanding, guards your heart and mind in Christ Jesus. Amen.