Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”
Epiphany season ends this year on a note of reflective judgment. Epiphany season is about the making known of God and of what God wants for us. That alone is an astounding matter. It centers on the idea of revelation, that there are things God wants us to know and which are revealed to us; such is redemption. It says so much about the truth and the dignity of our humanity, on the one hand, and says so much, too, about the truth and the mystery of God, the God who makes himself known to us so that his life can live and move in us, on the other hand. This is an astounding wonder.
The idea of God’s revelation of himself and his will for us also means that something about ourselves is revealed to us. We are in these stories individually and institutionally, as it were. Something about the dynamic and nature of human institutions and human personality is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We are made aware of something beyond ourselves, a principle of absolute goodness and truth to which we are held accountable and without which we have no freedom and no real dignity. That we close our ears to this is our folly and our wickedness; such is judgment itself.
Judgment. We are uncomfortable about the idea of judgment and well we should be. In our day, judgment is about being arbitrarily judged by others without any recourse to the question, “upon what basis”? What are the principles that inform our moral, social and political discourse?
We live in a world of wheat and tares. Tares is a Middle English word for weeds used by Wycliffe and then Tyndale in their English translations of the Bible. It is not always easy to know which is which or even which are we. That is why we are given sage advice by Paul in the Epistle for today about “forbearing one another, and “forgiving one another” and above all, to “put on charity which is,” he says, “the bond of perfectness,” and by Jesus in the Gospel parable to let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest. It is about leaving the judgement to God. It requires of us a certain toleration.
