Day: February 9, 2025

“Whatsoever ye do, in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”

Epiphany runs out this year in the themes of mercy and judgment as belonging to the radical meaning of Christ’s Epiphany. He is the Judge of all humanity and the Lord of all Mercy. Today’s Epistle from Colossians complements and illustrates the Gospel by highlighting the qualities of Christ that we are meant to embody and express in our lives despite the limitations of the world and ourselves. Epiphany is not and cannot be a flight from or a negation of the world; the overarching theme is God’s will and purpose for our humanity regardless of the circumstances of our lives. This is the significance of the images of wheat and tares, weeds, we might say.

Wheat and tares grow together in the field of the world. Wheat and weeds are there together, both the good and the bad. But who can be sure which is which? What is weed and what is wheat? To ask this question recognizes the limitations of our judgments. “Let them both grow together until harvest,” says the sower. God is the gardener and God is the judge. Not you and not me. That is itself a great mercy.

This doesn’t simply mean suspending our judgment in the abdication of our responsibilities. We have the obligation and the ability to discern right from wrong and, by God’s grace, to act accordingly. We are bidden to be God’s good wheat in the world of wheat and tares. That requires a check upon our judgmentalism both about ourselves and one another. Forbearing one another and forgiving one another is the counter to our judgmentalism. As we all know that is not always easy and increasingly so in our rather disturbed and disturbing world of folly and division, of uncertainty and fear, of vanity and nonsense, of wars and destruction; the list goes on as do the various ways of trying to make sense of our current dystopias, some more insightful and helpful than others. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, for instance, suggests that we are only just now coming out of a kind of 75 year old fantasy, the post-World War II world of relative peace and prosperity that seemed to promise endless material progress and limitless personal freedoms. No longer.

Our judgmentalism is our presumption to know what we cannot and do not know about others and even about ourselves. We would put ourselves in the place of God as judge, having forgotten the lessons of Epiphany. We would presume to have a total and absolute view when, in fact, our viewpoint is altogether restricted and limited. We see, at best, “through a glass darkly,” as Paul will say. To know this is to be aware of the limits of our knowing. Yet this is the beginning of wisdom. It frees us from the tyranny of ourselves.

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