by CCW | 9 February 2025 10:00
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.
“Did you not sow good seed in the field? From whence then hath it tares?” the servants ask the householder. “An enemy has done this,” he replies, pointing rather tellingly outwards at ‘others’; not unlike our times. Yet, perhaps, just perhaps, there is always the possibility of discovering that we are the enemy. That we are the tares even when we think we are the wheat. Our judgments have a way of turning back upon ourselves. It is called hypocrisy; a very wide net that catches us all.
The Epiphany here is the light of Christ made manifest in us. It is about our self-awareness of the limits of human judgment both with respect to ourselves and to one another. Is all this simply a cautionary tale? Are we exhorted here merely to a posture of skepticism? To deny the possibilities of knowing anything and therefore about doing anything? No. Quite the opposite. What we are presented with counters the cynical and false skepticism of our age which would deny any objective view about what is good and true while asserting as absolute its own relativism. And what we are presented with equally counters the religion of sentimentalism and self-righteousness which also makes the church such a parody of itself.
At the heart of Paul’s exhortation are these strong words about forbearing and forgiving. They impart an active quality to the virtues of “mercy and compassion, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering” – virtues which belong to our identity in Christ as “elect,“ as “holy and beloved.” We are reminded of who we are in the sight of God. That is no occasion for self-righteousness but for the deepening of our lives in faith, “put[ting] on charity, let[ting] the peace of God rule in our hearts, let[ting] the word of Christ dwell in [us] more richly”. In every way we are drawn more fully into the light of Christ, the one who has come into the midst of the world of wheat and tares, the one who illuminates the darkness of our hearts. We are at once convicted and comforted by the light of Christ.
There is a vision here. There is an Epiphany of our lives in the light of Christ. We are given to see and to act out of what we are given to see. We are given to see something of the forbearance and the forgiveness of God towards us which compels us to forbear and forgive one another. “Even as the Lord forgave you, so also do ye.” It is always what we pray. Our lives are lived in the sight of God “from whom no secrets are hid.” What we are given to see is the picture of his love for us. It counters all our pretensions and all the presumptions of our judgmentalism. Equally, it challenges our all-too-willing subservience to tyranny and bullying by the institutional authorities of our world who betray the principles that govern their authority. Why?
Because we are constantly being turned to Christ. The strong idea here is about the Lord Jesus. “Whatsoever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,” Paul says. That should be the check on our judgments of ourselves and one another. How? By reminding us of the lessons of the Epiphany, the lessons which open us out to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and to God’s will and purpose for our humanity. Healing and wholeness, joy and delight in God and in one another, service and sacrifice: these are the lessons which we have heard and seen. It means letting those lessons enter into our minds and hearts; they are the lessons of love, the deep love of God which demands that we forbear one and forgive one another for the sake of Christ. In the Christian understanding we live for Christ, rejoicing in his word and truth without using that word and truth as a cudgel to beat up on ourselves or one another.
It is really about God in us and us in God. As Isaiah sees, God knows about the tares of the world. In ethical terms, as he puts it, “the Lord saw it and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intervene; then his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon his head” (Is. 59. 15-17). Such words are echoed by Paul in several places about putting on the qualities of Christ. Today he exhorts us to “put on charity,” “let[ting] the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.” It is, we might say, “all for Jesus.” Putting on what we have been given to know. Epiphany ends with the vision of Christ in us, living patiently but faithfully in the world, waiting for God’s gathering of the harvest. This year especially it points us to the ‘gesima Sundays and Lent as the pilgrimage of love.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 5, 2025 (2014 re-worked)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/02/09/sermon-for-the-fifth-sunday-after-epiphany/
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