Proper 11A | Genesis 28:10-19a, Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Over the last few weeks, we’ve followed the first patriarch, Abraham, who made a covenant with God. He was promised a blessing: a child, a legacy, a nation that would come from him. God made a covenant with his wife, Sarah, that she would bear the child and begin this legacy. Which sounds awesome.
Stuff happens, of course. The couple get impatient and push up the timetable so that Abraham has a different son first, Ishmael. And then, when he does have a son, Isaac, God asks him to sacrifice him before stopping the whole thing. God wants Isaac to have a wife from the old country, so Abraham sends a servant to matchmake and he brings back Rebekah. Yes, this is a weird family.
After Abraham dies, Isaac and Rebekah have a pair of twins, Esau and Jacob. And God sets about overturning cultural expectations of power by convincing Rebekah to get Jacob to trick his brother into giving away his birthright as firstborn and inheritor of the father’s legacy. We read about that craziness last week.
In the meantime, God finally appears to Isaac during a famine and tells him not to go down to Egypt, but to settle in this other land and the promise made to Abraham will be fulfilled and chapter 26 is this weird sequence which finally puts Isaac front and center in the narrative and he tries to protect his wife, Rebekah by calling her his sister. The guys laugh about that later. He also has another encounter with God and becomes fabulously wealthy off the people. And the chapter ends with Esau marrying a couple of women that his parents do not like.
Changing the Blessing
Chapter 27 is the second half of the birthright/blessing swindle we heard about last week. It is a remarkable story of deception that begins with Isaac who is now apparently blind and senile and tells Esau it’s time to give him the blessing. And to really milk the moment, he asks for some wild game, prepared just right. Maybe in a stew. Esau, for his part, should be thinking Wait a minute… Anyway, strong, hairy Esau runs off to catch his dad some dinner. Meanwhile, Rebekah is like, Jacob, here’s your chance. I’m going to make your dad his favorite dinner, you’re going to put on some hairy gloves and drop that whiny voice an octave and pretend to be your brother and your idiot father won’t be able to tell the difference.
The ruse famously works. And when Esau shows up, his dad is like, sorry, pal. Nothing I can do! And the son who is older by like two minutes is rightfully outraged and Rebekah says to her favorite son, Jacob, Listen, you’re going to have to skedaddle. Get out of Dodge. Find my dad and my people and they will take care of you until this all blows over.
Jacob has enough time, apparently, to go back and visit his dad again and get a blessing from him (not to be confused with The Blessing he swindled earlier) and a command to not shack up with any of the local girls like his brother. Who, apparently, just keeps adding wives to his collection. Because, biblical marriage is a lot of different things depending on the story.
This is how we find Jacob in the wilderness encountering God.
The Story is Bigger
Context is always important. Especially when dealing with divine encounters.
The story itself, as it is told, is half of what we’re learning. It isn’t about a discernable truth we’re supposed to take away from it, but the people, their faith, their encounters, and what all of this begins to reveal.
Remembering the story helps us not paint Jacob as a hero. And perhaps, given enough time, come to see that he is also not a heel. He is representative of God’s conviction and willingness to engage with the least likable and worthy among us.
He also forces us to deal with our own sense of fairness and justice. Because Esau doesn’t deserve a blessing by being born two minutes earlier. And, I think, when the evangelist says that Esau despised his birthright, they imply he should have fought harder to keep it, that he was willing to trade it away. That he didn’t appreciate its true value. And when we reduce this story to caricatures, I don’t think we appreciate its value either.
Wrestling with Jacob
This morning, we share a moment with Jacob, seeing God in a dream, receiving the promise offered to his father and grandfather, of the holiness and generosity of God—it brings an appreciation to his heart. He is finally seeing the enormity of what it is to receive the birthright and the blessing.
He receives this while sleeping on the hard ground, resting his head on a rock. Fleeing the physical might and justified anger of his brother.
This is closer to rock bottom than it is to the height of power.
Aren’t we tempted, given this truth, to lift it up? To say this is the true power? That he is given something that Esau never will? And I think this rhetorical move is half-true. Because Jacob is blessed. He’s also sleeping on a rock. Because God wants to make use of this guy. And he’s still a conman.
Scripture keeps giving us these strange people and sharing that God loves them. But it also reminds us to not call them good. To resist turning them and their behaviors into our vision of “good”. Reminding us over and over that only God is good. That God defines good, not Jacob. And we have, then, in this story of the third Patriarch, of the one that God elevated above his brother, not a person who is worthy of our attention, but someone God invites us to witness. Even one so selfish as Jacob.
Another Seed Parable
Shifting over to the gospel, we’re in the midst of a teaching situation in which Jesus has already driven off the traditionalists who start conspiring to kill him because nothing expresses the love of God like a good murder. And faith like a good hypocrisy.
And he’s teaching the crowds in parables, it says. And then when they’re alone, the disciples ask for the answer key. I assume they want it to study for the midterms.
We heard the first thing he was teaching last week, which was the parable of the sower, with this thing about a sower just throwing seeds all over the place and not caring where they were landing, but then going into real graphic detail about the different kinds of soil. The whole thing is giving self-help.
But then he goes back to the well with the crowd and is like, OK, here’s another parable about seeds and soil. But this time he gives it a different start. He tells them to compare the kingdom of heaven to this. Notice that he didn’t say this last time. This one we compare to the Kingdom. And since we know a thing or two about that, we should be better off on the final, right?
A Different Lens
This parable/not-a-parable argues a completely different idea than the last one. It goes like this:
- Compare the kingdom of heaven to good seed sown in a field.
- Someone plants bad seeds while the master’s sleeping.
- The slaves wake up to a bunch of weeds in the field.
- The slaves first assume the master screwed up.
- Then they want to declare an enemy and go to war over it.
- And the master tells them to do their work, which is to gather the harvest at harvest time.
After sharing this teaching, Jesus again gives the disciples an answer key for the midterm, and it feels weird next to the other parable that was all about the good soil. This is a whole different direction.
And there’s another problem with this teaching for people then and for us. While we’re taught to let God deal with the chafe, we are taught to discriminate between good and evil and to push against the evil in our midst. So a teaching that is sort of an evil-blind policy doesn’t sit right. It’s a lot like reading about Jacob stealing stuff and being like “am I supposed to overlook this part?”
I think Jesus is inviting us to look at the situation with a less prescriptivist lens; to refocus our Kin-dom lens on our world with Kin-dom joy in our hearts.
Something’s Missing
Something that would make this easier is if we saw what the lectionary skips over to get to the cheatsheet: the parable of the mustard seed. Faith so small it can make the impossible happen. That’s the Kin-dom. It isn’t a magical world. It’s a world where impossible things can happen through faith.
So, as we think about the seed and the field and the wheat and the weeds and God’s work is separating it all out, the thing Jesus is coaxing his followers to dig into isn’t the question of possibility or an obligation to do what only God can do. It is to see what of this world is of God and what isn’t. And to trust in that knowledge, that relationship with God, in one another.
This teaching makes more sense the more we see it as living in our normal world. And the less we blame God and our neighbors for the stuff of empire, the stuff of evil. Stuff that makes us think that the right thing to do is to hurt someone.
Living the Kin-dom
This both compliments and complicates that Genesis reading, doesn’t it? Because Jacob does some bad stuff. But a cultural prioritizing of birth order isn’t from God, either. And this, friends, is about helping fertilize this soil here. Our soil. Us, this church, this community. That it would more resemble the Kin-dom than the culture.
And to do that, we have to unlock something we keep such a firm hold on that we store in our heart’s safety deposit box. That all of this is about who a person is. About who we are. Like we can take a personality test and find out if we’re a good person or not. And that isn’t real. The people sitting next to us at Cackleberries aren’t good or bad. The people sleeping under the bridge seven blocks from here aren’t good or bad. None of that is real. It isn’t our place to judge the very humanity of the people around us.
The thing about the Kin-dom is that it isn’t set by who we are but by our relationship to one another. How much love we give to one another. How much we trust one another. That is the heart of the Kin-dom. That is the nature of faith. Trust. In God, in our neighbors, and in ourselves.
This is who we are called to be. How we are called to be here. Loving and giving and sharing and trusting. Not because faith is naive. But because we know God. That God wants us to love more than God wants us to be right. About all of it. In trust, we share in a Kin-dom that is already here.