PROPER 11, YEAR A

July 19, 2020

St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, Little Compton, RI

Genesis 28:10-19a

Psalm 139:1-11, 22-23

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

A theme running through today’s readings is the vast gulf separating human perception from divine knowledge. In his omniscience—that is, his all-knowingness—God sees everything, including all that remains hidden from within the limitations of our finite human perspective. As the psalmist says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain to it.”

But then, occasionally, and in accordance with God’s own saving purposes, we’re granted glimpses of divine truth—not by means of any innate human cleverness of our own, but rather by means of God’s revelation to us. Today’s readings afford multiple instances of this wonderful process of God’s Word illuminating our minds with the brightness of divine wisdom.

In the reading from Genesis, Jacob is fleeing from his elder twin brother Esau. We may recall in last Sunday’s reading how Jacob extorted Esau’s rights to his inheritance in return for a bowl of lentil stew. In the intervening chapters, moreover, Jacob has impersonated Esau and stolen his blessing from their dying father Isaac. Understandably enraged, Esau wants to kill Jacob, who in turn escapes to take refuge with his uncle Laban in a place called Haran.

On the first night of his journey, sleeping out under the stars with a stone for his pillow, Jacob dreams of a ladder set up between earth and heaven, on which the angels of God are ascending and descending. Then the Lord draws alongside Jacob and speaks to him, making a series of amazing promises: he and his descendants will inherit the land on which he lies; his offspring will spread abroad in all directions as numerous as the dust of the earth, and they will become a blessing to all the families in the world. The Lord will be with Jacob wherever he goes, and will ultimately bring him back to this land from which he’s now fleeing in fear for his life.

The transformation is almost total. Jacob went to sleep a fugitive and refugee; he wakes up the inheritor of God’s promises to his fathers Abraham and Isaac. Such was the gap between human perception and divine wisdom that Jacob exclaims in wonder, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! … How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

A similar gulf between human perception and divine wisdom is evident in the Gospel parable of the wheat and the weeds. When an enemy sows noxious weeds in a farmer’s wheatfield, the servants offer to go and pull up the weeds. But the householder says, “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat as well.” Let both grow together until the harvest. Only after they’ve both been cut and reaped in the harvest can they be safely sorted and separated.

Saint Augustine of Hippo gave the classical interpretation of this parable around the turn of the fifth century when he likened the Church in this world to a mixed field of wheat and weeds growing together. Against rigorists and purists who wanted to excommunicate evil-doers from the Church’s fellowship for life, Augustine said no, the Church is as much a hospital for sinners as a showcase for saints. Moreover, we’re unlikely to know with any certainty who are which before the Last Judgment. Many who appeared in this life to be the worst sinners could then turn out to have been the greatest saints, and vice versa.

The contrast for Augustine, then, was between the sorry state of the Church in this world and the final revelation of its goodness, truth, and beauty in the next, when “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” In the meantime, God alone knows the inmost secrets of each person’s heart. In the words of the psalmist: “Lord you have searched me out and known me … you discern my thoughts from afar.”

Again, Saint Paul draws a contrast between present appearances and future reality in the Epistle reading from Romans: “I consider,” he writes, “that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” A bit further on, Paul describes a creation in bondage to decay groaning as if in labor, and not only creation but we ourselves, groaning inwardly, as we wait for redemption.

The problem is that from our finite human perspective we’re apt to focus our attention more on our present bondage and groaning than on the glory waiting to be revealed. So Paul exhorts us to wait patiently in hope: “Now hope that is seen is not hope … But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Taken together, these Scripture readings invite us to renew our trust in the God who sees infinitely more than we do. In the midst of a global pandemic, a faltering economy, and an ideologically polarized body politic, the temptation is to give in to despair. In the past weeks, I’ve occasionally found myself wondering: How are we ever going to get through all this?

At such moments, however, we need to remind ourselves that God desires only our good, and is working through our present troubles to bring us to a future beyond anything that we can presently imagine or visualize. Even when God seems absent or hidden, he’s always in our midst, bringing good out of evil, hope out of despair. So at length we shall be able to say along with Jacob, “Surely the Lord was in this place—and we did not know it!”

This hope, I hasten to add, presupposes no merit or worthiness of our own. Notice that in the Genesis reading, Jacob has done nothing to earn or deserve the promises that God makes to him. On the contrary, he’s a despicable character, a scoundrel (albeit maybe a likable scoundrel). But God favors him and blesses him anyway—as a sheer gift of unmerited grace and divine mercy. And if God did so for Jacob, he can certainly do so for each of us, without exception.

So, the foundation of our hope is the worthiness of Christ, in whom, as Saint Paul says in today’s Epistle, we’ve received the Spirit of adoption as God’s children. “When we cry ‘Abba, Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.”

In the days of the coming week, we might spend some time reflecting on our Christian hope and renewing our trust in God’s promises—especially in view of the vast gulf between the divine omniscience and our limited human vision. For the good news is that God sees, clearly and eternally, even what at present we cannot.