Weeping and gnashing of teeth

Address given at St Mary's, Nenagh on Sunday 19th July 2020, the Sixth after Trinity

Have you heard the old joke about the hell-fire preacher?

Reaching the climax of his sermon about the day of judgement, he declares in ringing tones the fate of those who fail to meet the standards of God’s Kingdom: ‘They will be thrown into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’. At which point an old woman interrupts him, saying, “But I have no teeth”; to which the hell-fire preacher replies, “Madam, teeth will be provided”.

Joking aside, it is always worth pondering the parables Jesus uses to teach his followers. The parable of the weeds of the field in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel (13:24-30, 36-43) follows on from the parable of the sower we looked at last Sunday, and it is no exception. So let’s look at it a little more closely.

The images Jesus uses in his parable would have been vivid and familiar to a Galilean audience.

Weeds were one of the curses against which a farmer had to labour before the discovery of weed-killers. In this parable the weed is no doubt bearded darnel, a kind of rye-grass. In its early stages darnel is indistinguishable from wheat. Only when they both produce seed-heads can they be told apart. But by then their roots are so intertwined that the darnel can’t be weeded out without damaging the roots of the wheat. Weeding would only reduce the yield.

The wheat and darnel can’t be safely separated while they are growing, but in the end they must be, because the grain of the darnel is slightly poisonous. In quantity it causes dizziness and sickness. So the master in the parable gets the reapers to separate them at harvest time. The darnel will be bundled up and burned, while the wheat will be threshed and gathered into the barn.

The idea of an enemy deliberately sowing weeds in someone else’s field would also have struck a chord. It was a crime forbidden in Roman law, which prescribed a punishment for it, so we can be sure it used to happen.

Jesus tells the crowd that the parable is about the kingdom of heaven, and Matthew records him later explaining it to his disciples, to help them – and us – understand what he meant by it. It is one of several parables recorded by Matthew in which Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to different things – others are a mustard seed and yeast. Jesus is teaching by analogy, and I feel sure we should not take it literally, but rather look for the underlying message.

It is the devil, says Jesus, who sows the weeds, the children of the evil one, in the field which is the world.

We all know instinctively, don’t we, what is right and what is wrong? We have been created as souls with consciences - in the image of God, to use the imagery of the Book of Genesis. But we all also experience insistent little voices within us, which tempt us to do what our God-given conscience tells us is not right. Theologians call it original sin, and Jesus personifies it as the work of the devil. But in our culture it may be easier to think of it as the bad side of ourselves, that part of own psyche which enables and encourages us to damage ourselves and others.

Let me illustrate it with some examples. Advertisers play on our innate greed by whispering, ‘Because you’re worth it’. They tell us that we will live more exciting lives if we buy a new car which will pollute the air in cities and damage health. They offer us a surfeit throughout the year of the rich food we all crave, even though air miles and intensified agriculture damages the ecosystems we depend on. They tempt us with foreign sun holidays, contradicting the public health advice we must follow to suppress Covid-19. It is the thin end of a very fat wedge. Further down that wedge we find unscrupulous interests that seek to persuade us that we and our communities cannot afford to take the steps needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.

However, Jesus warns us against pulling the weeds in case we uproot the wheat.

He is teaching us not to be too quick in our judgements of others. We are all too liable to classify and label people as good or bad without knowing all the facts. And people can change. We can be redeemed from sin by the grace of God, and equally we can disfigure a good life by a sudden collapse into sin. As Jesus says elsewhere, ‘Let he that is without sin cast the first stone’.

We are not entitled to make a final judgement about the righteousness of any other person – only God has that right. It is God alone who can discern the good and the bad. It is God alone who sees all of an individual and all of a person’s life.

Of course, we can’t help forming opinions of others, using our reason which is also God-given. And it is surely right that we should let such opinions guide our actions when appropriate. But we must never forget we may be mistaken. We would do well to remember the Quaker maxim – ‘There is something of God in every person’ – and try to find it.

But of one thing Jesus assures us – we will be judged eventually.

‘Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire’, says Jesus, ‘so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

When Jesus talks about the ‘end of the age’, I don’t think we should understand it as the end of time. Rather I think we should see it as a time which will come to us all – as certain as our own death – in which we see ourselves as God sees us, in one piece from our conception to our death, how we have touched those we have met, all the good in us, and all the bad too.

We are all a mixture of good and bad. Throughout our lives we have often done the wrong thing, but we have also often done the right thing. God loves each and every one of us, and will forgive our failures if we repent and change for the better.

At the end of the age, at a time that will come to us all, each one of us will see clearly. We will burn in the torment of shame for the evil we have done in our lives - we will weep and gnash our teeth. But for the good we have done, we ‘will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father’.

The issue in front of us is the balance between burning and shining.

I shall finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word

Saving God,

in Jesus Christ you opened for us

a new and living way into your presence:

give us pure and constant wills

to worship you in spirit and in truth;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever. Amen

Original Sin

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 9th March 2014, the 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Temptation and sin are strong themes running through the readings set for today.

This is no accident, because today is the 1^st Sunday of Lent. Lent is traditionally a ‘penitential’ season, a time when we are invited to reflect on our sinful natures, and to seek God’s forgiveness for actual sin.

The 1st reading (Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7) is that old, familiar story of the Fall: how the serpent tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and how they disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The first sin – the original sin.

The 3^rd reading from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 4:1-11) tells us how Jesus resisted the temptation of the devil in the wilderness. He did not sin.

In the Epistle reading from his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-19), Paul contrasts the sin of Adam with the righteousness of Jesus. This passage is very important historically for the development of Christian theology, because it’s a scriptural foundation for the theological doctrine that it is by God’s grace through Jesus Christ that original sin is overcome.

It’s this uncomfortable idea of original sin that I want to explore today.

First let’s look at the story of the Fall.

Surely this is just an old myth, with no relevance to sophisticated people like us today? Well, yes it is a myth, and a very ancient one. But like many an old myth I think it captures an essential truth.

We don’t need to believe that Adam and Eve were literally the first man and the first woman, the ancestors of us all - but they are typical men and women, very like you and me. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they did so, and became like God, able to distinguish good from evil. We can all tell good from evil, can’t we? We call that capacity conscience: it is part of what makes us human - we are moral creatures.

Adam and Eve could distinguish good from evil, and like us no doubt in their best moments they would prefer good to evil. But that doesn’t mean to say that they would always choose good over evil, any more than we do. Like us, they had free will. They were tempted by the serpent, and they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, because they desired it - because it was good to eat, because it was beautiful, and because it would make them wise. So many rationalisations for their bad choice! We don’t need to believe in a literal talking serpent, but we’ve all heard that little nagging voice in the head, haven’t we? Prompting us to do something we know in our heart of hearts is wrong, for what we pretend are jolly good reasons.

This is original sin – Adam’s sin, Eve’s sin, and our sin too: to know what is right, but to be tempted by our desires to do what is wrong, and all too often to give in to our desires. We all suffer from it, without exception. It is not so much a mysterious, theological doctrine as a truth about our psychological natures, derived from observation.

Matthew tells us how Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness, but resisted his blandishments.

But how did Matthew get the story? Since Jesus was alone in the desert, I think the source must be Jesus himself, who told it to his disciples. They in turn passed it on to Matthew, the Gospel writer, and so to us.

The devil tempted Jesus, we are told, just as the serpent tempted Adam and Eve. Jesus was human like us - he could hear that nagging little voice in his head too, but he had the strength to resist it. This should be no surprise, since we believe Jesus to be fully God as well as fully human.

Notice how the devil quotes scripture as he tempts Jesus: “He will command his angels concerning you … On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone” – it is a quotation from Psalm 91. We should be on our guard, I think, when we hear someone use scripture as a weapon against an opponent in argument – it just might be the voice of the devil tempting us.

Notice also how Jesus quotes scripture too to rebuke the devil and to resist temptation. Perhaps we might do the same when we are tempted. Scripture can also be a tool to help us resist temptation. Now that’s a thought that might help us keep our Lenten resolutions!

So we come to Paul, and his contrast between the sin of Adam and the righteousness of Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I find his argument convoluted and difficult to understand. But he ends up crystallizing matters in these words:

‘For just as by the one man’s disobedience - Adam’s -  the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience - Christ’s - the many will be made righteous’.

Paul seems to believe that Adam’s original sin causes our own, rather than being a consequence of our common humanity, as I do. But Paul sees the reality of original sin only too clearly: all human beings, like Adam, are inevitably sinners; like Eve too for that matter, though Paul leaves her out.

Later on in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul expresses the human dilemma perfectly:

‘I do not understand my own actions… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’

What a mess we are all in! Our sins convict us; they cut us off from God; and we inevitably suffer spiritual death. Or to put it another way, in the language of psychology:

I feel shame for the bad things I do; the shame destroys my self-esteem; and I plunge into deep depression.

But Paul also sees another reality: the reality that God offers us a way out of the mess. The way out is God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. By following Jesus’s path of obedience to God, our sins will be forgiven and we will be made righteous. Again, to put it in the language of psychology:

When I am truly sorry for the bad things I’ve done, I will change for the better, seek to make amends and cease to feel corrosive guilt, coming to accept myself for who I  am whatever my flaws.

So to sum up

Every one of us, without exception, should feel uncomfortable about original sin, because it is a reality: we all share the innate tendency of human beings to sin, which leads every one of us to be a sinner.

But as St Paul saw so clearly, that is not the end of the matter. God offers us the free gift of grace in Jesus Christ. If we follow his way and repent, our sins will be forgiven.

And a final comforting thought for Lent: ‘Remember, I am with you always’, says Jesus. The essence of original sin is the nagging little voice of temptation, which we personify as the serpent or the devil. But if we trust in Jesus and listen for it, we can also hear his confident, comforting voice: he encourages us to resist temptation, and offers us forgiveness when we succumb to it, if we come to him in penitence.

Let’s try to listen for Jesus’s voice, really listen, as we travel with him on the way to Jerusalem this Lent, to Calvary and on to Resurrection!

Let us put on the armour of God

Today we come to the last of this series of 5 addresses on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians
In the first 3 we explored key theological themes:

1. ‘We must start with Christ’.
2. ‘In Christ God is saving us by grace through faith for good works’; and
3. ‘In Christ we are members of God’s household, Christ’s Church’.

Last Sunday we looked at the ethical implications of Paul’s theology in the form of the advice he gave the Ephesians about how to behave as members of Christ’s Church. I summarised like this:

In God’s household - Christ’s Church - we must be kind and forgiving, we must live as children of light’.

Today we turn to the very end of the letter, Ephesians 6:10-20.

It is hard to be kind and forgiving much of the time, to live as children of light, very hard.
Paul knows that the Ephesians can be so only with God’s help – only by God’s saving grace, through faith, just like good works.

‘Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power’, Paul urges them. ‘Put on the whole armour of God’.

The armour of God is a striking metaphor, isn't it? For the Ephesians no doubt it conjured up the image of a Roman Legionary - for us, perhaps, the scary looking equipment of coalition troops in Afghanistan – light-weight body-armour, Kevlar helmet and night vision goggles. Paul no doubt also had in mind Isaiah’s description (59:17) of God’s breastplate of righteousness and helmet of salvation.

‘Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil’, says Paul. I suppose we all have that sense sometimes of a voice whispering inside our head, tempting us to do what that other voice, our conscience, tells us to be wrong, to be displeasing to God. Paul personifies it as the wily devil, but it is really part of us, that part of our psyche that is disobedient to God. It is that part of us that is responsible for all the petty human sins we are all guilty of to a greater or lesser extent – the lies, the malice, the dishonesty, the words intended to hurt others - as well as our failures to be kind and forgiving, as God is kind and forgiving to us.

But there is more evil in the world than we create by our petty human sins.
As Christians we must confront evil outside us as well as within us.

‘For’, says Paul, ‘our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh,’ - or our own natures - ‘but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’.

Paul’s words sound like science fiction, don’t they? The ‘cosmic powers’ and ‘spiritual forces’ could almost be the Martians in HG Wells’ ‘War of the worlds’, or the Borg in ‘Startrek’.

But these evil powers and forces are real. Wicked ideologies, xenophobia and national interests too often cause the evil of war and violence. Bad economic and social systems generate the evil of hunger and poverty, ravish the planet’s resources and damage the precious web of life. What are they but ‘spiritual forces of evil’? And then there is disease and natural disaster that cause untold suffering. What are these but ‘cosmic powers of darkness’? We don’t understand why God permits such things – but they are surely not ‘acts of God’, since they are contrary to all God’s loving purposes.

Christians must ‘stand firm’ against all these evils, but to do so we must ‘take up the whole armour of God’, in order to ‘be strong in the Lord’.

Paul models the armour of God on the state-of-the-art equipment of a Roman legionary of the 1st Century.

• There is ‘The belt of truth’. The belt a Roman soldier wore was a wide piece of thick leather which protected his lower abdomen, his guts. The truth is God’s truth – the truth of the good news Jesus proclaimed. It is that truth which gives us the guts to resist evil.


• There is ‘The breastplate of righteousness’. The legionary’s breastplate was made of overlapping iron bands fixed to leather to protect the chest and heart from swords, spears and javelins. A righteous person relates to God in the way God intends. Righteousness, knowing what God intends us to be, protects the integrity of the Christian heart.


• There are ‘Shoes … (to) make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace’. The Roman military boot, open like a sandal, with thick leather soles and hobnails, enabled legionaries to march long distances without suffering blisters. Christians too must be able to travel far to proclaim the gospel of peace. It is ‘shalom’, inner wellbeing, the peace of the kingdom of God.


• There is ‘The shield of faith’. The rectangular legionary shield, made of bent-wood and covered with leather, was soaked in water before battle to extinguish flaming arrows. Christian faith acts like a shield to turn temptation aside.


• There is ‘The helmet of salvation’. Made of iron or bronze, with a neck-piece at the back and hinged cheek-pieces, the ‘Imperial Helmet’ was designed both to protect the head and intimidate opponents. For Christians, salvation is about God forgiving our sins. Knowing that our sins have been forgiven, we can think clearly, stand firm in the face of evil and not be intimidated by it.


• Finally there is ‘The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’. The legionary sword was the short steel ‘gladius’, used in hand to hand combat for cutting and thrusting – it’s the origin of the English word ‘gladiator’. The Holy Spirit reveals the word of God to us, what God wants, what is good and right and true, and this is the weapon with which Christians must fight evil. Notice it is the only offensive weapon Paul mentions – everything else is defensive armour.

So, as Paul urges the Ephesians, ‘Let us put on the armour of God’.
Let us prepare ourselves to fight the good fight, to confront and defeat evil wherever we may find it, not just in our own natures, but in all the dark places of the world. We cannot be successful by ourselves, but God through Christ has given us all that we need for the spiritual fight – the whole armour of God.

Paul finishes his letter by urging the Ephesians to pray. ‘Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints’ - 'for all the saints', that is, for all Christians, because we are all saints in the sense Paul uses the word. Prayer by every Christian for all Christians raises the morale of Christ’s Church for the spiritual battle with evil in all its manifestations.

I shall finish with our parish prayer for March. It is a verse from St Patrick’s Breastplate, a powerful invocation of the name of Christ. It can be our breastplate too, part of the armour of God for us, which we can use whenever we feel anxious or fearful in the face of the enemy.

Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger
Christ in heart of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger
Amen